Stanford's Stefan Nastic showing promise (original) (raw)

Stanford center Stefan Nastic (4) shoots in front of California forward Harper Kamp (22) in the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in Berkeley, Calif., Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

So far, Stefan Nastic's career at Stanford hasn't exactly gone according to plan. A broken bone in his right foot ended his freshman season after five games. Though he lifted weights, he couldn't run, so his weight ballooned to 265 pounds.

He was able to write that season off as a red-shirt year, so he's a freshman again for eligibility. An illness, however, set him back going into this season. He is averaging just 3.0 points and 1.1 rebounds while playing about seven minutes a game. Eleven other Cardinal players are seeing more playing time.

Stanford (15-6, 5-4 Pac-12) is smarting from three straight losses as it prepares to host Arizona State (7-14, 3-6) tonight at 7 at Maples Pavilion. The Cardinal play Arizona (14-8, 5-4) at home Saturday at noon.

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Big guys like Nastic (pronounced Nas-TICH) who take time to develop are usually called "projects." This project, though, showed some slick moves in Sunday's loss at Cal. A Toronto resident who has played for years on Serbian national teams, Nastic maneuvered quickly to block a layup by Justin Cobbs and scored 11 points. That tied his fellow Canadian, Dwight Powell, for the team high on a day when points were especially hard to come by for the Cardinal.

He also made a long-striding drive to the basket that the officials couldn't believe. They called him for traveling, and the commentators on the Fox broadcast laughingly called it a "Euro step."

The term means a drive that involves changes of direction after a player picks up his dribble, a move more commonly taught in Europe. Coach Johnny Dawkins and Nastic both said the call was incorrect.

"I know it wasn't traveling," Nastic said. "With all due respect to the referees, they definitely weren't expecting a 7-footer to do something like that, to go that far. I wasn't even expecting it myself. ... I won't stop trying it."

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Still only 19, Nastic is listed at 6-foot-11 but says he's now 7 feet. He has spent summers with the Serbian teams since age 13, when he was 6-7. Like a lot of big men who have been nurtured in Europe, he has worked assiduously on his dribbling, passing and outside shooting. "I like all parts of basketball," he said.

Even in Canada, he was trained in the European approach by his club coach, Vlad Matevski, a native of Macedonia. Nastic was born in Serbia and was a toddler when his family moved to Toronto. He has both Canadian and Serbian citizenship. The Canadians have been after him for years to join their national team program, but he had already gotten settled with various Serbian age-group teams. He hopes to play for Serbia in the Olympics.

Although his Stanford teammates call him Nasty Nastic, he's anything but nasty off the court. Despite the team's recent setbacks, he said, "The mood is definitely positive. We played some very good teams."

Dawkins is definitely positive about Nastic's future. "The sky's the limit for how good he can be in the low post."

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Feb 2, 2012

Tom FitzGerald has been the Stanford beat writer for The San Francisco Chronicle since 2009. He also covers men’s and women’s basketball and many other Stanford sports.

He also covers motor sports in the Bay Area and wrote about the America's Cup regatta in San Francisco in 2013, during which Oracle Team USA made one of the greatest comebacks in sports history to beat Emirates Team New Zealand.

Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. He also rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran in 2012 and in an Indy car with legendary Mario Andretti in 2014 for other first-person stories.

For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called "Top of the Sixth" (later re-titled "Open Season"). A weekly version of the column was nationally syndicated in as many as 50 daily newspapers.

He has a degree in political science from the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Benicia.