If it's not one thing, it's another for the No. 15 ASU women's basketball team.
Coming off a sloppy shooting performance against California Thursday, the Sun Devils needed to regroup offensively for a chance to defeat No. 14 Stanford.
ASU revamped its offense, only this time it forgot to invite the defense, falling to the Cardinal 84-78 Saturday at the Maples Pavilion.
"This was night and day from the Cal game," ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said. "We worked a lot harder for (offensive) improvement, but we just had a few too many defensive breakdowns."
The Sun Devils (14-5, 5-4) tied their second highest scoring output of the season, led by junior forward Emily Westerberg's 20 points, but failed to hold on to a 13-point lead; Stanford's largest deficit of the season.
"We need more discipline and consistency," Westerberg said. "It's been a constant thing for us to focus and improve on something, but slip with something else the next day."
Stanford's Candice Wiggins, who has scored 30 points or more in four of her last six games and leads the conference with a 21.2 scoring average, scored 33 points and went 16-for-19 from the free throw line.
"Our defense lost the game for us," Kristen Kovesdy said. "Anytime you let a team score 80 points you know that it was your defense that hurt."
Stanford (13-4, 8-1) entered the contest as the Pac-10's top rebounding team, but was out rebounded by ASU, 41-20. However, 25 Sun Devil turnovers to Stanford’s 10 proved to be the difference maker.
"We shot the ball really well, but we didn't take care of the ball," Westerberg said. "We took care of what we wanted to take care of, but we had way too many turnovers."
Junior guard Jill Noe, who scored only 13 points in her last three games combined, lit up the scoreboard with 19 points and hit five 3-pointers off the bench to help ASU shoot 50 percent -- the eighth time this season the Sun Devils have shot at least 50 percent.
"It was fun to see us attack Stanford and be aggressive and hit shots," Turner Thorne said. "We're moving back towards being ourselves."
After shooting a ghastly 26 percent in the first half of Thursday's 66-64 loss to the Golden Bears, the Sun Devils began much better against the Cardinal, taking a 32-19 on a Kovesdy jumper with 6:45 left in the first half.
Kovesdy finished the game with 16 points and 10 rebounds, passing Jodi Rathbun for seventh place on ASU's all-time scoring list with 1,202 points.
The Sun Devils have dropped four of six games after coming off a nine-game winning streak and now fall into a fifth place tie in the Pac-10.
"We're all just sick," Turner Thorne said. "It's us, it's not about the other teams."
Reach the reporter at james.schmehl@asu.edu.
