Editor's note: Charlie Creme, Graham Hays and Mechelle Voepel each vote to determine espnW's national player of the week, which is awarded every week of the women's college basketball season.
Lili Thompson has a good poker face, her body language and facial expressions often betraying little to anyone trying to use those things to judge how she feels about any given performance.
But after the Stanford junior guard's final 3-pointer of the week dropped through the net in the closing seconds of Sunday's win against Washington State, she couldn't help but clap her hands together once as she retreated toward the defensive end.
Excessively exuberant the display was not. Entirely earned it most definitely was.
Come to think of it, if Thompson celebrated every field goal she hit this past week, she wouldn't have had any energy left by the end of the game against the Cougars.
Thompson is espnW's national player of the week after leading the Cardinal to victories against Washington and Washington State, performances that kept her team very much in the group on the heels of Pac-12 leaders Arizona State and Oregon State, which play Monday (ESPN2, 11 p.m. ET).
She first got the better of a scoring duel against national scoring leader Kelsey Plum of Washington on Friday night, scoring 27 points to Plum's 23, then turned around and bettered that performance with a career-high 30 points against Washington State.
In the week's two wins, Thompson averaged 28.5 points per game and shot 63 percent from the field (22 of 35) and a staggering 71 percent from the 3-point line (10 of 14). She scored 41 percent of Stanford's points.
By the late stages of the win against Washington State, Thompson looked like she was playing the proverbial different game than everyone else on the court. At one point, she caught a pass in front of the Stanford bench on the offensive end, dribbled left several time and looked like a running back waiting for a hole to open. Never leaving the balls of her feet as she moved laterally, she spotted the seam and attacked the basket for a layup. Soon thereafter, she caught a pass in nearly the same spot by the bench, took one dribble right this time around a screen and buried a 3-pointer.
In or out, left or right, all her movements seemed to take her in the correct direction.
Try as Washington State might to rally, Thompson always had an answer.
If she was a player full of confidence this week it is all the more impressive because it hasn't been the easiest season for Thompson, especially through some lean shooting nights thus far in Pac-12 games. She entered the week shooting just 30 percent in league games, part and parcel of Stanford's offensive struggles.
That rose to 38.5 percent on just the past week's production alone.
She earned the right to celebrate. And if you looked close, you might have seen it.
Also nominated: Lexi Eaton Rydalch, BYU; Tiffany Mitchell, South Carolina; Aerial Powers, Michigan State
Previous winners: Kelsey Mitchell (Nov. 29) | Courtney Walker (Nov. 22) | Vanessa Panousis (Dec. 6) | Makayla Epps (Dec. 13) | Megan Podkowa (Dec. 20) | Kelsey Mitchell (Jan. 4) | Stephanie Brunner (Jan. 11) | A'ja Wilson (Jan. 18) | Jessica Shepard (Jan. 25)