The Blake Griffin of the Kansas University women’s basketball team, Danielle McCray signed autographs Sunday afternoon inside Allen Fieldhouse until her pen ran out, and then she grabbed another pen and signed some more.

Everybody loves a winner.

The Pink Zone promotion staged to raise money and awareness for breast cancer research brought with it an opportunity for the women’s basketball program to cash in, too, in that it trained new sets of eyes on it.

A 5-foot-11 junior out of Olathe East High, McCray embraced the opportunity to market her team by leading it to a 58-47 upset victory against 23rd-ranked Iowa State.

A rare blend of power and skill, McCray is KU’s best shooter and rebounder, and on this afternoon, she was the team’s best defender. In 37 minutes, she contributed 24 points, 16 rebounds, three assists, three blocked shots and three steals.

She came to college as a two-time all-state selection and the two-time champion in the shot put and triple jump. First, she changed her body, toning it from the requirements of a weight thrower to the needs of a basketball player. Now she’s toning her basketball mind in a way that resulted in her dominating a game in every way against a nationally ranked opponent.

McCray’s a natural scorer who banks on a soft touch from long range, a rebounding ability that enables her to score on put-backs, the strength to finish drives, and a developing pull-up jumper. Natural scorers don’t have to force it on the offensive end, but that’s easier in theory than practice for McCray, who needs to score for Kansas to have a shot at winning. She created an interesting diversion of sorts for herself Saturday, and in a way it kept her from forcing shots.

“I made a change today,” McCray said. “I made a point to make defense my priority.”

Players who do that tend to find, to their surprise, that it relieves pressure from them at the other end.

“I think it kind of does,” McCray said. “Toward the beginning of the year, when I messed up on offense, I continued thinking about that on defense. It was hard to transfer. I just had to relax and forget about the shot that I missed and come back down and play defense and get a stop. Today I was just letting it come to me on offense. Other than one three toward the end when I rushed it, I let it come to me.”

McCray leads the team in scoring (19 points per game), rebounding (7.5), steals (38), blocked shots (21), three-point field goals (46) and free-throw percentage (.845).

Like most stars, she enjoys playing to big audiences. She understood the significance of the team being at its best when the crowd, announced as 7,069, was the year’s largest.

“Just like the Iowa game, we all showed great effort,” she said of the nonconference game in which the crowd was made up mostly of school children. “The more fans, the more success. I think we’re doing a good job of gathering fans. We just have to continue to win and gather more fans like our men’s team has.”

For now, she’ll settle for pleasing the crowds with points and autographs.

“It’s fun,” she said of signing her name. “Until your pen runs out.”