Beyond the box score: 10 stats you didn’t know from WSU’s exhibition win

You may have watched Wichita State’s 75-64 exhibition victory over Catawba at Koch Arena on Tuesday night, but here are 10 takeaways that you might not have noticed and didn’t show up in the box score.

1. WSU was at its best when Udeze, Stevenson and Brown saw the floor. WSU thoroughly outplayed Catawba when the trio of freshmen in Morris Udeze (0.43 PPP advantage), Erik Stevenson (0.34 PPP) and Rod Brown (0.36 PPP) were on the floor. The Shockers’ offense peaked with Udeze at center, as WSU scored at 1.18 PPP (0.17 above its game average) on the 28 possessions Udeze played.

2. WSU’s defense struggled to protect the paint area. The Shockers posted a solid defensive efficiency mark, but it is troubling that they allowed Catawba to generate over half of its offense within five feet of the rim and convert at a 51.6 percent rate (two points higher than last season’s defense). WSU survived because Catawba is not a great shooting team and it missed 19 of 26 shots outside of the paint.

3. The Shockers played a small-ball four for 39 of 40 minutes. After playing the majority of last season with two traditional posts on the court, WSU switched up to a small-ball lineup for all but 58 seconds of Tuesday’s game. Every minute Markis McDuffie (25) and Brown (13) played came at power forward, which seems to indicate WSU plans on playing small — at least early in the season. Marshall split 40 minutes at center four ways between Udeze (16), Asbjorn Midtgaard (10), Jaime Echenique (9) and Isaiah Poor Bear-Chandler (6).

4. It was just a bad jump shooting game for the Shockers. WSU shot a combined 3 of 17 on corner and wing threes, an alarmingly bad rate for places on the court that are typically efficient. WSU had about the same shot make-up as last season: around 45 percent of attempts near the basket and more than 35 percent of attempts from three. The Shockers converted a fine percentage of their shots within five feet (16 of 27, 59.3 percent), but it’s a problem when you take 26 threes and long twos and make less than a quarter (23 percent) of them.

5. Only 13 of 36 lineup combinations for WSU outscored Catawba. The Shockers had two lineups that outscored Catawba by more than four points and both were played in the final seven minutes when WSU absolutely needed it for the win. The first group was Samajae Haynes-Jones, Dexter Dennis, Jamarius Burton, McDuffie and Udeze, which reeled off a 6-0 run in two minutes for a 60-51 lead, then the second group was Haynes-Jones, Stevenson, Burton, McDuffie and Poor Bear-Chandler that finished off the game with a 9-2 spurt in the final three minutes.

6. The Shockers didn’t share the ball like they normally do. Every WSU team Marshall has coached has assisted on at least 53 percent of its made baskets. The Shockers have had a pretty good run at point guard lately, but Marshall’s sets have also to credit for the high rate of assists. But none of that translated on Tuesday when WSU assisted on just 10 of 27 field goals, a 37 percent rate that would have been WSU’s lowest since March 2017.

7. WSU could lead the country in bench minutes. Maybe Marshall can nail down a starting lineup that gels, but with so many newcomers it’s a good bet there will be inconsistency. That means a lot of bench minutes like there was on Tuesday when Marshall doled out 48 percent of available minutes to non-starters. Marshall has shown the last three years (when WSU has ranked top-25 nationally in bench minutes) that he loves to go to his bench and this season should be more of the same with so many options at his disposal.

8. The most-played lineup only saw 3:39 of court time together. With so many newcomers and new pieces to try to fit into lineups, it’s not a surprise only three of 36 lineups saw the court a second time together. The most-played lineup consisted of Haynes-Jones, Chance Moore, Burton, Brown and Udeze and they outscored Catawba 9-6 during two first-half stints.

9. WSU might struggle with turnovers like in the early years of the Marshall era. Marshall’s teams have protected the ball well in recent seasons, as WSU has finished among the 50 best in the nation at limiting turnovers in six of the last seven seasons. But the Shockers wasted 20 percent of their possessions with turnovers (15 total) on Tuesday, a threshold it only surpassed seven times all of last season. WSU committed turnovers on at least 20 percent of its possessions in Marshall’s first three seasons at WSU.

10. The starting lineup was actually the worst lineup of the night. It took Marshall 2:39 to pull the plug on the starting five of Ricky Torres, Haynes-Jones, Dennis, McDuffie and Midtgaard after they fell behind 6-0 after four possessions to start the game. No other lineup played more than 2:39 consecutively together the rest of the game and no other combination was outscored by more than two the rest of the game.

This story was originally published October 31, 2018 at 12:14 PM.