Here’s Gregg Marshall’s biggest regret following his worst loss at Wichita State
The extreme youth on this season’s Wichita State men’s basketball team has kept Gregg Marshall and his coaching staff busy trying to make the transition to the Division I level as smooth as possible for nine first-year players.
Sometimes there are challenges that Marshall doesn’t think to prepare his players for until their inexperience make it an issue. That was the case on Saturday in WSU’s worst loss in 15 years and worst offensive performance in even longer, an 80-48 thumping at the hands of Oklahoma.
WSU’s list of problems on offense was long — too much standing around, not enough passing, no dribble penetration — but playing in Chesapeake Energy Arena, home to the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, added to it. When college games are played on NBA courts, blue tape is plastered on the floor to differentiate the college three-point line, which measures 20 feet, 9 inches, from the NBA three-point line, which measures 23-9 above the break and 22 feet in the corners.
Instead of toeing up the college three-point line, many of WSU’s players subconsciously drifted to the painted line, three feet farther than their typical shot. As a result, WSU launched over half of its three-pointers (14 of 27) from NBA range and missed 12 of 14 shots.
It doesn’t solely explain away a 32-point loss, the worst of Marshall’s career at WSU, but it does highlight the type of inexperience the Shockers are dealing with in an up-and-down 4-4 season to date.
“The biggest error that I didn’t do going into this game was to tell the players to not even think about that line,” Marshall said Monday. “If you’re going to take a three-pointer, take a normal three-pointer. But we elected to show the world that we could hoist one from behind the NBA three-point line with no chance of it going in. All that does is confirm you can’t make those type of shots.
“I needed to talk to them and warn them and I failed to do that.”
It didn’t even take a minute for the difference in lines to take effect.
After setting a screen, Jaime Echenique popped to the top of the key to receive a reversal pass. He does this several times a game, usually setting up on the edge of the three-point line to be a threat to shoot if his defender doesn’t follow him.
But this time Echenique is fooled into drifting a few extra feet out to the behind the NBA line. He makes the catch, realizes he’s open and fires away WSU’s first three of the game. It’s a shot he’s used to making, except this time he’s three feet farther away than he thinks and the shot missed badly.
“It was such an unorthodox delivery of the shot that it hit the backboard with a velocity that I thought could have broken the backboard before hitting the rim and caroming out to the top of the key,” Marshall said. “It was like a scud missile. That started it off.”
Two minutes later, point guard Ricky Torres was the next to be duped. Torres received a pass on the wing with a 6-foot-9 defender on him and after one dribble, Torres decided to launch a contested three-pointer with both feet behind the NBA line. The shot was well short.
Freshman Erik Stevenson connected on a pair of deep threes from NBA range, but it proved to be fool’s gold. Stevenson continued bombing away from deep and finished the game shooting 2 for 9 from three-point range. Trying to recreate his past success, Stevenson was adventurous enough to even attempt a shot that was close to six feet behind the college three-point line.
“I think we saw that line and our eyes got big, instead of gravitating to the normal three-point line on a normal court,” WSU’s Dexter Dennis said. “It’s hard to remember during the game when you’re playing on a court with the taped-on line.”
It was WSU’s worst-shooting game of the season, as the Shockers connected on only 16 percent (7 of 44) of their jump shots against OU.
WSU senior Markis McDuffie said the film study on Monday was an eye-opening experience for many of WSU’s first-year players and they responded positively in Monday’s practice, the first since the loss.
“This is the most adversity they’ve been through,” McDuffie said. “They’ve coachable, though. They just want to get better. They know we did wrong, but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Now we’re back to practicing like we should be practicing.”
A film review of the game showed WSU recorded a season-low in passes completed in the halfcourt, which led to a season-low five assists. OU’s switch-everything defense bogged WSU’s offense down to 0.66 points per possession, the lowest efficiency rating by any WSU team in a game since Ken Pomeroy started tracking the metric in the 2001-02 season.
WSU’s offense was absent of ball movement and dribble penetration, two things that the Shockers must improve to halt the five-game winning streak of Jacksonville State (5-3) on Wednesday at Koch Arena.
“We were horrendous in our execution, horrendous,” Marshall said. “Whether it was our transition, our set plays, our breakdown offense, just very, very poor execution. And then the ability of our guards to get into the lane and go by their defender to create a scoring opportunity for themselves or draw the defensive help and create a scoring opportunity for others. We’re just not very good at that right now.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2018 at 6:44 PM.
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