‘We know what we want’: Shockers make their 2019-20 expectations clear
The Wichita State men’s basketball team did not play in the NCAA Tournament last March for the first time in eight years.
Of course, there are worse ways to spend that time than taking down Furman, Clemson and Indiana on the road to punch a ticket to New York City and the semifinals of the National Invitation Tournament.
Especially considering where the Shockers were in January, the 14-4 close to last season was a fun ride for an inexperienced team that found its identity. By most measures, the 22 wins — the 10th straight year WSU coach Gregg Marshall has guided the Shockers to that many — were a success.
But in this program, hanging NIT banners isn’t something to celebrate.
With seven returners from last season’s rotation and Marshall’s most highly-regarded recruiting class entering the fold, there’s no confusion on what the expectation is for the Shockers when their season begins 7 p.m. Tuesday at Koch Arena against Nebraska Omaha.
“We know what we want to do and the major priority for us this season is to get back in the dance,” WSU sophomore Jamarius Burton said. “We’re trying to win games and we’ve got to do what we can to get back in that tournament.”
Last fall, the Eagle examined how previously-successful teams in high-major conferences fared when retooling in a major way like WSU did last season.
The three teams that were the closest doppelgangers to the Shockers were the 2017-18 Oregon team, the 2012-13 Missouri team and the 2010-11 California team. All three of those teams were trying to replace almost all of the production from a successful NCAA Tournament team the previous season and all three took a slight step backwards in trying to reload.
But what stands out is looking at what happened in the season following the rebuilding year, as the three teams averaged 24 wins with all three reaching the NCAA Tournament.
A similar trajectory is what WSU is internally projecting. The Shockers are still young, but the extreme learning curve that played a role in an 8-11 start last season shouldn’t be as severe this time around.
“We expect to win now,” WSU sophomore Dexter Dennis said. “We don’t want to have a year like last year. We don’t want to take the NIT experience for granted, but we wish we could have turned it around a bit earlier.
“Our main goal is to get back to the NCAA Tournament, for sure.”
Marshall hopes last season’s NIT run can be a similar launching point as the 2011 NIT championship run, as the 2011-12 Shockers followed that up with 27 wins, a Missouri Valley Conference championship and a No. 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
It’s in the little details that he believes his team improved drastically as last season progressed and he has cause for optimism that those improvements will carry over to the start of this season.
On defense, Marshall said “we learned what it took, especially on the road, to win. You have to be a little gnarly, you have to be tough-minded. It’s not so much physical toughness. It’s how disciplined are you mentally to sprint back in transition every time?”
On offense, Marshall said “they didn’t know about the speed and the size that the opposition possesses on the defensive end. In high school, they could basically shoot just about any time you wanted and they could raise up and shoot over the defender. But on this level of college basketball, that’s just not the case.”
The two players who carried WSU through its growing pains, Markis McDuffie and Samajae Haynes-Jones, are gone. Their production and leadership aren’t likely to be replaced by one or two players.
The trio of sophomore guards for WSU will need to be more consistent. Dexter Dennis (8.4 points, 5.3 rebounds) has all-conference potential, while Jamarius Burton (6.0 points, 3.4 rebounds and 3.4 assists) and Erik Stevenson (6.5 points, 3.7 rebounds, 2.1 assists) can raise WSU’s ceiling by shooting better.
Marshall said WSU has numbers at the center position. While 6-foot-11 senior Jaime Echenique (9.2 points, 6.0 rebounds) should return in December from a broken left hand, WSU still has a solid three-player rotation in 7-foot junior Asbjorn Midtgaard and sophomores Isaiah Poor Bear-Chandler and Morris Udeze.
That core won 14 of its final 18 games last season, even with some of the worst shooting in the country during that stretch. Despite shooting 31% on three-pointers, WSU won because it limited turnovers, rebounded better and defended like the Marshall teams of past lore.
The Shockers believe they can continue excelling in those three areas and bring in three talented freshmen guards: Grant Sherfield, Tyson Etienne and Noah Fernandes. Marshall has said all three can shoot from the outside, create offense for themselves and others, and defend like he wants.
The biggest question entering the summer was who would replace McDuffie at power forward, but 6-foot-6 junior-college transfer Trey Wade has answered that question with an impressive preseason. He may not be able to score like McDuffie, but he figures to be a solid all-around player for the Shockers. WSU also has freshmen DeAntoni Gordon and Josaphat Bilau.
So if WSU was winning so much at the end of last season without even average shooting, how much more can it win if the offense takes the leap Marshall is expecting?
“I think we’ll take better care of the basketball out of the chute and then I know we’ll shoot the ball better this year,” Marshall said. “We’ve got to continue to rebound and defend at a very high level. That’s got to a staple of ours. But the biggest things I would like to see us to do is rebound better and take better care of the basketball. Those are the two things in practice I’ve been harping on the most.”
The consensus among the national media is that Wichita State will finish between fourth and sixth in the American this season. Some prognosticators have the Shockers on the NCAA Tournament bubble, but none have included WSU in the field in their preseason predictions.
The AAC coaches seemed to give the Shockers a vote of confidence by selecting WSU to finish fourth in the preseason poll, but Marshall was quick to point out to his team that the other coaches did not pick any Shockers in the 11 players on the preseason all-conference teams. The fifth-place team, South Florida, had three players selected, while Connecticut, the sixth-place team, and Temple, the seventh-place team, both had two players selected.
“I thought that was interesting,” Marshall said. “I talked to the team about what does that mean? What does that say? Obviously someone trusts our program, but not necessarily you as individuals. What I would like is several of you to do what we do here and be all-conference at the end of the year when it really matters.”
With such a young core (10 of 13 scholarship players are freshmen or sophomores), it feels like maybe one season too early to expect the Shockers to return to the NCAA Tournament. If it can keep its core together, WSU figures to be major players in the American — and nationally — in the coming years.
But this team doesn’t want to wait for the future. They believe they can win now.
This story was originally published November 1, 2019 at 1:49 PM.
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