Ice-cold shooting downs Wichita State basketball in road loss to Memphis Tigers
Since joining the American Athletic Conference, the Wichita State men’s basketball team seems to be good for one ice-cold shooting performance on the road per season.
Two years ago, it was 28% shooting in a 54-41 loss at South Florida. Last season, it was 26% shooting in a 76-43 loss at Houston. The Shockers will hope they got their annual dud out of the way on Thursday.
Wichita State shot a season-worst 29% from the field and missed 21 of 23 three-pointers in a 72-52 loss to Memphis at FedExForum on Thursday.
“We just didn’t play well,” WSU interim coach Isaac Brown said. “We didn’t defend at a high level, and we didn’t execute on offense. We just didn’t have energy. I don’t know what it was, but we’ve got to play harder and we’ve got to play smarter. Give Memphis all of the credit. They were just the better team than us tonight in all phases of the game.”
A sloppy start from Memphis allowed WSU to hang around, but the Shockers’ worst offensive game of the season (0.74 points per possession) prevented them from holding a single lead in the final 29 minutes of the game.
Behind a season-best 11 three-pointers and 47 second-half points, Memphis improved to 7-5 overall and 3-2 in conference play. The Tigers have now won four of five games against WSU under coach Penny Hardaway.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Hardaway said of Memphis’ breakthrough performance. “We’ve been doing this forever. We were looking this good (before the season). I started seeing what I saw a long time ago and it felt good because I always knew we had this firepower.”
WSU remained in second place in the AAC, thanks to banked road wins at South Florida and Tulsa, but it missed an early opportunity to create distance from the middle of the pack. It was the third straight loss in Memphis for the Shockers, which fell to 8-4 overall and 4-2 in AAC play.
Not only were the Shockers not scoring, many of their offensive possessions were disasters.
The crisp ball movement, hard cuts and solid screens that Brown preached about being necessary to win at Memphis were largely absent from the Shockers’ performance.
“Going into the game, we talked about Memphis being a long and athletic team,” Brown said. “We talked about if we’re not scoring, we still have to defend and rebound at a high level. We didn’t rebound at a high level or defend at a high level. They were the tougher team. Give them all the credit.”
Without the dribble penetration or ball movement needed to bend Memphis’ defense, WSU was left hoisting contested shots along the perimeter and barreling out of control toward the rim against one of the best shot-blocking teams in the country. The end result was more wild shots than any game this season with seven shots blocked by Memphis and 11 more by WSU that failed to hit rim.
“We haven’t seen a defense like that,” said freshman Ricky Council IV, who led WSU with 13 points and seven rebounds off the bench. “Coach told us that from the beginning. They’re really aggressive. They’re long and they trap a lot. They trap aggressively. That kind of put us out of sort in the beginning.”
Brown admitted that Memphis’ defense was so disruptive that WSU was almost never able to run through its offensive sets. The Tigers constantly sent a double-team in the way of WSU’s ball handler. Sometimes that was enough for WSU to turn the ball over and even when WSU found the open player, it failed to capitalize on its momentary numbers advantage.
The end result was a lot of one-on-one forays against one of the best defenses in the country, as WSU finished with just eight assists on 20 field goals.
“I think their speed and athleticism bothered us a lot,” Brown said. “When we tried to run our sets, they would trap us and they wouldn’t allow us to run any offense. That made it a breakdown game, and we weren’t able to make good plays. We didn’t make any plays at the rim. We didn’t do a good job of attacking and taking good shots.”
Memphis did the best job yet on WSU leading scorer Tyson Etienne, who entered averaging better than 17 points per game, but left Thursday probably feeling more frustrated than he has all season after being bottled up for a season-low three points on 1-of-12 shooting.
Even with how poorly the offense was going, the Shockers only trailed by four points, 33-29, early in the second half because Memphis could not stop turning the ball over. The Tigers committed 10 first-half turnovers and finished with 16 for the game.
WSU has feasted this whole season on turning other team’s mistakes into points at the other end. But without shots falling on Thursday, WSU was robbed of one of its biggest strengths.
“We talked a lot about our defense becoming our offense,” Brown said. “When we would get a turnover, we weren’t turning it over into any points. I don’t know what it was. We just couldn’t complete plays. We missed a couple of layups. We missed a couple of wide-open threes. They got all of the loose balls and all of the rebounds. I thought we let our offense affect our defense again.”
Council admitted that it was difficult for the players to shake off a shooting performance as poor as the one on Thursday.
“When you’re hitting shots, getting baskets gives you energy on defense,” Council said. “Everybody knows that.”
And when you’re scoring points as rarely as WSU’s offense was on Thursday, that puts an incredible strain on your defense. WSU hung around for one half, but the defense dipped in the second half as the misses on offense continued to pile up.
WSU couldn’t contain dribble penetration, which put the back line of its defense, usually Morris Udeze (10 points), in a no-win situation. Memphis exploited this multiple times during the game-sealing 15-3 run that ballooned a four-point lead into a 16-point lead.
Memphis freshman center Moussa Cisse had scored 10 combined points in his first four AAC games, but delivered 12 points against the Shockers — many on easy dunks after dump-downs when Udeze left him to stave off dribble penetration.
To make matters worse for WSU, Memphis — a team making less than 30% of its triples in conference play — hit a season-high 11 three-pointers at a 61% clip. Alex Lomax, Damion Baugh and DeAndre Williams — who were a combined 0 for 13 — all made their first threes of the season and finished 4 of 5 combined.
“Tough one on the road,” Udeze said. “We’re going to lose some, win some. We’ll have to watch the film on this and get better from it. All credit to Memphis for their game plan. They beat us. But we’ll have a chance to play them again at home. We’ll see about that.”
The Shockers will have to wait another week to redeem themselves after COVID-19 issues within the South Florida program forced Sunday’s game at Koch Arena to be postponed. WSU will have to wait until next Wednesday to return to action with another road game, this one at Cincinnati.
This story was originally published January 21, 2021 at 8:02 PM.
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