Wichita State basketball handles Tulane and catches unlikely break in AAC title race
The good news for Wichita State fans is that the Shockers’ men’s basketball team took care of business on Wednesday evening at Koch Arena in a 75-67 victory over Tulane.
But the better news came before WSU even tipped off. East Carolina stunned No. 5 Houston, 82-73, to hand the conference-leading Cougars their second loss in American Athletic Conference play.
And just like that, the Shockers (10-4, 6-2 AAC) are tied for first place in the AAC in the loss column. There’s still work to be done to catch Houston (15-2, 10-2 AAC) in the win column, but it was a pleasant surprise for WSU to be able to control its fate in the conference race again.
“We’re mainly just worried about us,” said WSU junior Dexter Dennis, who added eight points and four blocks. “We’re controlling what we can do and taking it one game at a time. We’re not looking ahead or anything like that. We’re just focused on us and how we can get better.”
WSU interim coach Isaac Brown already knows how he wants his team to get better after watching the Shockers allow a 21-point lead with less than eight minutes remaining dwindle to six points in the final minute.
“I tell them all the time that it’s a bad habit that can come back to bite you,” Brown said. “You’ve got to learn how to close out games. We’ve got to stop at the end of the game thinking about me, me, me and playing hero ball. Let’s play as a team, let’s defend as a team, let’s play smart. We did that for about 32 minutes.”
As the coaching expression goes, it’s always better to learn from a win rather than from a loss. And despite WSU’s struggles protecting big leads this season, it has won eight of its last 10 games.
Brown said he was already looking forward to cutting up the game film to show the players in Thursday’s film session. In fact, he might not cut up the final eight minutes at all — he said he was thinking about letting the Shockers watch every one of their mistakes that let bottom-tier Tulane make things more interesting than they should have been.
“Good teams don’t play like that,” Brown continued. “They play for 40 minutes. They don’t play for 32 minutes. I’m going to show them some of the good things we did, but I’m going to show them all of our mistakes. I don’t want that to come back and bite us.”
The good things on Wednesday mostly involved WSU sophomore Tyson Etienne, who delivered his seventh 20-point performance and fifth in conference play. The AAC’s leading scorer finished with 22 points on 7-of-13 shooting, including four three-pointers. Meanwhile, 9-of-10 shooting from the foul line boosted senior Alterique Gilbert to 17 points, six rebounds and four assists.
WSU’s defense did well forcing Tulane (7-6, 2-6 AAC) into poor shots and held the Green Wave to 31.3% shooting from the field and a 4-for-25 performance on three-pointers. Dennis was also responsible for putting the clamps on Tulane’s leading scorer Jaylen Forbes, who was averaging 15.5 points but left Koch Arena with an 0-for-13 shooting experience.
“We wouldn’t be who we are without (Dennis),” Etienne said. “And I mean that in many aspects other than him locking people up. He’s a great teammate. He does everything the right way. He’s an elite defender. Every game he’s guarding the other team’s best scorer. For him to have the resume that he does is amazing. I’m thankful he plays like that for us.”
Etienne was superb early, scoring 10 of WSU’s first 13 points with the Shockers leading 13-3 after the game’s second media timeout. He started the game making Tulane pay in transition, swishing a pair of three-pointers following Tulane turnovers.
It was a rather mundane first half until the final four minutes when WSU turned in on after its lead had been whittled down to 21-16.
After letting Tulane’s match-up zone dictate the shot attempts (mostly threes) that it took, the Shockers stopped settling and took it right at Tulane during a 10-3 run to close out the half for a 31-19 lead. Isaiah Poor Bear-Chandler scored a layup, then Ricky Council followed with one of his own and Etienne added another layup in transition.
“We really talked about spacing and getting into those gaps and getting each other involved,” Gilbert said. “We had a solid game plan coming in.”
WSU was able to maintain its double-digit lead for the first 15 minutes of the second half. When Tulane clawed to within 10 early in the second half, Dennis sparked the Shockers with a chase-down block pinned to the backboard, an offensive rebound put-back and a wing three. It was the start of an 8-1 run that stretched WSU’s lead to 47-30 with 13:14 remaining.
The lead ballooned to 21 points with 7:39 remaining, but that’s when a lack of focus and urgency plagued the Shockers and allowed Tulane to reel off a 13-0 run to trim WSU’s lead to 59-51 with still five minutes to play. Etienne stopped the run with a triple, then Gilbert produced a four-point play with 2:47 remaining to help restore a double-digit lead.
But a foul-fest at the end of the game saw Tulane close to within 73-67 with 48.5 seconds left. Etienne made a pair of free throws to extinguish the threat, but the Shockers were disappointed they were in that situation at all.
“We’ve got to play until the end,” Etienne said. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a skill thing, it’s a mental thing. Knowing the game is not over. They don’t want to get killed, so they’re not going to just lay over. Just being aware. I don’t think it’s anything crazy. We just need to be aware of it and we need to make the adjustments. I’m not worried about it.”
For a team that entered the game ranked No. 330 out of 347 teams in the country in defensive rebounding percentage, boarding out at 66.5%, it was an encouraging performance — at least most of the game — for the Shockers in their biggest weakness.
In the first 33 minutes of the game, WSU grabbed 31 of 35 defensive rebounds for an 88.6% rate. That work was somewhat undone by giving up six offensive rebounds in the final seven minutes, but WSU still grabbed a season-best 77.8% of the possible defensive rebounds (35 of 45) in the game.
The Shockers will wrap up their three-game homestand on Super Bowl Sunday with tip-off against Temple (4-5, 3-5 AAC) at Koch Arena coming at 2 p.m. with the television broadcast on ESPNU.
This story was originally published February 3, 2021 at 9:04 PM.
.jpg)