Five burning questions facing Wichita State Shockers men’s basketball team this season
Before the Wichita State men’s basketball team opens the 2021-22 season against Jacksonville State at Koch Arena on Tuesday, here are the five burning questions facing the Shockers.
1. What does Tyson Etienne do for a follow-up act?
In the mind of Etienne, not much has changed for him entering his third season with the Shockers. He always believed he would be great. But now, the rest of the country knows.
That’s what happens when you average 16.3 points, make a school-record 2.95 three-pointers per game on 39.2% accuracy and win a share of the American Athletic Conference Player of the Year award.
As a result, the preseason accolades are piling up for WSU’s 6-foot-2 star guard: AAC Player of the Year, Wooden Award watch list, Lute Olson Award watch list, Naismith Trophy watch list.
“Now the expectations are higher,” WSU coach Isaac Brown said.
And the pressure is on Etienne to deliver, not only so WSU can fulfill its potential, but also to prove to NBA scouts he can play at the highest level.
That is why it will be a fascinating season to watch how Etienne tries to balance his time on offense. His bread-and-butter last season was playing off ball, darting off pin-down screens and letting it fly from deep. But to play in the NBA, Etienne needs to show he can be a creator out of the pick and roll as a team’s lead ball handler.
Etienne has spent most of his time in practices refining his skills in high ball-screen situations, focused on making the right reads in passing to teammates rather than hunting his own shot. And because of the gravity his shooting commands, Etienne very well could be an extremely effective play-maker for the Shockers this season.
Having the ball in the hands of your best player more sounds great, but WSU won’t want to stray too far from what Etienne does best: catching and shooting. It will be interesting to see how Etienne strikes a balance between the two responsibilities.
While Etienne may have been working on his decision-making and passing recently, don’t be fooled: he is a natural scorer and determined to become a three-level scorer this season.
For WSU to be great, Etienne needs to improve his efficiency as his usage rate goes up with more playmaking — a difficult ask, but not an unreasonable one for Etienne’s caliber.
2. Can WSU become just an average defensive rebounding team?
Under Gregg Marshall, it was almost a given — no matter how much turnover from year to year — the Shockers would be one of the nation’s best defensive rebounding teams. In Marshall’s 13 seasons, WSU finished in the top 40 nationally in all but one of them.
In WSU’s first season playing under Isaac Brown, the team plummeted to No. 332. How did that happen?
Asking around the program, several theories emerge. Some of it had to do with the personnel — Trey Wade (6-6) and Morris Udeze (6-8) were just about the smallest frontcourt in the AAC. Some of it had to do with Marshall, a great teacher and master motivator when it came to rebounding, no longer being there. But the most popular theory is that WSU simply lacked the toughness to win 50-50 balls.
“We just didn’t rebound with two hands,” Brown said. “In order to rebound, you’ve got to have toughness and you’ve got to have guys willing to go get the rebound. That’s what we’ve been trying to work on all summer long. Our technique being in the right position and rebounding the ball with two hands. The entire team has got to gang rebound in order for us to be successful.”
WSU’s first-shot defense was one of the best in the country, but because it allowed more than 10 second chances per game, the Shockers’ defensive efficiency sunk to No. 84 on KenPom, which in turn lowered their overall efficiency on KenPom to No. 68. WSU’s relatively mediocre efficiency rankings played a role in why the team had to play the NCAA Tournament’s First Four, despite having won the AAC regular-season title.
If WSU was just an average defensive rebounding team, WSU’s overall efficiency would have made a significant jump and it would not have had to sweat it out on Selection Sunday.
The Shockers seem poised to be a significantly better defensive rebounding team this season. They’re still undersized, but Joe Pleasant seems like an upgrade over Wade on the glass, and guards like Craig Porter and Qua Grant have a knack for racking up rebounds. WSU should also receive a boost with more playing time for Ricky Council and Monzy Jackson, the team’s two best defensive rebounders last season.
WSU doesn’t need to return to its top-40 form — it just needs to be average. If the Shockers can attain mediocrity on the defensive glass, their overall metrics should receive a boost and strengthen the Shockers’ case come Selection Sunday rather than be a liability.
3. Can Isaac Brown make all of the pieces fit?
Internally, Wichita State believes it has the talent to repeat as conference champions and win in the NCAA Tournament.
The Shockers have a star in Etienne who gives them a chance against anyone. They have reliable veterans in Dexter Dennis and Morris Udeze. They have an emerging star in Ricky Council. They have a pair of instant-impact transfers in Qua Grant and Joe Pleasant. They have returners like Monzy Jackson, Craig Porter and Chaunce Jenkins hungry to prove themselves in expanded roles. And they have a trio of talented freshmen, any of whom could provide a lift in a pinch.
With so many options at his disposal, it falls on Brown to pull the right strings in his second year as a head coach. There is pressure, but the good kind that comes with expectations.
“I do feel a little bit more pressure,” Brown admitted on Monday. “I just try to talk to the guys about trusting the process. I’ve got to trust them and they’ve got to trust me as a coach.”
The versatility of WSU’s roster is intriguing. With a single substitution, Brown could drastically alter the way WSU plays at any of the five positions.
At point guard, Porter plays at his own speed and is a smooth operator, while Grant is lightning quick, powerful and aggressive. At power forward, Pleasant does the little things and is solid in every aspect, while Jackson brings chaotic energy that picks WSU up. At center, Udeze is a bruiser who can punish teams down low, while Kenny Pohto is a pick-and-pop specialist who can stretch defenses out.
WSU has an option to play just about any style it wants to and it will be up to Brown to feel out the right starting five and the right rotation as the season progresses.
4. How much improvement can WSU make with its shooting?
Since sporting one of the best offenses in college basketball during WSU’s first season in the American, the Shockers have seen their shooting numbers fall off a cliff in the last three seasons.
After posting a top-25 effective field goal percentage (55.1%) during the 2017-18 season, WSU has since finished No. 320 (46.9%), No. 285 (47.1%) and No. 290 (47.1%) the last three seasons.
WSU is up against better defenses in the AAC with bigger, faster, stronger athletes, but that doesn’t explain such a massive drop-off in shooting the last three seasons.
While the Shockers have been far from a good three-point shooting team in recent seasons, they have been one of the nation’s worst inside the arc. WSU has seen its two-point percentage drop from 47.1% to 45.8% to 44.6% the last three seasons, finishing No. 324 in the country this past season.
WSU has even seen its free-throw shooting tail off, dropping to 68.9% this past season — the lowest mark in the program by more than a decade.
“We want to be a better shooting team and in order to be a better shooting team, you’ve got to put in the work in the summertime,” Brown said. “They did a great job this summer. I feel like we’re shooting the basketball a lot better. We’ve got to take good shots and we’ve got to have guys step up and make wide-open shots. That’s the number one thing we worked on this summer was trying to be a better shooting team.”
In a way, WSU’s relative success the last three seasons has been an impressive feat considering such poor shooting percentages. If it has felt like so many of WSU’s wins in recent seasons have been so difficult that’s because they have been. Winning without shooting well isn’t pretty and WSU has become somewhat of an expert in how to win ugly.
There is hope internally that this could be the team to break the mold and return the Shockers to playing pretty basketball with their shot-making.
It starts with Etienne, a well-documented sharpshooter. But WSU is also optimistic Dexter Dennis can return to the consistency he showed beyond the arc during his freshman season when he made 40% of his three-pointers. Emerging bench players like Ricky Council and Monzy Jackson should take and make more threes this season, while freshman center Kenny Pohto has already been called the best-shooting big man Brown has ever coached.
The benefits of making more shots are obvious: better efficiency takes the pressure off everywhere else. That means WSU won’t have to be as good at rebounding its own misses, avoiding turnovers and getting stops on the defensive end.
5. Will the Shockers’ luck run out this season?
Wichita State finished last season with a 9-3 record in games decided by five points or less, which was the second-best record in the country and tied the program’s 80-year-old record for most in a season.
When those results were put through the correlated gaussian method, which is the deviation in winning percentage between a team’s actual record and their expected record, WSU came out as one of the luckiest teams in the country — No. 23 to be exact.
And to think, WSU actually finished the regular season with a 9-1 record in such games, only to see its season end on back-to-back one-point losses.
The WSU coaching staff would probably object to the notion that “luck” played such a large role in the team’s success. In the eyes of an optimist, WSU displayed the ability to continually find ways to pull out victories down the stretch of close games.
Is that sustainable? We will find out this season.
There’s something to be said about the confidence gained through the number of clutch baskets and timely stops WSU delivered last season. But it’s also likely WSU won’t win such a high percentage of its close games this season.
The last two seasons the Shockers have found themselves right on the bubble entering March. If WSU is faced with the same situation again this season, its record in close games could be the difference between playing in the NIT and the NCAA.
This story was originally published November 9, 2021 at 6:15 AM.
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