Another long scoring drought dooms Wichita State basketball in loss to North Texas
The pain was clear in the faces of the Wichita State players trying to come up with answers for things that made no sense to them.
How could a team with so much talent go nearly 13 straight minutes without scoring a single point? And why are long scoring droughts like that becoming a troubling norm?
None of it added up to the Wichita State men’s basketball team following a 62-52 loss to North Texas at Koch Arena on Saturday, a game that the Shockers paid their opponent $70,000 to play.
“We’ve got to look at ourselves in the mirror, each one of us, and figure out what we can do better to help the team,” WSU junior Morris Udeze said. “We can’t be losing games like this.”
It was about the worst possible way for the Shockers (8-3) to snap their 14-game winning streak at Koch Arena, as their 52 points was the fewest total scored in a home nonconference game in more than two decades — since December 18, 2000, to be exact, in a 68-51 loss to Hampton during Mark Turgeon’s first season in Wichita. WSU is 64-4 at Koch Arena against nonconference opponents in the last 11 seasons.
WSU once held a 10-point lead early in the second half, believe it or not, but was derailed by perhaps the worst 13-minute stretch of play by the Shockers since the turn of the century that resulted in a 20-0 North Texas run and an ugly loss.
The Shockers went 19 straight possessions without scoring a point. They missed 12 shots and this wasn’t a case of simply missing open shots, rather a case of WSU failing to create them and chucking contested jumpers. And when they weren’t missing jumpers, they were turning the ball over — 12 times in the second half and nine during the nearly 13-minute scoreless stretch — in a variety of mind-numbing ways.
WSU turned the ball over when it couldn’t complete a simple pass to the wing, another when it couldn’t pass back out top and another on an inbounds pass. WSU turned the ball over twice when North Texas double-teamed the post and another two times when guards dribbled straight into traffic, not to mention the poor passes that missed an easy layup on a back cut and another that led straight to a steal.
To top it off, WSU’s final turnover came when its star player took a dribble out of bounds and stepped forward after the referee handed him the ball for the inbounds throw.
“It’s too late to point fingers, pout, you can’t do that,” WSU coach Isaac Brown said. “You can’t rewind the game. Give (North Texas) all the credit. They played better than us today. We didn’t do a good job of playing smart basketball. You can’t turn it over 12 times and expect to win, even when you’re at home. You can’t keep losing games because you’re turning the ball over.”
Even with a late flurry of scoring in the final 90 seconds, WSU’s offense delivered its biggest dud of the season in the second half — a season-worst 0.51 points per possession — thanks to a nasty combination of 26.9% shooting and 12 turnovers.
It left WSU’s players in a daze trying to explain what had happened.
“We’ve got to look at ourselves in the mirror,” WSU freshman Ricky Council IV said. “I know I’m about to do that for a long time when I get home. That’s what we have to do as a team to be great.”
Udeze notched his sixth straight game scoring in double-figures with a team-high 17 points, but also tied his season-high with five turnovers. The Shockers won the rebounding battle, 35-31, but it didn’t lead to an advantage in second-chance points. And the bench, which is usually superb in wins, combined for just 11 points on 5 of 19 shooting.
North Texas (7-3), which won its fifth straight game, was a fundamentally sound defensive team committed to clogging the paint against WSU, much like Kansas State did. And much like they did in the K-State loss, the Shockers made the job easier on North Texas with their lack of ball movement, off-ball movement and overall energy on the offensive end.
WSU showed none of its potential on the offensive end and the engine that powered the team to the American Athletic Conference championship last season, Tyson Etienne, finished with nine points on 3-of-12 shooting to finish in single-digits scoring in back-to-back games for the first time since the 2018-19 season.
“They guarded (Etienne) well and it’s going to be like that all year long,” Brown said. “We don’t want to take contested shots. We want to move the basketball and set screens and try to get our shooters open. We’ve got to do a better job of taking care of the basketball and we’ve got to make shots.
“I thought it was taking us too long to get into our stuff and we’re taking a lot of contested shots late in the shot clock.”
Much like Bruce Weber did with K-State, North Texas structured its defense to take away the paint and force Wichita State to hoist as many jumpers as possible. Too many times the Shockers took the bait, settling for a pull-up jumper just inside the arc.
“We felt like making the threes difficult early in the possession was really important and then you’ve got to try to protect the paint,” North Texas coach Grant McCasland said. “They can come down and make threes on top of you quick and then all of a sudden you feel like it snowballs on you and it spreads you out. We tried to guard the three-point line early and then protect the paint and double the post and that was the way we had success.”
Etienne drilled a three coming out of halftime to extend WSU’s lead to 10 points early in the second half, but the game turned in a bizarre swing when WSU point guard Craig Porter Jr. was injured during a play and the officials allowed play to continue for nearly 20 seconds with both teams trading possessions before North Texas finally capitalized on its man advantage with Tylor Perry (game-high 23 points) draining a three-pointer to trim WSU’s lead to 39-35.
Without Porter, who eventually returned on a badly sprained right ankle, WSU’s offense looked lost. In Porter’s 22 minutes on the floor, WSU outscored North Texas, 38-35, and were outscored 27-14 in the 18 minutes Porter was on the bench.
“In all honesty, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to,” said Porter, who finished with a career-high 12 points with three assists and two blocks. “I was telling myself I probably shouldn’t because it was feeling pretty bad, but once it was tied up I had to get back out there.
“They know I’ll lay my life out there on the line for these guys. I wanted to do whatever I could to help my team, but we just fell short.”
WSU was already down to nine available players entering the game, as freshman guard Chaunce Jenkins (knee) missed the game due to tendinitis and is considered day-to-day, while freshman wing Jalen Ricks, freshman forward Isaac Abidde and walk-on guard Steele Chapman are all redshirting this season.
North Texas 62, Wichita State 52 basketball box score
This story was originally published December 18, 2021 at 4:56 PM.
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