As outside frustration mounts, Wichita State basketball players remain confident
Outside frustration is mounting with the Wichita State men’s basketball team following its loss last Saturday against Memphis, its third straight defeat in a key game at home.
Even though it was only eight months ago when head coach Isaac Brown and the Shockers were celebrating an implausible American Athletic Conference championship at Koch Arena, those memories seem ages ago and the good will built up during that run has waned among some in the fan base.
It was only a month ago when WSU was coming off back-to-back road wins at Missouri and Oklahoma State, once again building a case for NCAA Tournament inclusion. But ugly home losses to Kansas State, North Texas and Memphis — where WSU shot a combined 33.5% — have raised questions if the Shockers’ offensive woes are too much for them to overcome in their bid to return to March Madness.
There is still plenty of time (and opportunities) for Wichita State to do that and within the program, the Shockers (9-4, 0-1 AAC) remain confident they will still achieve their goals this season. WSU star guard Tyson Etienne was adamant about it following the 82-64 loss to Memphis, the worst at Koch Arena for WSU in more than two decades.
“We’re not going to take a loss like this and just chalk it up to, ‘Oh, I guess this will be a season like this,’” Etienne said. “No, we’re going to be back in the gym and continue to work on it. Tough times happen. Bad games happen. It happens. But good games come and I guarantee we’ll have a good game the next game. I’m not going to say it’s over for us because we lost our first game. All right, we’ll be OK.”
The common gripe by critics of the team is that it’s not just that Wichita State is losing, but the way it is losing. The Shockers have rarely featured an aesthetically-pleasing offense since joining the American, but this season has been the biggest struggle yet.
Lengthy scoring droughts have doomed the Shockers in their last three losses and the team has shot worse than 37% from the field in all four of its losses. Most notably, WSU is currently having its worst shooting season since the 1997-98 season.
What has hamstrung this team more than anything is its inability to knock down open shots on the perimeter. WSU has made just 30.8% of its three-pointers and shot 23.4% on triples in its last three losses, including an abysmal 7-for-33 performance against Memphis. Making matters worse, WSU shot just 4-for-21 (19%) on open three-pointers against Memphis, per a video review by The Wichita Eagle.
“We’ve got to get in the gym and be able to make wide-open shots,” Brown said. “(Shooting) 7 for 33, it’s hard to win if you can’t make wide open jump shots.”
Most college basketball teams would require a significant increase in shooting to start winning games. WSU players found solace in the fact that the program has won the second-most games in the country the last four seasons when shooting under 40%.
“I’m confident because I’ve seen it happen before,” WSU fourth-year junior Dexter Dennis said. “I think in all my years here we never really shot it extraordinary, but we shot it well enough to win games. I think the defense is the thing that held us down. As long as we can stop them from scoring a certain number and we shoot our regular number, we win most of the time. But (Saturday) that didn’t happen.”
Good shooting can often mask deficiencies in a team. WSU is rarely afforded that luxury. In fact, the Memphis loss showed just how razor-thin the margin of error can be for WSU.
When the Shockers don’t shoot well, which is often, they rely on crashing the glass for second-chance points, limiting turnovers to maximize possessions, manufacturing points at the foul line and playing stellar defense to grind out victories. As soon as the defense wasn’t playing anywhere close to an elite level, WSU was crushed by Memphis — at one point falling behind by 28 points on its home court.
“We’ve been known to win games despite not shooting the basketball well because our defense is usually on point and it wasn’t on point (Saturday),” Etienne said. “Obviously we need to start shooting the ball better, which we will, but defense is something we’ve always hung our hat on and we didn’t do that today.”
As disappointing as the last three losses have been for Wichita State, none of them have necessarily been bad losses. K-State (No. 80), North Texas (No. 54) and Memphis (No. 53) all have a chance in the NET rankings of finishing as Quadrant 2 home losses, which isn’t great, but isn’t a knock-out blow, especially in a conference that currently offers plenty of upside in the NET rankings with Houston (No. 3), Central Florida (No. 48), Memphis (No. 52), SMU (No. 67) and Cincinnati (No. 75).
This group of WSU players are no strangers to adversity and with outside criticism now swirling around them, they said now is the best time to stick together and block out the noise this week when they prepare for another nationally-televised showdown against AAC favorite and No. 12-ranked Houston on the road this Saturday.
“I don’t necessarily care what the outside people may think,” Etienne said. “I just care what my teammates think and what my coaching staff thinks. As long as we know we can win basketball games in this conference, that’s all that matters to me. Because I know what we got in our locker room. I know what we’re going to do. I know we’re going to bounce back. We’re going to focus on what we need to do to win games and we’re going to do that.”
“The only thing that really matters is what we think of each other and how we respond,” Dennis added. “Nothing else really matters.”
This story was originally published January 3, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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