‘They exposed us’: Memphis hands Wichita State basketball yet another blowout loss
Since Penny Hardaway took over, Memphis has been the bully on the block for the Wichita State men’s basketball team.
The Tigers saved their worst beatdown for Sunday afternoon when they decimated the Shockers in a 81-57 win at FedExForum, handing WSU its second-worst loss since joining the American Athletic Conference.
Hardaway’s teams are now 6-1 against the Shockers and the gap has only widened recently. Memphis has now blown out WSU three straight times by an average of 20.7 points since the 2020-21 season.
“Once again their pressure bothered us,” WSU coach Isaac Brown offered up outside a solemn locker room in Memphis. “We were unable to make shots and I think we let our offense affect our defense. Against Memphis, they make you play basketball. And right now we’re not good at making basketball decisions. They exposed us today in that. We couldn’t handle it.”
Sunday’s game was just the latest chapter in the same book: Memphis was bigger, stronger, faster, hungrier and played at an entirely different level than WSU.
It was a game between two teams headed in opposite directions: Memphis (17-9, 11-5 AAC) is marching toward its first NCAA Tournament berth since 2014, while WSU (13-12, 4-9 AAC) is wrapping up its first losing conference season since 2009.
The Shockers shot 31.3% from the field on Sunday, which actually was an improvement from their past two shooting performances against the Tigers: 29.4% in a 20-point loss at Memphis last season and 29.5% in an 18-point loss at Koch Arena this season.
“I don’t know what it is, but it’s been like that both times I’ve come to this arena,” WSU point guard Craig Porter said. “It’s like someone has like a voodoo curse on us and they’re just messing with us.”
The Shockers have been no strangers to extended scoring droughts this season, but Sunday’s nine-minute scoreless stretch in the first half was particularly cruel.
By the end of it, Memphis had reeled off 18 unanswered points and WSU found itself in a 26-point deficit with its shooting percentage (12%, 3 of 25) below freezing after missing 14 straight shots. For the first 14 minutes of the game, Memphis made 79% of its shots.
“We didn’t come to play basketball, across the board,” said WSU guard Tyson Etienne, who became the 48th player in program history to score 1,000 career points with his team-high 11 points on Sunday. “We didn’t play Shocker basketball. A lot of boneheaded mistakes. And they just shot the lights out.”
Brown tried to stem the tide by calling three of his timeouts in the first half, but nothing anyone said could snap the Shockers out of their daze. There was one sequence in the first half when Brown called a timeout to try to steady the team, only to watch WSU give up a dunk, turn it over and give up another dunk before deciding to call another timeout less than a minute later.
By then, the game was essentially already over with the Shockers staring down a 22-point deficit after just 12 minutes of play.
“Any loss is frustrating, but it is different when you get blown out like that,” Porter said. “It hits deep.”
Memphis plays such an aggressive style on defense, running and jumping and trapping all over the court. But there are slivers of space to attack, moments where the defense is vulnerable. It takes decisive actions, meaningful cuts and passes to punish Memphis.
On Sunday, WSU was woefully not up for the challenge.
“We didn’t handle the pressure well,” Brown said. “We’ve got to have guys that can make more basketball plays, that can take on a double team, split it and get it to a guy for a wide-open shot.
“Right now we haven’t been able to handle the breakdown basketball. I put that on myself and the guards. We can execute when it’s a halfcourt game, but when it’s a team that’s pressing us, we’ve got to be able to make better decisions.”
The lone bright spot was the play of Porter, who finished with nine points, six assists and a program-record seven steals, which tied him with Ernie Moore (1963), Cheese Johnson (1978), Robert George (1992), Tekele Cotton (2014) and Fred VanVleet (2014) for the record.
The most impressive sequence in the game for WSU was early in the second half when Porter drove the lane, rose up and finished over Memphis’ 6-foot-11 future NBA Draft lottery pick Jalen Duren. Porter crashed to the ground after the basket, but quickly bounced up and jumped up to snag Duren’s inbounds pass for a steal and another basket over Duren.
“It’s a nice accomplishment and it shows what I can do defensively,” Porter said. “I was taught to play hard no matter how much time is on the clock. You can come back from anything if you stick with it. I just tried to play until the last buzzer. We just fell short.”
Despite turning the ball over 20 times, six more than WSU, Memphis still held an 18-11 advantage in points off turnovers. The same was true in second-chance points: WSU had five more offensive rebounds, but Memphis scored four more (15-11) second-chance points.
Ricky Council IV, who earned another start, scored 10 points but on 2-of-12 shooting, while Morris Udeze grabbed a game-high 11 rebounds (six offensive) and Chaunce Jenkins came off the bench to score eight points.
Even with the brutal loss, WSU is positioned to leapfrog Cincinnati, which has lost five of its last six games and still has road trips to SMU and Houston, for the No. 7 seed in the AAC tournament in Fort Worth if it can rebound and win at Tulsa on Wednesday and against East Carolina at Koch Arena on Saturday.
“It’s very frustrating, but all we can do it go back and try to get better,” Brown said. “We didn’t play well. We’re making too many mistakes and those mistakes cost us. We’ve got to defend at a higher level. I want to see us compete harder than we did (Sunday) because we didn’t compete very well.”
Memphis 81, Wichita State 57 basketball box score
This story was originally published February 27, 2022 at 3:38 PM.
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