A season of broken dreams for Shocker basketball hits rock bottom in loss in Memphis
A season of vanquished dreams and heartbreak reached rock bottom in Memphis on Sunday.
For the second time this season, the Wichita State men’s basketball was thoroughly dominated. Both times have been at the hands of Memphis, which administered the second-worst beating to the Shockers since they joined the American Athletic Conference in an 81-57 drubbing on Sunday.
It’s preposterous to think this is the same season that began with WSU pushing Arizona, now one of the top-ranked teams in the country, to overtime and winning back-to-back road games over Missouri and Oklahoma State. On the first day of December, the Shockers were 6-1 with hopes of defending their conference championship and returning to the NCAA tournament with a largely intact core of players back from last season.
Three months later, on the cusp of the first day of March, Wichita State has not won a road game since. Chances of repeating its title were dashed by WSU’s 0-4 start to conference play, its worst since 2009. A season after winning nine straight two-possession games, WSU has lost six of eight of those games since December. Now the Shockers (13-12, 4-9 AAC) are closing out their first losing conference season in more than a decade.
A week after summoning perhaps their best effort of the season in a double-overtime thriller with Houston, the Shockers put forth arguably their worst effort of the season on Sunday in Memphis. It’s telling of this season that both ended the same: a WSU loss.
“We’ve had so many of those games come down the stretch and we could have won the game if not for a couple bad bounces, a couple things go awry,” WSU guard Tyson Etienne said. “It’s tough losing those. We’ve just got to continue to stay the course because if you quit, you never know what could have happened. You’ve got to continue to pursue, continue to fight. We still have an opportunity to make the biggest tournament.”
WSU has proven capable of scraping its ceiling: the overtime losses to Arizona and Houston, the 9-point win at Oklahoma State, the 15-point shellacking of SMU, the conference’s second-best team.
But those performances have proven to be the exception rather than the rule in a disappointing follow-up season for coach Isaac Brown after guiding WSU to improbable success last season.
The Shockers are in the midst of one of the worst shooting seasons in program history. After shooting 31.3% from the field on Sunday, WSU’s season-long field goal percentage dipped to 39.8% and these Shockers are now fighting to avoid becoming just the second team since 1957 to not crack 40% from the floor.
Not helping matters is that this team is on pace to become the most prolific three-point shooting team in program history with more than 42% of shots coming beyond the arc. But taking nearly 25 three-pointers per game isn’t as analytically-friendly when the team is shooting just 31.8% on those shots, which would be the sixth-worst accuracy for the team since the program started tracking three-point shots in the 1986-87 season.
WSU has missed more than its share of wide-open shots this season, but those alone cannot be the culprit for such drastic shooting woes. The Shockers have struggled to make Brown’s free-flowing style work on offense, regardless if it was a dribble-drive motion or flurry of high ball screens. Ideally, the floor would be spaced to give players the room to attack and create high-percentage shots. In reality, there is poor spacing too often, the ball handler and screener fail to create an advantage with the ball screen too often, and players are left hoisting an array of low-percentage jumpers too often.
When teams apply pressure, like Memphis did on Sunday, the Shockers have too often wilted.
“They make you play basketball. And right now we’re not good at making basketball decisions,” said Brown in a brutal-but-honest assessment of his team. “They exposed us today in that. We couldn’t handle it.”
The dejection was palpable on Sunday afternoon when the WSU players finally began to trickle out of the locker room.
Brown spoke with intensity, clearly upset another game with Memphis had turned into another blowout. The players were exasperated, a growing feeling not just with how Sunday went, but the last three months.
Many have wondered how a team with so many of the same parts returning could go from a conference champion to near the bottom of the standings.
A prevailing thought from those around the program, but not directly associated: the avalanche of adversity last season actually helped in a way. Obviously, it was not ideal circumstances for WSU’s legendary coach Gregg Marshall to resign amid abuse allegations a week before the start of the season, then for COVID-19 issues to pop up and the team start 1-2. But what it did do going through that adversity, they argue, is give everyone in the program, from the coaches to the players, a burning desire to achieve a common goal. Everyone felt like they were fighting for their futures last year, uniting an entire program and creating a unique bond.
Whether that truly pinpoints the difference, it’s true that WSU was never going to be able to replicate the same sense of urgency and motivation this time around with such different circumstances.
Nothing can erase the disappointment in how this season has played out to this point, but Etienne at least is clinging to the hope that the Shockers can summon their magic one last time when they head to Fort Worth for the conference tournament and are faced again with the overwhelming odds, this time needing to win four games in four days to go dancing.
“You’ve got to have faith something good is going to happen for us,” Etienne said. “You can’t be fearful because of what’s happened in the past. Hindsight is 20-20. People say we could have done this, we could have done that, but we’ve got to continue to move forward. That’s the only thing we can do. It’s not like you can say, ‘We’re not going to play the rest of our games.’ We’ve got to give everything we’ve got and see what happens.”
This story was originally published February 28, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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