Wichita State basketball surges late for ECU win, locks up seed in AAC tournament
There was no confetti or championship to celebrate this year in the final home game at Koch Arena, but what the Wichita State men’s basketball team did secure was some momentum entering the postseason.
The Shockers shook off a three-game losing streak and their season-long shooting woes to finish 2-0 in the final week of the regular season, completed by a 70-62 win over East Carolina at Koch Arena on Saturday afternoon.
“It feels like we’re starting to pick it back up,” said WSU’s super sub Ricky Council, who scored another 20 points with seven rebounds off the bench. “We wanted to end the season with some momentum going into the conference tournament and I felt like we accomplished that today.”
While locking up the No. 7 seed in the American Athletic Conference tournament may have sounded like a disappointment before the season, it was a small victory for the Shockers to recover from an 0-4 start to finish 6-9 in conference play. WSU (15-12) will play the No. 10 seed, likely Tulsa, in a 2 p.m. Thursday game at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth with the winner advancing to face the No. 2 seed, likely SMU, in Friday’s 6 p.m. quarterfinals.
The good news is if that likely path becomes finalized with Sunday’s results, WSU would be 3-0 this season against the teams in its way to the semifinals. The bad news is the Shockers would not only have to do something they’ve never done this season — win four straight games — but do it in four straight days in order to return to the NCAA tournament.
“We’ve been expecting to go all the way and make it to the championship,” WSU point guard Craig Porter said. “That’s going to take winning four games in four days. So we’ll take these last two wins and run with it.”
It was once again another rollercoaster performance by the Shockers. They played so well for the game’s first 15 minutes, it looked like they would run ECU (15-14, 6-11 AAC) out of the gym by building a 16-point lead. Then they played so poorly for the next 10 minutes, allowing ECU to surge in front early in the second half, it looked like they would blow another double-digit lead at home.
But WSU found an advantage with Porter and Council and exploited it mercilessly down the stretch of the game, continually running its favorite action — the ghost screen where a player pretends to set a screen, only to slip to the perimeter — to give Porter and Council the runway they needed to attack.
“They don’t know if they should switch or not,” Porter said. “Really, it was a choice of who they were going to let score on them.”
With the score tied at 48 entering the final eight minutes, Porter took advantage of the confusion caused by the ghost screen to score three straight times to give WSU a cushion.
Then it was Council’s turn to attack. After Porter had scored three in a row, this time he flipped the ball to Council, who turned the corner with his dribble, which took the ECU defense by surprise, and was cleared for lift-off to deliver a thundering dunk to put WSU up 60-55 with 4:19 remaining and send the Koch Arena crowd into a frenzy.
“We found an action that was beneficial for us and I like the fact that we didn’t go away from it,” said WSU’s Tyson Etienne, who scored 12 points and moved into fourth place all-time on the program’s career three-pointers made list. “The right players got the ball at the right time.”
With the game up for grabs, WSU put forth its best effort to rip off a 10-0 run capped by a Morris Udeze slam dunk in transition for a 66-55 lead with 1:11 remaining.
It was an especially dominant close for Porter and Council, who combined to score 27 of their 35 points in the second half. Porter registered the first double-double of his career with a career-high 10 rebounds to go along with four assists, two blocks and a steal.
It was exactly what the Shockers needed after their spirits were at a low following a 24-point loss at Memphis on Feb. 27.
“This team has great character,” WSU coach Isaac Brown said. “We’ve got good kids around our program and those guys don’t point fingers, they don’t listen to outside noise. They come into practice every day and they can take coaching. We talked about that Memphis game, that film, it stung a lot, but those guys learned from the film and they got better.”
The most encouraging improvement from the Shockers entering the postseason has been their dramatic increase in taking and making two-point shots recently. Too many times this season WSU has settled for three-pointers, often not even wide-open ones, but lately that has changed.
In its win at Tulsa on Wednesday, WSU shot 56.8% (21 of 37) inside the arc. The Shockers followed that up with their best performance inside the arc this season on Saturday, matching their season-high with 25 two-point field goals against ECU and shooting a season-best 62.5% on two-pointers. WSU out-scored ECU 42-22 in the paint.
“When we figured that out, we’re a pretty good basketball team,” Brown said.
There was plenty to be encouraged about in Saturday’s performance, but the same bad habit — turnovers and sloppy play on offense leading to poor defense — showed up yet again for the Shockers.
While the win covered up the fact they allowed a 16-point lead to slip away in 11 minutes of play, Brown knows WSU will have to kick that bad habit of letting teams back into games if it is to pull off the improbable this coming week in Fort Worth.
“It’s very aggravating because if you want to be a good team, you’ve got to play for 40 minutes,” Brown said. “You can’t have spurts like that. You’ve got to be able to put your foot on the gas and stay solid on defense and not turn it over. We just had some slippage there. For them to make a run like that, that’s just not good basketball. We’ve got to want it more.”
Wichita State 70, East Carolina 62 basketball box score
This story was originally published March 5, 2022 at 4:05 PM.
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