Wichita State men’s basketball season ends with Tulsa loss, early AAC Tournament exit
As long as there was one more game on the schedule, the Wichita State men’s basketball team had an unflappable belief it could turn around its season.
One more chance was all the Shockers believed they needed to redeem themselves by capturing their championship form from a season ago.
But belief only matters when backed up by actions, a stinging lesson WSU learned on Thursday when time ran out on its season following a 73-67 loss to No. 10 seed Tulsa in the opening round of the American Athletic Conference tournament at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth.
Given the expectations following an AAC title and NCAA tournament berth the previous season, it’s hard to categorize a 15-13 season ending the program’s 12-year run of postseason berths — WSU will not play in the College Basketball Invitational or CollegeInsider.com Tournament, coach Isaac Brown told The Eagle — as anything other than a failure.
“This year we had the same expectations, if not more, but it really didn’t pan out for us,” WSU junior Dexter Dennis said. “We had high expectations and the fans had high hopes, but that didn’t happen and obviously it’s a let down for us, for coach Brown, for the fans.”
WSU showed glimpses of what it was capable of this season — taking nationally ranked teams like Arizona and Houston to overtime, winning at Missouri and Oklahoma State, beating SMU by 15 points — but it never found anything resembling consistency in Brown’s first season as full-time coach. The team’s longest winning streak was three games and it never won more than two games in a row in conference play.
After winning 10 of 13 games last season decided by six points or less, WSU sported just a 6-8 record in those games this season. Once the clutch baskets and timely stops dried up, WSU started to regress closer to the mean.
“It’s extremely disappointing. It’s been a tough year,” Dennis said. “We have a bunch of losses that shouldn’t be on our record. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what’s going on, it’s just extremely disappointing.”
“We know we should have done a lot better,” WSU junior Morris Udeze offered up. “We played close games close and it was our fault for playing them close. Last year we were winning a lot of those close games. This year it just didn’t happen in our favor.”
For as maddening as WSU’s play was at times, it showed this season that resiliency is still part of the program’s DNA. The only problem is too often the resiliency was of the “too-little-too-late” variety like it was on Thursday.
WSU deserves credit for fighting back from a 16-point deficit in the second half to make it a one-possession game in the final five minutes. But any credit feels hollow when thinking about why the Shockers had to rally from such a large deficit in the first place against a team that had finished 4-14 in conference play and a program they have dominated the past two decades.
“I don’t really have a word or a phrase to express myself right now,” WSU guard Tyson Etienne said. “It’s a lot of mixed emotions. Frustration is definitely the main emotion. You want every season to be a success, to be better than the year before, but obviously it didn’t work out that way for us.”
Ricky Council IV, who scored 16 of his team-high 19 points after halftime, hit a step-back three-pointer with 3:49 to play to cut Tulsa’s lead to 56-53, briefly injecting the Shockers with hope an improbable comeback was possible.
The hope didn’t last long: Tulsa’s Sam Griffin (game-high 21 points) answered back with a triple of his own and 90 second later, after WSU missed a pair of wide-open threes, committed a turnover and gave up a costly offensive rebound, the deficit was back up to 10. WSU managed to rally to within four points twice in the final 30 seconds, but never closer.
“We all had one plan and that was to get to the NCAA tournament,” Council said. “Losing in the first round really hurts. Honestly, I expected us to make it to the championship.”
The offense struggled to establish a rhythm playing without starting point guard Craig Porter, who suffered a groin injury in a Monday individual workout. At least that was true for the game’s first 35 minutes when WSU connected on just 31.9% of its shots, which included a 7-for-26 performance on three-pointers.
WSU is no stranger to winning games ugly, often with shooting percentages even worse than the 36.7% mark it finished with against Tulsa. But the secret to that formula requires supreme effort on the defensive end, battling every possession, winning 50-50 balls, grinding out stops — traits that this team never developed, despite being spearheaded by Dennis, the AAC Defensive Player of the Year.
“Last year coming off the bench and watching a lot, the defense looked amazing. Teams couldn’t score on us at times,” Council said. “This year we started out really well, but then that fell off. Our offense started slow and our defense was great, then our offense got better and our defense just…collapsed.”
Allowing Tulsa to score 1.18 points per possession, its fourth-best performance of the season and best in nearly two months, was indicative of the defensive slide WSU has been falling down since the start of AAC play. The Shockers had no answer for Griffin, Jeriah Horne and Darien Jackson, who combined to score 58 points with a 56.3 effective field goal percentage.
Once upon a time, long ago in non-conference play, WSU had a top-30 defense in the country, per KenPom’s adjusted efficiency. But by the conclusion of conference play, the Shockers finished with the eighth-best defense in an 11-team league.
Combine that with an offense that floundered despite possessing talented scorers and WSU had a mix for mediocrity. The Shockers were plagued on Thursday by the same things: a lack of urgency, a lack of ball movement, a lack of player movement, which coalesced to make up one of the worst-shooting offenses in the history of the modern program.
A season that began with so much promise ended as one to forget.
“I don’t really have much to say,” Council said. “I’m disappointed in myself, disappointed in the team. It’s a tough way to go out.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2022 at 4:51 PM.
.jpg)