What went wrong for Wichita State basketball in Alcorn State loss? Analysis of the game
Following Wichita State’s stunning 66-57 loss to Alcorn State on Saturday, The Eagle did a film analysis of the game to break down what exactly went wrong for the Shockers’ men’s basketball team.
Here are the three major themes from the disappointment:
Wichita State was baited away from exploiting its size advantage
The gamble Alcorn State made was clear: The SWAC team felt like they could survive on defense playing 6-foot-6 and 6-foot-7 wings at center because WSU wouldn’t punish them enough inside for downsizing their lineup.
Alcorn State deserves credit for an inspired, scrappy and disciplined performance on the defensive end, but WSU’s woeful 0.90 points per possession had more to do with the Shockers themselves.
What Alcorn State did on defense was simple: The guards applied full-court pressure to WSU’s ball handler to drain seconds off the shot clock, the wings made setting screens and catching passes difficult for WSU along the perimeter, and the help defense was instructed to protect the paint at all costs.
The Braves made up for their lack of rim protection by rotating completely off WSU players on the perimeter to prevent the drive from reaching the paint.
WSU point guard Craig Porter faced this problem throughout the game when he broke down his defender: either barrel into a waiting defender or make the right basketball play and pass to the open shooter spotted up on the three-point line.
Porter, to his credit, made the right basketball play time and time … and time again. In fact, by The Eagle’s count, Porter made nine “would-be assist” passes to shooters for open catch-and-shoot three-pointers — and WSU missed all nine shots. In total, WSU shot a miserable 2-for-15 on open catch-and-fire threes.
The Shockers took the bait set by Alcorn State. Instead of capitalizing further on the advantage inside, WSU ended up hoisting 24 three-pointers in its pursuit for the open shots from the outside that just weren’t falling. Make no mistake, they were open by design: Alcorn State was willing to give up wide-open threes in exchange for limiting WSU’s damage inside and the strategy worked.
WSU scored 39 points (1.34 PPP) and made 64% of its shots at the rim, as the Shockers had their way with the much-smaller Alcorn State team when they attacked the basket. That efficiency was much higher than WSU’s season-opening performance against Central Arkansas, but the problem was the frequency of attempts at the rim was significantly down compared to the first game.
When WSU remained patient on offense and made it a point for a post touch to go inside to centers Kenny Pohto or James Rojas, good things almost always happened for the Shockers. But WSU didn’t stick with it.
Not only that, the Shockers allowed Alcorn State to dictate the matchups instead of forcing the Braves to adjust to their personnel. The obvious example being 7-footer Quincy Ballard, who only played four minutes after excelling in the exhibition and season opener. Brown presumably kept Ballard on the bench because he didn’t like the defensive matchup of Ballard guarding a 6-6 wing. It’s always easy to second-guess a coach after a loss, but giving Ballard more of a chance to affect the game with his size is likely a regret of the coaching staff.
Brown said in his postgame interview a halftime adjustment was to try to get the ball inside, and for the first possession of the second half, it was true: WSU funneled the ball inside to Pohto, who missed a hook shot but followed it up with an easy put-back score. The blueprint had been established, but what did WSU do on its next four possessions? Settle for three-pointers.
WSU scored on five straight possessions midway through the second half to pull back in front for a five-point lead. All 10 points came from attacking the basket. During the next 10 minutes, when the game was decided, WSU had just two attempts at the rim with 2-for-9 shooting on jumpers to go along with five turnovers.
“That’s on me,” Brown said. “I’ve got to make those guys get the ball inside. Our bigs played well. I’ve got to get them more touches inside. We’re struggling to make threes, so you’ve got to throw the ball inside.”
Lack of intensity at the root of Wichita State mistakes
A stunning loss became even more troubling in the postgame press conference when Wichita State players said the team had practiced poorly for the whole week leading up until the game.
Sophomore center Kenny Pohto admitted WSU “didn’t respect our opponent” and senior leader Craig Porter said it felt like the players were going through the motions because they were thinking, “We got this in the bag.”
Those comments certainly align with the effort level and discipline shown by Wichita State on film against Alcorn State.
Take the first play of the game for example: Porter, a seasoned veteran, made the uncharacteristic mistake of completely losing his mark on a simple cut through the paint. Porter guessed incorrectly where the cut would end up; in the meantime, his man was setting a back-screen on an unsuspecting Kenny Pohto. The ball was entered inside without Porter even recognizing his error yet. Pohto’s length was able to prevent a shot attempt, but the lack of attention to detail was already present.
In the first eight minutes alone, WSU racked up the careless mistakes on defense. Basic fundamentals weren’t followed on ball-screen coverage, a veteran made an off-ball blunder that Alcorn State punished with a three and a freshman was badly beaten on a back-door cut that put the Shockers in a 10-point hole and forced WSU head coach Isaac Brown to burn a timeout.
That nonchalant attitude carried over to ball protection throughout the game for the Shockers. While 13 turnovers (one added from film review) doesn’t sound excessive, consider WSU’s 20.6% turnover rate for the game would have ranked No. 308 in the country last season.
Turnovers are bound to happen, but too many of WSU’s turnovers were easily preventable. The Eagle counted the Shockers coughing up the ball four different times from having the ball poked out of their control from behind, another two on dribbling into crowds and straight into turnovers and then another, perhaps the one that best embodies the bizarre night for WSU, where Porter simply dribbled off of his leg out of bounds, a mistake he might not make the rest of his career.
The sluggishness also crept into WSU’s rebounding. After Brown vowed WSU would work on rebounding after giving up 16 offensive rebounds to Central Arkansas, the Shockers followed up with another haphazard performance on the glass.
WSU’s traditional approach to gang rebounding is for the big men to be consistent in boxing out and for the wings to swoop in to secure the defensive rebound. The centers held up their end of the bargain for WSU but were let down by too many instances of the wings simply forgetting to box out and the guards failing to swoop in to help.
Alcorn State made tough shots, Wichita State missed open ones
It’s also worth pointing out the stark difference in shot-making between the two teams.
WSU consistently produced higher-quality looks — ShotQuality’s algorithm says WSU would win the game 62% of the time based on the shots both teams took — but still shot a worse percentage than Alcorn State, which put on a tough-shot-making clinic at Koch Arena.
It wasn’t uncommon for the Braves to look completely disjointed for the first 20 seconds of the shot clock, only to call for a one-on-one isolation and score over, around and through strong contests, which was routinely a back-breaking experience for WSU’s defense.
Alcorn State scored 28 points and connected on 59% of its shots (10 of 17) in the final eight seconds of the shot clock. For context, WSU scored just seven points during the same time-span.
Simply put, WSU lost in part because it missed a lot of open shots, and Alcorn State won in part because it made a high amount of difficult shots.
This story was originally published November 15, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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