Wichita State basketball rallies for double overtime win over SMU
His eyes widened and he shook his head; Isaac Brown contemplated the alternative on Sunday afternoon.
What if the Wichita State men’s basketball team didn’t rally from six down in the final 90 seconds of regulation?
What if Craig Porter didn’t deliver in the clutch or Kenny Pohto didn’t have a career game?
What if the Shockers lost yet again at Koch Arena for their first four-game home losing streak in 15 years?
Those hypothetical situations dissipated the moment Jalen Smith’s shot clanked off the front of the rim, as Wichita State survived a marathon to win 91-89 over SMU in double overtime. The Shockers won just their second home conference game in seven tries in front of a few thousand fans on Super Bowl Sunday.
“I’m so proud of them,” Brown said. “This game can do nothing but give those guys confidence. Those guys stayed together and they believed and they just kept battling.”
With a nightmare situation looming over them, the Shockers showed they at the very least have some resiliency left in them. WSU improved to 13-12 overall and 6-7 in American Athletic Conference play, building a 2-game advantage over SMU (9-17, 4-9 AAC) for seventh place in the conference standings.
Nothing is ever black and white with this WSU squad, so it was fitting that the same game it made a scorching 57.4% of its shots, it also turned the ball over 25 times — the most for a WSU team since Jan. 5, 2008. WSU also had three separate 20-point scorers — Kenny Pohto (career-high 28), Craig Porter (22) and Jaykwon Walton (20) — for the first time since Dwayne Praylow, Lew Hill and Sasha Radunovich combined for 66 points in a 116-92 win over Bradley on Feb. 1, 1988.
“It was an ugly win, but at the end of the day, it’s a win,” said Porter, who played a career-high 47 minutes. “We’re just thankful for that.”
WSU had a minuscule 4.5% win probability when SMU’s Samuell Williamson went to the foul line to shoot a one-and-one free throw with the Mustangs in front 75-69 with 1:18 remaining in regulation.
But Williamson’s miss kicked off the latest absurd chapter in the WSU-SMU series.
Tasked with protecting a five-point lead with 54 seconds left, SMU promptly turned the ball over against WSU’s press, as Porter poked the in-bounds pass out for a steal, then raced behind the arc to receive a handoff and drain a contested three-pointer that cut SMU’s lead to 75-73 with 47 seconds remaining.
Another empty possession from SMU gave WSU a chance to tie or take the lead in the final 15 seconds and the ball once again was funneled to Porter, who played the hero down the stretch in Dallas earlier this season to lift WSU past SMU.
“When the game is on the line, I don’t care if he’s 0-for-25, I’ve got to put the ball in his hands,” Brown said of his senior point guard. “He’s the guy that’s won a championship and he’s our leader.”
With the game on the line — and to avoid a disastrous loss — Porter pulled out perhaps his most impressive move of the season: a devastating hesitation dribble that baited SMU’s Zhuric Phelps into the air and gave Porter access to the paint for a double-clutch, left-handed layup to tie the game with 2.6 seconds left.
“I knew they were going to be on me more heavily on the three-point line,” Porter said. “I knew the hesitation would get him off his feet, so I just used my patented move and drove down the lane. It just came to me at the right moment.”
After leaning heavily on James Rojas and Jaron Pierre for the past month, Brown opted to play redshirt freshman Isaac Abidde (career-high 32 minutes) and walk-on Melvion Flanagan (21 minutes) after halftime. Rojas and Pierre each played just four minutes in the second half and didn’t play at all in either overtime.
Flanagan played 20 combined minutes in WSU’s last six games, including a DNP-CD last Wednesday against UCF, but was on the floor in crunch time and hit one of the biggest shots of the game for the Shockers, a deep, go-ahead three on the wing with 1:46 left in the first overtime for an 80-78 lead.
Phelps (team-high 26 points) tied the game for SMU with 44.5 seconds left, dribbling the length of the floor, cutting through WSU’s defense and finishing an acrobatic layup. Double overtime was needed after Porter was whistled for a charge, WSU’s fifth of the game, and Phelps misfired on a step-back shot at the buzzer.
“There were a lot of ups and downs, times where we probably thought we were out of it,” Porter said. “Then we made a few big plays and kept playing, kept fighting hard. It was an emotional game from start to finish. I’m just proud of how we stayed in it and continued to fight.”
The start of the second overtime was where Pohto, who played a career-high 41 minutes, came up clutch. According to Synergy, Pohto had made just two two-point jumpers outside of the paint before Sunday’s game. Against SMU, Pohto drilled four of them with his finest saved for last, a combination of a pump fake, ball fake and then a right-handed hook shot from 10 feet out to stake WSU to an 84-80 lead.
“I felt like I had to make a bigger impact on the team,” Pohto said. “I felt like I had to give more. I felt like I was in a deep hole that I’ve been trying to get out of for a long time. I just felt like it was time to get out of it. So that’s what I did.”
Even with an early lead in double overtime, WSU still gave SMU plenty of opportunities to rally. If not for four missed free throws in double overtime, the Mustangs very well might have.
Porter put WSU up 88-83 with 40.8 seconds left, but WSU immediately fouled Phelps, who split a pair of free throws. But then WSU’s meltdown against full-court pressure once again occurred, as Porter was trapped in a corner and his pass was picked off by Phelps for a steal and basket to trim WSU’s lead to 88-86 with 25 seconds left.
Porter calmly extended WSU’s lead to four with a pair of free throws, but the Shockers weren’t allowed to exhale when Phelps drove the length of the floor, barreled into Abidde in the lane, a collision that didn’t draw a whistle either way, only for Williamson to tap in the rebound while being fouled by Porter, which was his fifth.
Williamson completed the 3-point play to trim WSU’s lead to 90-89, then Abidde was fouled with 14.2 seconds left and split a pair of free throws to only extend the lead to two.
On SMU’s final possession, Flanagan left his mark to stave off a drive by Phelps in the paint, then scrambled back to the corner to use every inch of his 5-foot-11 frame to wall up and force Smith to attempt a contested shot on the potential game-winner that proved to be short.
“I grabbed that rebound and it felt so good,” Pohto said. “I was about to throw it in the air like one of those last moments in the movies. That’s what it felt like.”
Such heroics wouldn’t have been necessary against a nine-win team at home if not for WSU’s 25 turnovers, many of which coming in bizarre and sometimes comical fashion.
The Shockers committed two of the strangest turnovers you will see in the span of 15 seconds midway through the second half. The sequence began with an Abidde pass being deflected by an SMU player seemingly out of bounds, but as the ball was hurtling out it bounced off the referee. All of WSU’s players stopped playing, assuming the play was dead, but Phelps recognized the ball was still in play and scooped it up for a dunk at the other end.
If that wasn’t weird enough, then Walton retrieved the ball after the dunk and attempted to toss the ball to the same referee for a reset before the throw-in. But because Walton was standing behind the in-bounds line when he released the ball, the referee allowed the ball to trickle out of bounds for a turnover.
“I watch college basketball games every night and the teams that are winning are the teams that don’t have careless turnovers,” Brown said. “We’ve got to do a better job of valuing the basketball. If you value the basketball, you’ve got a chance of winning every game.”
According to Sports Reference, WSU is just the third NCAA Div. 1 team to win a game since Christmas this season with at least 25 turnovers.
It also snapped a four-game losing streak in overtime games, as the Shockers finally prevailed in extra time after blowing late leads and losing in overtime to Missouri and Tulane at Koch Arena this season.
“It was a very emotional win. It felt like a monkey off our back,” Walton said. “It’s a big win for us. It showed a lot about this team. We stuck together as a team and that’s why we won.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2023 at 5:44 PM.
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