3 things Paul Mills learned from Wichita State-Oklahoma State basketball scrimmage
While college basketball fans clamor for statistics and final scores from closed-door scrimmages, head coaches are interested in other aspects of the preseason tuneups that might shed light on their team.
Wichita State and Oklahoma State both agreed to not leak the score from their men’s basketball scrimmage at Koch Arena from this past Saturday, although multiple sources told The Eagle that WSU prevailed in each session.
But WSU head coach Paul Mills was more focused on how his team played against a Big 12 team. He gave his overview of the scrimmage on Monday morning from Irving, Texas, at the American Athletic Conference basketball media day.
“My biggest takeaway was just the physicality of the game,” Mills said. “Could we hold our own? Having been in that conference for 14 years, you understand the physical nature of the Big 12. I thought physically, we were able to hold our own.
“Could we handle the level of physicality? Could we keep a good team off the glass? And then let’s see how well we compete based upon where we were a year ago. I thought all three of those boxes were checked.”
Oklahoma State was an ideal litmus test for a WSU team looking to prove itself as a winner in Mills’ second season following a disappointing 2023-24 campaign. The Shockers return five key rotation players from last season who are all seniors, then added proven veterans in the transfer portal.
The Cowboys are in a transition state under first-year head coach Steve Lutz, as they were recently picked 14th in the 16-team Big 12. But they are an experienced team with eight players in at least their fifth year and unanimously rated a top-100 team — Ken Pom has OSU pegged No. 89, while Bart Torvik has the Cowboys No. 93 with WSU falling at No. 101 in both preseason prognostications.
“We were physical and our defense was really good,” WSU senior Harlond Beverly said. “We rebounded it well, we shared the ball really well. I feel like all around we showed what we’ve been practicing as a team this summer and throughout this fall. We did a good job.”
According to a source, WSU didn’t shoot particularly well in the scrimmage, but succeeded by racking up offensive rebounds and cashing in on free throws.
Even if it was just a one-off scrimmage in mid-October, early success at the foul line is encouraging for a program that shot 69.3% at the foul line and finished No. 292 in the country last season in free-throw shooting. One statistic Mills did share on Monday was that WSU made 77% of its free throws against Oklahoma State.
The scrimmage is the only outside competition WSU will face until its lone exhibition game, against Division II Emporia State, on Sunday, October 27, at Koch Arena. WSU opens the season on Monday, Nov. 4 at Western Kentucky.
“Something we need to work on is to just continue to show up each and every day,” WSU senior Xavier Bell said. “A little bit throughout the scrimmage it showed where we can kind of get caught up in ourselves and act uncharacteristic. But for the most part, the upside of it, we played really well and we played through physicality. We shared the rock, we showed our experience with our older group and then also some promise with the younger guys with being able to string together a couple of wins.”
AAC tournament on the move from Fort Worth
The big news from Monday morning’s media day address from AAC commissioner Tim Pernetti was that the conference basketball tournament, which has been hosted in Fort Worth since 2021, will be moved from Dickies Arena following the 2025 tournament.
Pernetti said the conference is exploring all options for its basketball tournament, including the possibility of hosting it at campus sites.
Before its current run at Dickies Arena, the AAC tournament was hosted by member schools like Memphis (2014, 2019), Connecticut (2015, 2017) and UCF (2016, 2018).
This story was originally published October 14, 2024 at 12:23 PM.
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