‘Face the truth’: Wichita State basketball meets harsh reality in season’s first loss
It was a long plane ride home from Florida on Friday evening for the Wichita State men’s basketball team.
Ask anyone before the start of the season and the Shockers would have gladly accepted their fate of a 6-1 start with the lone loss to a nationally ranked Florida team in the ESPN Events Invitational championship game.
What should have felt like a solid start to the season was instead soured on Friday in an 88-51 loss to the No. 18-ranked Gators that somehow wasn’t even that close. It took WSU 30 minutes to crack 30 points on the scoreboard and the Shockers trailed by as many as 48 points late in the second half, which was flirting with the worst loss in program history.
Instead, a flurry of points in the final 90 seconds scored against Florida’s walk-ons ensured Friday’s performance would go down as only the fifth-worst loss in modern history.
WSU head coach Paul Mills addressed what he wanted to see from his team in the four days between the end of Friday’s loss and next Wednesday’s game against Alcorn State at Koch Arena.
“You always look in the mirror first,” Mills said. “Anytime you have bad leadership, the initial issue is to point blame. The first person that you’re in control of is you. I think we have a group that what they’ll do is look in the mirror and say, ‘Where can I tighten up?’”
It’s quite possible Wichita State won’t face a better opponent the rest of the season and the team isn’t nearly as bad as it played on Friday. But a defeat of that magnitude was a stark reminder of the gulf that currently exists between the Shockers and the top teams they used to take pleasure in upending in March less than a decade ago.
For a program trying to build toward competing at that level again, WSU couldn’t afford to flush Friday’s performance and move on. If WSU is to look in the mirror, as Mills suggested, the team must best honest with itself — and acknowledge the warts that were exposed.
“We’ve got to face the truth and accept the fact that it was a beatdown,” WSU center Matej Bosnjak said. “It was mostly them imposing their physicality on us and we weren’t up for the challenge today. We’ve got to give credit to (Florida). They were super physical and their motor was running all day. But Quincy (Ballard) and I should take pride in being the imposers of physicality. We have to work on that. And not just us, but the whole team as well.”
Mills was perturbed by his team’s lack of physicality after its first game in the tournament. While a last-second 3 by Harlond Beverly and free throws from Justin Hill lifted the Shockers to an overtime victory over Minnesota, the coach was more concerned about the process than a result in November of a five-month season.
Winning can often hide a team’s weaknesses, but there was no hiding in a 37-point loss on Friday: The Shockers were simply bullied by a more athletic, more physical team. It showed up in WSU’s shooting numbers — the Shockers shot 7-for-30 (23.3%) on 2-pointers in the first 35 minutes — and rebounding numbers — Florida outrebounded the Shockers by 26 and retrieved 47% of its misses.
“You’ve got to understand the need for fundamentals, the need for playing off of two feet,” Mills said. “We were just going in there attacking and there wasn’t enough space and we just threw stuff up hoping somebody would bail us out with a call when there were much easier plays to make.”
Given the final score, it’s hard to believe WSU was actually scrapping with Florida in a one-possession game for the first 15 minutes. But after Xavier Bell’s 3 with 8:40 remaining, the Shockers missed their next 14 shots, turned the ball over six times and went 18 straight trips down the floor without a single point.
By the time Bosnjak ended WSU’s field goal drought with 16:46 left in the second half, a one-possession game had turned into a 30-point blowout with a 27-0 run by the Gators.
There was a 14-minute stretch where Florida practically scored at will against WSU, piling up 53 points in a 26-possession span — effectively scoring 2.04 points per possession for a significant chunk of the game.
“Can’t do nothing but learn from it and move on,” said WSU leading scorer Justin Hill, who struggled in a 2-for-12 performance from the field for a season-low four points. “They played really tough and that showed up on the scoreboard.”
WSU’s offense was far from pretty in its 6-0 start, but it was effective because the Shockers spread defenses out, engineered ways to send ball-handlers downhill and kept battering their way to the rim over and over. It worked when WSU was athletically superior on the perimeter.
But when WSU tried to out-athlete a more athletic team on Friday, disastrous results ensued. The Shockers were 2-for-20 on 2-pointers in the first half with six shots blocked and six more that had no chance of going in after out-of-control drives.
In a troubling sign, WSU scored fewer than 0.60 points per possession for the game when each of its starting five players was on the floor. Translation: WSU’s offense was bogged down the most with its best players on the floor.
“They are good defensively, but I thought it was more about our shot selection,” Mills said. “We were playing way too individualistic. Guys were trying to hit homers rather than singles.
“I don’t think effort was the issue, it was more about how everybody was trying to burden themselves with ‘I need to make a play’ rather than ‘I need to make the right basketball play.’ People were just trying to wear a burden that they didn’t need to.”
Last year’s 7-1 start to the season proved to be a mirage, as the Shockers lost 10 of their next 11 games and spiraled toward the program’s first losing season in 16 years.
If this year’s team wants to avoid a similar fate, WSU must improve its physicality and its shot selection on offense.
Next week’s return to the Roundhouse against a winless Alcorn State team isn’t likely to provide much resistance, although the Braves did upset WSU at Koch Arena just two years ago. But the Shockers have stiff challenges ahead with a road date against undefeated DePaul on Dec. 14 and against K-State at Koch Arena on Dec. 21.
The next month will be a crucial one for the team.
“November is a month for growth,” Mills said. “December is a month for refinement.”
This story was originally published November 30, 2024 at 6:02 AM.
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