‘Feel bad for Shocker fans’: What went wrong for Wichita State in Kansas City loss
A typical press conference following a Wichita State basketball home game begins without a question, rather an opening statement from the head coach, usually emphasizing the positives from the team’s performance.
There was no soliloquy from Paul Mills after a 74-64 loss to Kansas City at Koch Arena. In its place was what sounded like an apology.
“I honestly feel bad for Shocker fans having to watch the first 25 minutes of that basketball game,” Mills said, “because that is not the standard around here.”
It was only four short days ago when plenty of optimism surrounded this Wichita State team. Sure, a 37-point loss to Florida was brutal, but the Shockers were 8-1 with a chance to potentially secure a Quad 1 win on the road at DePaul. Steal one in Chicago and handle business in the Roundhouse for the rest of the month and the Shockers could have been in position to make some noise come March.
Instead, 96 hours later, WSU is spiraling after allowing a back-and-forth game with DePaul to snowball into a 19-point loss, then vowing to bring a better effort in its return home, only to play its least disciplined game of the season.
WSU fell behind by 23 points to a 14.5-point underdog and suffered one of the worst home losses since the turn of the century.
“It sucks,” WSU senior Xavier Bell said. “A loss at home after all the work we put in. We had a hard practice and expected to give our best effort, but it just didn’t show. We’ve got to go back to the drawing board, lean on each other and find another way to win.”
That’s what made the loss all the more confounding for the team: By every account, Monday’s practice was one of the sharpest of the season.
The loss to Florida could be chalked up to being simply outmatched by one of the most talented teams in the country. The loss to DePaul could be chalked up to a team catching fire at home and making 17 3-pointers. But the loss to Kansas City? That could only be chalked up to a team lacking discipline, intensity and competitive fire for too many of the 40 minutes played on Tuesday.
“When you’ve been doing this for 31 years, you’ve seen a lot of things,” Mills said. “I get a little fearful about this time of year simply because we’re only with them three hours a day and the other 21 they don’t have any other obligations (because) there’s no school. Sometimes you see a little bit of this malaise.
“I told our staff the other day, ‘You have DePaul, then you have K-State, this is kind of a trap game for us,’ and we knew that going in. Honestly, because they are a little older, I thought we would approach it a little bit differently, but unfortunately it didn’t go that way.”
Kansas City coach Marvin Menzies seemed as surprised as anyone that his team managed to build such a large lead. The Shockers he scouted on film looked more like the team that furiously tried to dig itself out of a 23-point hole in the final six minutes.
“They’ve got so much talent, you could see it in those last few minutes,” Menzies said. “It was like, ‘OK, that’s what we thought we were going to see.’ I think we might have caught them coming off that DePaul game and they’ve got K-State right around the corner. The mind is a tricky thing, man, especially with young men.”
Regardless of where the minds of the WSU players might have wandered off to on Tuesday, they were clearly not locked in to Mills’ scouting report. The coach bemoaned his team’s lack of attention to detail after the game.
WSU had clear instructions to stay attached to Kansas City sharpshooter Jamar Brown, yet consistently lost him in the first half and allowed him to score 11 points right away to stake the Roos to an early lead. WSU was also told to go under all screens set for Babacar Diallo, deemed a non-shooter for good reason, yet the Shockers consistently chased the point guard over screens and allowed the senior to score a career-high 18 points.
On top of the defensive miscues that piled up, WSU missed its first 13 shots beyond the arc and didn’t make its first 3-pointer until 5:39 remaining in the game with the team down 23 points.
In fact, a film study conducted by The Eagle revealed WSU scored just 17 points and shot a paltry 21.2% (7 for 33) outside of the restricted area. Throw in 11 clanks from the foul line and it was a miserable showing for 34 minutes against a team that entered Tuesday’s game ranked No. 298 in the latest NET rankings.
“You only were able to make 54% off your free throws, that’s not going to get it done,” Mills said. “You look at being 3-for-19 from 3, that’s not going to get it done. And then you have that many errors defensively, that stuff comes back and gets you. You can’t turn around and attribute it to, ‘Well, it was their night, they were banking in shots.’
“We have to be able to control the things that we can control. We can control whether we go over and under on screens. That’s on us. We can control if we can convert free throws. You see them clogging the lane, some of that is going to have to get loosened up by being able to make shots. That’s on us.”
Lapses like that are common with younger teams, not one with the 22nd-most Division I experience on its roster like Wichita State.
WSU senior point guard Justin Hill said the team didn’t bring the right “energy” to the game, which was true, but begged the question why there was a disconnect between how the players performed in Tuesday’s game and how they performed in Monday’s practice.
The Shockers will try to find an answer in time for Saturday’s showdown against Kansas State at Koch Arena.
“I don’t think it’s a disconnect, I think it was a lack of effort, a lack of willingness and a lack of want-to,” Bell offered up. “It’s in us all, we just got to come out for 40 minutes and do that, not just in the second half or when we get down (double digits). It starts from start to finish. We’re an older group and we’ve got to realize that and continue to work on that.”
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 6:01 AM.
.jpg)