Why Dillon Battie had a career game to lift Wichita State past Tulane
Controlled aggression.
That’s what the Wichita State men’s basketball team needed in order to break down Tulane’s matchup zone on Sunday afternoon, and that’s what Dillon Battie delivered.
The 6-foot-8 sophomore poured in a career-high 19 points on 8-of-10 shooting with nine rebounds, three steals and a block to power Wichita State to a 75-61 road win over the Green Wave at Fogelman Arena. It was his decisiveness and forceful, downhill style that gave WSU the exact antidote it needed against Tulane’s shape-shifting zone looks.
“They play that weird, funky zone that we weren’t used to, so you have to play with aggression,” WSU star Kenyon Giles said. “Lucky for us, aggression is DB’s middle name.”
Tulane’s defense is designed to confuse, as the Green Wave seemingly switch responsibilities on the fly. It can bait offenses into overthinking and settling.
With Battie, that was never a problem. He did the opposite.
“One thing that can happen against a zone is you sit around and do too much thinking,” WSU coach Paul Mills said. “We needed guys to just play. Don’t think through (everything). Guys understood with what we already had in, we didn’t need to insert a whole lot. We just needed to be aggressive and DB was that.”
From the opening minutes, Battie played like a zone-buster’s blueprint.
Instead of drifting on the perimeter, he repeatedly cut into the middle window, the most vulnerable area of Tulane’s structure. On one early touch, he recognized the defender had surrendered the middle, faked an entry pass and drove hard, jump-stopping under control before finishing at the rim. Later, when Emmanuel Okorafor drew attention with a deep catch, Battie sliced down the lane for a catch, finish and foul for a three-point play.
“I was just looking for open space,” Battie said. “That’s what you have to do against that zone.”
In a game that required quick reads, Battie thrived because he was always in attack mode. Because he doesn’t have a developed outside shot yet, it almost made the game simpler for Battie. And once he created an edge, he rarely gave it back.
Against a defense that thrives when the offense hesitates, Battie never paused long enough to get stuck.
“Honestly, it’s just my thing,” Battie said. “I’m an aggressive player. I want to get in the paint.”
Tulane’s top priority was clear: crowd Kenyon Giles and force the ball elsewhere. The Green Wave held WSU’s leading guard to seven points on 3-of-11 shooting and tilted their coverage toward him from the start. That attention created seams, the kind that Battie exploited.
“They were really focused on taking KG out of the game, so that opened up 3s for me and allowed DB to get those driving lanes,” senior Karon Boyd said. “So we were just taking what they were giving us and executing.”
Boyd joined Battie with a superb game, scoring 18 points and four 3s, as together they carried the offensive load. With Giles and Mike Gray Jr. combining for just nine points on 4-of-19 shooting, the Shockers still produced a solid 1.03 points per possession because of the frontcourt efficiency and second-chance work.
Battie and Boyd combined for 37 points on 14-of-24 shooting and helped WSU control the glass with 14 offensive rebounds and a 35.9% offensive rebounding rate, while limiting Tulane to a 16.2% mark.
Battie’s impact showed up there, too. On one second-half sequence, he chased down his own missed putback in traffic and powered in the next attempt to push the lead to double digits. His motor never shut off.
“It’s a weird zone, so it was all about him being physical and not shying away from the contact,” Boyd said of Battie.
The sophomore’s aggression traveled into the game’s most important stretch.
When WSU’s 18-point lead shrank to nine at 60-51 with seven minutes remaining, Battie helped steady the possession game. He executed a pick-and-roll with Gray, caught the bounce pass on the move, came to a composed jump stop and attacked under control to draw a foul instead of barreling blindly into traffic. A minute later, he slipped another screen and floated in a paint shot with no defender in position. The margin expanded and Tulane never seriously threatened again.
Battie capped his career day with a punctuation dunk in transition — two hands, knees up — that served as the exclamation point on the best scoring game of his college career. For the first time, he earned game MVP honors from KenPom’s efficiency metrics.
His performance was also a case study in why his skill set is so valuable against zone-heavy opponents. Even though he can’t stretch the defense with his outside shooting, Battie excels at maintaining an advantage when one is created for him. For example, when another player drives, tilts the defense and kicks to Battie, he thrives at preserving the advantage created and attacking close-outs by finishing at the rim rather than passing out and resetting the offense.
“I heard some really good players say, ‘The more that is asked of me, the more I’m going to produce,’” Battie said. “So they ask me to do my job, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
For a WSU team trying to climb the American standings, Sunday was another example of growth from a team that showed it can win when its two star guards aren’t hitting.
“We’ve done so much growth, but we still have so much more growth to do,” Battie said. “We’re just continuing to get better.’”
This story was originally published February 8, 2026 at 5:42 PM.
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