Wichita State’s Zach Brown ready for NCAA tourney turnaround (+video)

The look on Zach Brown’s face was a mix of disgust and disbelief.

As he sank back into his locker at the Scottrade Center on March 5, Wichita State’s high-flying, sometimes-super 6-foot-6 sophomore forward filled his mind with the what-ifs of a game, and a postseason, that had taken a bad turn.

Eight days later, the lessons learned from an overtime loss to Northern Iowa in the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament semifinals in which Brown played arguably his worst game of the season seemed to have fully hit home.

Now, Brown and his teammates get a chance at redemption.

After a sweat-it-out Selection Sunday in which the Shockers discovered they were in the NCAA Tournament, albeit with a First Four date with Vanderbilt on Tuesday night, Brown seemed genuinely humbled by the opportunity in front of him.

“It’s been a tough week, a lot of short nights,” Brown said. “Not necessarily really getting the sleep you need … for me, a lot of thought about this whole process and what you do to get here. And now that we’re in, we’re ready.”

The Shockers need Brown, as much as any player outside senior All-Americans Ron Baker and Fred VanVleet, to deliver a big game if they’re to advance to Providence, R.I., for a Thursday date with No. 6-seed Arizona in the South Regional. An offensive X-factor, he’s also usually tasked with guarding one of the other team’s best players.

“I think there was a sigh of relief (after the NCAA announcement),” Brown said. “Now we just need to come out and play like we know how.”

Brown’s horrible day against Northern Iowa started with an airballed three-pointer, continued with a point-blank miss in a crucial stretch during the second half, and ended with a missed free throw on the front end of a one-and-one with the score tied 47-47 with 50 seconds left in regulation.

In all, he scored two points and went 0 for 6 from the field, although he did tie his season-high with eight rebounds.

It ended a late-season stretch in which Brown strung together a string of solid performances. He averaged 9.1 points over the Shockers’ previous 10 games – up from his 7.1 average – and posted a career-high 16 points in a win over Missouri State on Feb. 18.

In the 10 games, Brown scored in double figures four times and scored nine points two other times.

“I was disappointed with how I played, because I expect a lot out of myself,” Brown said. “But I try not to let it affect me. That doesn’t do me any good.”

Brown’s sophomore season has been eerily similar, numbers-wise, to the sophomore season of the player he was tasked to replace this season. Two-time MVC Defensive Player of the year Tekele Cotton started 28 of 39 games that season, averaged 6.5 points and 3.9 rebounds in 23.7 minutes as the Shockers made a surprise run to the Final Four.

Brown has started 28 of 31 games this season and averages 7.1 points and 3.0 rebounds in 19.4 minutes.

“Obviously, Zach is known for his defensive capabilities,” WSU guard Ron Baker said. “And he knows, and we know as a team that he wasn’t guarding as well during the (MVC) tournament as he was during the season. We need him to be like Tekele, where he can shut down the other teams’ best offensive player and then do the little things on offense, set screens, crash the glass ... do those things and he can help us during this tournament.”

Cotton and Brown both also got their names in the national conversation with a dunk in the NCAA Tournament – Cotton with a steal and two-handed slam that put WSU up by 10 over Pittsburgh in the 2013 second round, and Brown with a steal and two-handed slam against Kansas that put the Shockers up by 11 in the third round last season.

Brown also scored 11 points and grabbed eight rebounds in the Shockers’ 81-76 second-round win over Indiana — the most complete game of his freshman season.

Asked Sunday if it gave him any extra confidence knowing he’s already made big plays on college basketball’s biggest stage, he deferred ... and circled back to a theme many of the Shockers were sticking to Sunday.

“We’ll just have to see how it goes,” he said. “You can’t speak on something that hasn’t happened yet, and last year was last year. This is a whole new tourney and a whole new team playing. Speaking for me, and for everybody else, we just need to come out and play like we know how to play.”

This story was originally published March 14, 2016 at 7:10 PM with the headline "Wichita State’s Zach Brown ready for NCAA tourney turnaround (+video)."