Wichita State basketball has issues to fix. Why Paul Mills believes team can solve them

The problems that exist on the court for the Wichita State men’s basketball team are correctable because of the character of the players off the court, by the estimation of head coach Paul Mills.

The Shockers did some things well in Sunday’s 82-72 loss at Missouri, but they also struggled executing certain aspects of their game plan.

A month into the regular season, Mills sees a work in progress when he watches his team on film. In a 7-2 start to the season, WSU has beaten the opponents it has been favored to and lost to the two teams it was underdogs against.

Sunday’s loss in a hostile road environment provided the team several new lessons to learn from, and Mills thinks WSU’s players are up for the challenge to bounce back with a week off to prepare for Saturday’s annual downtown game against South Dakota State at Intrust Bank Arena.

“A ball when it hits the ground is going to come back up because it has air in it,” Mills said. “Hopefully you’ve got a lot more than air in you. When things don’t always go your way, that’s life. But hopefully, internally, you have a whole lot more than air in you. And you’re going to come back and you’re going to respond the right way and you’re going to learn from it.”

When Mills examines a team’s ceiling, it doesn’t always have to do with pure basketball talent. A team needs strong leadership, a dedication to attention to detail and strong character in the locker room.

When a team possesses all of those qualities, on-court basketball issues don’t seem as daunting.

“When you have a team that the problem is the character in the locker room that you’ve got to get better at because they’re a fractured unit, those are going to be the long years,” Mills said. “We don’t have those issues. We’ve got some basketball issues that we can correct, and we’ll do that moving forward because the character in the locker room is really good.”

Improved decision-making tops the list of basketball issues for the Shockers after 18 turnovers at Missouri, a team-wide relapse after doing well to limit their mistakes in the three previous games. Improved decision-making could also apply to the team’s shot selection.

Another work in progress has been WSU’s defensive rotations, plus the pick-and-roll coverage. There were plenty of moments where the Shockers were dialed in, communicating well and walling off Missouri to force difficult shots, but WSU suffered too many lapses on defense — particularly down the stretch — by Mills’ standard.

“We’ll concentrate on defensive fundamentals and get back to that,” Mills said of this week’s practice plan. “Our identity is that we’re good defensively and we’re pretty good at rebounding. We need to make sure we’re sound in those two areas. I don’t know if we’re going to be a great scoring team, so we do need to take the right shots so we can get better there. And then we have to get better defensively at just nailing down the fundamentals, and that’s what we’ll revert to for the rest of the week before we play on Saturday.”

The statistics certainly support Mills’ assessment of WSU’s identity.

The Shockers rank third in the country in defensive rebounds per game (33.0) and No. 17 in rebounding margin (plus-10.6). Their defensive effective field goal percentage of 44.3% is good for 30th-best nationally.

WSU leaned on those two strengths to claw back in Sunday’s game, chipping away at a double-digit deficit following a turnover-prone start to make it a one-possession game in the final three minutes.

After being bombarded in its first loss of the season to Liberty, WSU had an improved response — this time in a true road environment — in its next high-level game. It’s still not where Mills expects, but it’s part of the process for a relatively new team in a new system.

“I still think we’re on a learning curve about the things that we need to do,” Mills said. “To be able to play in that kind of environment, I think guys understand the urgency that’s needed now.

“We did a lot of things right, but we’ve got a lot of things to correct. The response was better, but we still need to tighten up some areas in regards to pick-and-roll coverage and shot selection. Those things are all fixable.”