WKU Basketball: Dissecting Early Season Struggles

If there’s one thing all of us could agree on, it’s that the expectations for WKU’s men’s basketball team are pretty high this year…

If there’s one thing all of us could agree on, it’s that the expectations for WKU’s men’s basketball team are pretty high this year. Probably the highest they’ve been since a guy named Courtney Lee was still on campus. With the scoring firepower of Taveion Hollingsworth and Jared Savage along with freshmen studs Charles Bassey and Dalano Banton, Hilltopper fans have good reasons to be excited.

Most of us have had the mindset before this team even played a game this year that they will be the first team since 2012–2013 to reach the NCAA Tournament and even win a C-USA Championship as well. Even ESPN’s BPI projected them going 30–2 at one point at the beginning of the year.

But is it possible that we may have overhyped this year a little too much?

Before you think I’m calling this entire year a loss this early or anything ridiculous, I just want to say that this is the most excited I’ve been for WKU basketball since I was a student on the Hill. I’ve bought into the hype of this team along with many others. I saw how this team looked in the win against West Virginia and was impressed and I’ve seen the glimpses of what I believe this team will become later this year.

But it’s hard to ignore some of the struggles this team has had and where they are now.

The most recent being an abhorrent showing at Indiana State on Saturday that resulted in a 63–54 loss. I didn’t get to see the game (for better or worse) but from hearing how they looked from those who did and looking at the stats, they seem like they didn’t come ready to play.

It’s the same issues that they’ve struggled with up to this point in the year so I’m going to dissect some of the main factors that have caused this team to “underperform” to the standards we’ve set for them.

Youth/Inexperience

This is by far the biggest issue this team has and it seems like every other issue I’ll mention stem from this one. With only two seniors (one of which hasn’t seen the floor this season due to eligibility reasons, the other of which wasn’t on the team last season) and a boatload of sophomores and freshmen, this team is extremely young. And with youth comes a lot of boneheadedness.

We’ve seen that boneheadedness a lot this year with confusion on defense, carelessness passing the ball and just an overall lack of confidence from some players at times but sadly, things like that are natural and part of the growing process.

I think it’s funny how no one really talks about Justin Johnson’s freshman year at the Hill (ed. note — my frustrations leading up to Johnson’s stellar senior year were well documented, and I was ready to write off his career on the Hill as a failure. — Fletch): We all agree he graduated as one of the best Hilltoppers we’ve seen in a long time but he didn’t just show up and start reaking havoc on everyone from the get-go. He averaged four points and four rebounds his freshman year (mostly due to being behind George Fant) but Johnson looked scared to death with the ball and seemed overwhelmed at times early on in his playing career.

Not all great players become great players overnight: Sometimes it takes a lot of messing up and trial and error for some players to learn lessons the hard way and grow.

I wish that we could have freshmen come in and play flawlessly every game but with the one-and-done era of basketball we’ve all seen with Duke, UK and the like is that we tend to forget what real freshmen look like. The players on these powerhouses are usually NBA lottery picks that have had more unique and skillful abilities in their young lives than some other do their whole careers. That’s just the cold, hard truth.

Even WKU has a player likely to be drafted early in next year’s NBA Draft with Bassey but he’s still learning and adjusting to this level of play. He’s had some moments where he looked amazing, like against UCF, and he’s had some moments where he struggled, like against Valparaiso.

Consistency is hard to have this early in the year with young players and the more young players you have, the more inconsistency overall your team is likely to have.

Banton has been one of the players I’ve looked forward to seeing the most but to put it plainly, he’s struggled so far this year. He’s had some bad turnovers and hasn’t done well shooting this year but that doesn’t mean he won’t figure it out soon. Once he does, I wish anyone good luck trying to stop him.

But I feel like losing a game like at Indiana State may do more good than harm in the long run (other than the fact that it probably killed their at-large bid chances but that’s debatable if they would’ve had one in the first place but that’s a tangent for another article). (ed. note — Hi, me again: WKU was not going to get an at-large bid.)

The reason I say that is because I remember what the loss at Ohio University last season did for this team. That was the worst road loss WKU had last season in non-conference play and left us all confused, like we feel now after the Indiana State game. They struggled most of the game and didn’t seem very inspired to play and lost 89–84 to a team that ended up winning only 14 games. It was a wake up call and the other losses they had in their non-conference after that were both determined by less than three points on the road against good teams (Belmont and Wisconsin).

With a lack of experienced players, head coach Rick Stansbury has had to ask a lot of his young players to play at times above their heads and skill levels but yet when they don’t, we wonder what happened. Stansbury has had to call on the likes of Hollingsworth and Josh Anderson to become leaders on this team but they’re still only sophomores. They’re extremely talented sophomores but even they have struggled at times too this year which will lead me to my next noticeable thing.

Point Guard Play

One thing that is crystal clear is what the loss of Lamonte Bearden for the first few games of the year has cost WKU. Bearden is a skilled senior with the most experience so losing that talent at the head of your offense has been a hard adjustment for the Tops to make.

Anderson hasn’t done as well as I hoped he would up to this point adjusting to the point guard role but for whatever reason, he has struggled with foul trouble early on and once he does, it seems like he gets in a funk he can’t get out of the rest of the game.

It was recently announced by coach Stansbury at his radio show on Monday that he will now look to Hollingsworth to play the point, likely until Bearden comes back, starting with the Tennessee State game. I’m not sure how much better Hollingsworth will do (he’s struggled getting in a rhythm offensively) but hopefully this opens things up for Anderson to play on the wing and will let Hollingsworth drive to the basket more.

With the inconsistent playing of whoever starts in Bearden’s absence, it hasn’t helped the depth of the team either because Banton is a true freshmen still trying to figure out how to play the point at the colligate level. It’s great for Banton to get some big minutes to help with his development but it still hurts the team if he can’t produce at the level they need him to.

It makes me wish that Jeremiah Gambrell was healthy. He’s an extremely talented point guard and would likely be a more consistent shooter than Anderson and Banton have been thus far but sadly you have to deal with stuff like injuries. I’m interested to see what Gambrell’s role will be with this team once he’s healthy around January. I’m hoping he could help the point guard depth even more but we’ll see.

Bench Play

Last season, WKU only had seven scholarship players for a big chunk of the year. The lack of depth was the biggest issue with the Tops last season but thankfully for this year, Stansbury has more people to fit into his rotations. But so far, the bench hasn’t produced as much as they need to be in order to win games.

WKU’s bench has failed to score more than 10 points collectively in five out of the six games they’ve played so far. The only exception was the game where Desean Murray came off the bench instead of starting against UT-Martin for 18 points. If it weren’t for his 18 points that game, the bench would’ve only had 10 points. Part of the reason why is my aforementioned section talking about the youth of the team.

The core of your bench players are Banton, Tolu Smith, Marek Nelson and Jake Ohmer up to this point in the year. Two of them played on last year’s team but the others are true freshmen.

Ohmer hasn’t played many minutes and when he has, he hasn’t contributed much yet. Nelson, on the other hand, has had some great moments playing the four coming off the bench. Smith is still recovering from an offseason injury and has had some flashes of greatness as well but the biggest issue is that these guys haven’t added a whole bunch collectively in one night.

You might have Smith get nine points while no one else on the bench scores a point or like against Indiana State, Banton scored five points but the rest of the bench didn’t score at all. You have to have more than one bench player scoring in order to beat someone. Plain and simple. This team has the depth last year’s team didn’t have but hasn’t gotten to the point where they are effective as a cohesive unit yet.

One question I have: Where is Moustapha Diagne and Matt Horton? I’m not sure if Horton has been redshirted but he hasn’t played in many of the games since Washington when he looked pretty good in the first regular season game.

Diagne has struggled with some illness recently and didn’t make the Myrtle Beach Invitational but if he’s healthy he needs to play some. I know he’s added a three-point shot in the offseason and has looked better so why not give him some more minutes say if Smith or Nelson is struggling tremendously? Stansbury has some older and more experienced players but hasn’t used them much. Just my thoughts, though.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of a hyper-analytical person that’s probably looked into these past six games a little more than some of you would. I’m just trying to see what’s kept this team from winning some games they had a real chance to win. I know it’s early, but these games still matter and could help determine things come March.

With all these things in mind, the best thing for WKU fans to do is to try to be patient as possible with these young players as they continue to learn and gel with the team. While I wish they could win every game, bad losses happen but that shouldn’t keep them from doing well once conference play is here. I feel like once we reach February and March, you’ll see how much this team as a whole has grown and that they will be capable of playing at the level we thought they would be playing at now.

And to be honest, I think a lot of the expectations that have been put on this team this early on have been a little far fetched. That doesn’t mean they won’t be capable of reaching big goals but the present isn’t the destination. We just need to do our best to support them (because losing any game at home is bad) as we hopefully forget all these miscues and mistakes come March.