What's next for WSU basketball?

There’s this very funny thing that we fans do which never ceases to amuse me. Or, maybe it’s just me, and I’m amusing myself. I’m open to that idea!

Anyway, this is how it goes: I’ll spend all year analyzing my team’s weaknesses, lamenting how they’re holding them back, and then also still somehow convince myself that the solution is right around the corner – that, for some reason(?), tonight is the night they turn the corner and figure it out!

Of course, they usually don’t, and it’s funny that we think well established patterns of play are suddenly going to change.

Which brings us to Monday night’s loss to Georgetown in the College Basketball Crown tournament.

During the Cougars’ infamous two-month slide in which they lost 10 of 13 games, their defense abandoned them, fueled by atrocious defensive rebounding as much as anything else. Because it’s generally more fun as a fan to be optimistic, I held out hope that for Monday, buoyed by two facts: (1) Georgetown was missing its two best offensive rebounders and a bunch of other players, and (2) WSU was running out a very big lineup after its two starting guards announced they’d be transferring. For whatever other problems (2) might cause, it figured to at least help the rebounding to have nobody shorter than 6-6 on the floor for most of the game.

Sigh. In the immortal words of Dennis Green:

WSU gave up an 14 offensive rebounds on 23 Georgetown misses in the second half – an embarrassingly absurd 60% rate – to fully fritter away both a 10-point first-half lead and also a one-point lead with 90 seconds to go.

No play was more emblematic than the penultimate possession: Down one with 15 seconds to play and needing a stop to bring the ball up with a chance to win, WSU did an outstanding job with the shot clock running down of forcing a difficult shot from Malik Mack. He had made 8 of his first 11 3-point attempts, but missed this one – thanks, in part, to a good contest from 6-foot-10 Ethan Price.

Just one problem: Price was watching the ball instead of boxing out, and guess where the long rebound ended up? Right back in the hands of Mack, the quicker of the two to respond to the long carom.

Two free throws later, the Cougs needed a miracle after the Hoyas fouled while up three. Their prayers were nearly answered after executing a missed free throw about as well as you possibly can, but wouldn’t it have been nice to, you know, have gotten a fairly simple rebound and not needed a miracle against a team that was even more depleted than WSU?

Pretty embarrassing stuff, to be honest.

Thus ended the most frustrating WSU basketball season in years in the most fitting way possible, bringing into stark relief just how far David Riley has to go as a coach to be successful at this higher level.

His reputation as an offensive mind remains intact; as if to underscore that point, the Cougars scored 1.1 points per possession against the Hoyas while getting only 11 (completely ineffective) minutes from a guard because of injuries and transfers. Playing LeJuan Watts as a point forward – toward which he’s been trending for some time – was nothing less than a smashing success in this one: 22 points, eight rebounds, five assists, three steals, and just two turnovers.

Other questions remain.

In each of Kyle Smith’s five seasons, WSU finished higher in the kenpom.com rankings than where it started. Not this year: Projected to finish 111^th , the Cougars ended the season 121^st . That’s not some kind of massive indictment; after all, they did enough to play in the postseason, which is a historical rarity for WSU. But it is troubling that the team didn’t improve.

Injuries surely had something to do with that – of course everything looks very different if Cedric Coward doesn’t get hurt – but it is inescapable that the Cougars peaked at No. 71 before playing like a team ranked in the low 200s for the better part of two months. That kind of sudden and extended run of terribleness is something that really should never even be on the table for a program like WSU, and it’s quite a bad look for Riley that it happened under his watch with a roster that he built around a bunch of his guys from Eastern Washington.

That said, Riley is indeed still very young and inexperienced: He is 36  years old and this was only his fourth season as a head coach. He is undoubtedly bright, and he comes across in interviews as thoughtful and reflective. He surely has given a lot of thought to how this season got so far off the rails after such a promising start, and he has certainly concluded that turnovers on offense and rebounding on defense were two of the biggest culprits.

What’s he willing to do about it?

Although it was taken to absurd levels this year, Riley’s teams have always turned the ball over at a higher-than-normal rate – a tradeoff he has been willing to make in order to secure paint touches for easy looks at the rim. I would assume he’d want to get the team back down to at least the levels at EWU, but how does he want to do that? Is he going to get a point guard who takes care of the ball first? Is he going to coach things a little differently? I’m inclined to believe the first option is a lot more plausible than the second, given his inability to get the team to stop throwing the ball away this year.

As for rebounding … I think that issue is a bit more complicated. Riley doesn’t just prefer offensive bigs who can stretch a defense — it’s integral to his offense. The issue is that bigs who can shoot and defend and rebound aren’t coming to WSU – they’re at Florida, Duke, etc. Coaches at the other 95% of schools have to prioritize the skill set they desire, and Riley has always traded rebounding and rim protection for shooting. It’s a strategy that served him well at EWU, but was pretty disastrous this year against the top half of the WCC. Which leaves him with a few options going forward:

• Somehow get bigs who can shoot and rebound at a high level (seems very unlikely?);

• Get bigs whose offensive skills are so high level that the offense veers into elite territory and overcomes defensive deficiencies (also seems unlikely?);

• Get at least one big who is primarily a post player who can defensive rebound and modify the offensive philosophy accordingly (most likely).

I’m sure which of these he chooses will come down to who he can lure to Pullman. But one thing’s for sure: Running out a pair of shooting, weak rebounding bigs again should be a complete non-starter.

There is a third culprit that I think also needs to be addressed.

Mike Leach had a saying: You’re either coaching it, or you’re allowing it to happen. And it sure seemed this year like Riley did a whole lot of “allowing it to happen” as the season descended into madness.

There were several times this year where it felt like an “inmates running the asylum” situation on the court. As the team underperformed game after game, the players appeared to be playing with impunity, seemingly aware that there would be little (if any?) accountability for sloppy or lazy play. There was a decided lack of grit on the team, whether it was battling for 50-50 balls or puking up a lead by dialing down the intensity — two things we saw over the final 30 minutes on Monday.

I don’t know why Riley allowed it to happen. Maybe he had extreme trust in his EWU guys; maybe he simply wanted his players to learn to play through tough things; maybe he just thought he had no viable options because of injuries. But having no repercussions to playing time for just doing whatever you want on the floor is absolute poison to a team, and there’s simply no way to look at that 10-in-13 stretch and think that there wasn’t something seriously wrong behind the scenes.

It’s for this reason that I would be lying if I said I was super bullish on Riley’s tenure at this point. I’m not saying he should be fired, and I’m open to the idea that he can improve. But some of the things I saw this year were troubling, and they’re not going to be easy to shake – even as I hold out hope that Riley is capable of big improvements.