Like last season, defense will carry Dean Wade-less Kansas State
.JPG "Kansas State’s Barry Brown Jr. celebrates after making a basket during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game against Vanderbilt Saturday, Dec. 22, 2018, at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)")
Call off the search party. The Kansas State team coming off the Elite Eight and ranked over the season’s first few weeks was spotted at Sprint Center on Saturday.
In the process, the Wildcats might have locked in an identity a week before Big 12 conflicts begin.
If Kansas State plays defense like it did in Saturday’s 69-58 defeat of Vanderbilt, it should be able to withstand the absence of top gun Dean Wade, out with a foot injury, hold its own and regain a NCAA Tournament trajectory that seem off course recently.
For 30 minutes, Vandy could hardly run a set. K-State challenged passes, got to shooters and generally muddied everything in Coach Bryce Drew’s playbook.
With about 10 minutes remaining, Kansas State owned a 22-point lead and had not allowed a second-half field goal.
This against a team that entered Saturday averaging 83.6 points per game. The Commodores are too talented to not make a run, and that happened. Shots finally started to fall and the margin was reduced to single digits coming out of the final media timeout.
But it was nowhere near enough to overcome a performance that forced 32 percent shooting from a team that hit 48 percent through its first nine games.
The setting was perfect for K-State senior Barry Brown to become the program’s career steals leader. Brown passed Jacob Pullen with a second-half pilfer, and jogged Coach Bruce Weber’s memory after the game.
Brown was a freshman when Weber asked who was going to be team’s lock-down defender, expecting a response from an upperclassman. Brown raised his hand.
Weber said, who else? “He said, ‘Me,’” Weber said. “And he has since he got here.”
Kansas State wants to lead with defense — it held a 16-3 advantage in points off turnovers Saturday — and although the absence of Wade, the Big 12 preseason player of the year, is a net negative with the loss of a skilled big man, the Wildcats can play differently with four guards. Switching is easier Brown said. Vandy noticed.
“They rotate very quickly,” Drew said. “They take things away.”
Vandy forward Matt Ryan called Kansas State’s “the best half-court defense we faced this year.”
It helps that Kansas State has been there, done that. Wade’s right foot is injured this time. At last season’s Big 12 and NCAA tournaments, he missed time with a left foot injury. Wade played eight minutes in the NCAA event, but K-State powered its way to the regional final.
Saturday marked the second game without Wade this time around, and he’ll likely miss more. The first effort was a home survival of Southern Mississippi.
“I don’t know if there was a little hangover from Dean being out,” Weber said. “We didn’t do a good job of reacting. Tonight, the guys showed a lot of pride, hopefully a sense of urgency.”
What guard-oriented Kansas State also showed was some interior skill. Makol Mawien’s season-best 15 points included his fourth three-pointer in the past two seasons.
Xavier Sneed, the fourth guard, hasn’t jumped his scoring from last season as might have been expected. But in the Wade-less games, he’s been a bull on the boards with 23 total rebounds.
Then there’s Austin Trice, the junior-college transfer who was to bring rebounding but hadn’t delivered much of anything in recent weeks as he figures out the major college game. He took a step on Saturday with seven points and perhaps the game’s best defense play.
Trice poked a ball from Vandy’s Aaron Nesmith, who had taken a dribble after a rebound. The ball went to Brown who slammed home the transition bucket.
A standout defensive play on a night of plenty of them brought some of the loudest cheers from the 14,062 in the building.
It also reinforced the idea that this is what Kansas State is about, defense-minded, and everyone raises their hand.