Throughout Paul Mills’ first two seasons as Wichita State men’s basketball’s head coach, he noticed those at the top of the American Athletic Conference (AAC) standings had two things in common: they were among the best defensive and 3-point shooting teams in the AAC.
That is exactly what Mills said he was looking for when recruiting talent for the 2025-26 season during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“We just felt like we needed to address some shooting woes that we experienced while maintaining a defensive presence,” Mills said. “We were the best rebounding team in our league; number one defensively, number two offensively. Collectively, we were at the top. We need to maintain that, but at the same time, we needed to be able to add some pieces.”
And add pieces he did.
Mills snagged 12 new players this offseason — one is a JUCO national champion, a few will be freshmen out of high school and another eight were brought in via the transfer portal. He said as shooters, they should be able to surpass a team that shot 44.5% from the floor and 30.5% from 3-point range last season.
“The guys we’ve been able to add who can shoot the basketball,” Mills said. “If you go look at last year’s stats to compare to these guys’ … this is a 7% better shooting team on paper.”
Last season, the Shockers’ top 3-point shooters were AJ McGinnis and Corey Washington, who shot at 34.8% and 34.7% clips from deep, respectively. Three incoming transfers — Kenyon Giles (40%), Brian Amuneke (41%) and Mike Gray Jr. (41%) — shot better than McGinnis and Washington by wide margins for their respective teams last season.
Defensively, Mills wanted to add versatility in guarding the 3-point line.
Last season, the Shockers allowed opponents to run rampant at times from beyond the arc. This was seen in 10 games where they allowed their opponent to shoot 40% or better.
Mills also wanted to add a layer of physicality on that side of the ball.
“So you get a guy like Michael Gray who’s got physicality … Karon (Boyd) obviously does,” Mills said. “Jaret Valencia has length and William Berg can really do a great job, and not only protecting the rim. But I’d tell you the same thing about Emmanuel Okorafor — he’s got that same ability as well. So, (we’re) putting a team on the floor that can be in the top.
“You need to be in the top two, top three defensively in order to give yourself a chance, unless you’re just really, really scoring the ball at a high rate.”
WSU will return only 1.39% of its total minutes and a whopping 0.91% of its total scoring from last season. With that being said, Mills stressed the need to keep things simple, but this “doesn’t mean simplistic.”
“We need to do pretty simple things with these guys and get them on the same page as quickly as possible,” Mills said. “Because in my mind, again, there’s not a coach in the world that doesn’t think they have a good team on May 20 — everybody thinks they have a good team. So, we’ll see how this plays out.”
Mills said, overall, he’s excited to get his third season as the Shockers’ head coach underway. All the new and returning players will be on campus for summer workouts on June 2.
“We are in a pushing-forward mode,” Mills said.
