When Wichita State men’s basketball coach Paul Mills found himself staring down a nearly blank roster this offseason, he turned to the pros. Literally.
He called NBA coaching veterans Mike D’Antoni and Monty Williams with one simple question: How do you build team chemistry from scratch?
In today’s college basketball landscape, where roster turnover is constant and chaotic, Mills is starting to feel more like a professional coach with only a handful of practices to build chemistry.
He knew the traditional summer script — light workouts, slow build-up, player development — wasn’t going to cut it this time around.
“So we’re changing how we do things in the summer,” Mills said. “We’ve actually started holding real, two-hour practices. That’s different than what we’ve done in the past. And I think it’s needed in order to get everybody on the same page.”
Coming off a 19-15 season and replacing nearly all of last year’s production, Mills is treating June and July like they’re already October.
Wichita State isn’t easing into this new era. The Shockers are diving headfirst into full-scale practices, team concepts and defensive systems. Because with a roster this unfamiliar, there’s no time to ease in.
“We showed them film this morning for about 20 minutes and I don’t know if I’ve ever done that,” Mills said in June. “With this many new guys, you have to get them all on the same page. They have to visually see it before we can come out here on the court.”
Mills isn’t focused on installing pages of his playbook just yet. He’s more concerned with laying the foundation.
“It’s simple things like how to use your length and how to use your voice,” Mills said. “It seems intuitive, but the truth is, it isn’t.”
In past summers, the focus was on individual skill development. This time, it’s all about building team identity.
That urgency is the biggest shift in Mills’ approach entering Year 3.
With constant turnover in the transfer portal era, there’s no time to experiment in November. That was the other lesson from his NBA conversations: establish your identity now — before the season begins.
“You’re going to have to make up your mind pretty early about what you want to see this stuff look like in November,” Mills said. “There will be some course corrections along the way, but we have to be pretty bold about how we’re going to approach this and then we need to stick to it.”
Mills has studied the last two American Athletic Conference champions — South Florida (2024) and Memphis (2025) — and found a clear blueprint: both led the league in defense and could shoot the 3.
WSU ranked fourth in defensive efficiency last season, but dead-last in 3-point shooting. Mills wants more. He believes newcomers like Karon Boyd, Jaret Valencia, Will Berg and Emmanuel Okorafor give the Shockers the tools to become an even better defense.
“We want to put a team on the floor that can be in the top-2 or top-3 defensively in order to give yourself a chance,” he said. “Simple doesn’t mean simplistic, but we do need to be pretty simple with these guys and get them on the same page as quickly as possible.”
That starts with communication, which is one of the key themes of this summer.
“The only way we really know what’s going on is if we’re communicating,” Mills said. “Some of it is just being familiar, but having a voice, specifically a competitive voice, really matters.”
On offense, Mills still wants his team to play with force — a hallmark of last year’s squad, which led the nation with 35% of its shots coming at the rim.
“Everybody understands that the best shots in basketball are a layup or a dunk,” he said. “But the problem is you can apply a lot of force on the rim, and teams aren’t just going to let you dunk the ball. So when defenses suck in, you can spray that thing out and we just needed people who could make (defenses) pay.”
He believes this team finally has those shooters in Kenyon Giles, Brian Amuneke, Mike Gray Jr. and Dre Kindell, as well as more post scoring options beyond pick-and-rolls or lob plays.
It’s still early, and far too soon to project where WSU stacks up in the AAC. But Mills is encouraged by what he’s seen from his new group so far.
“We felt like we needed to address those shooting woes we experienced, while maintaining a defensive presence,” Mills said.
“So how different will (the offense) look? It will look different. How different? I’m not sure, but I do know that we’re still going to continue to put a lot of pressure on the rim.”