Wichita State-KU basketball game leads former Shocker to reflect on ‘nostalgia’ of 2015
Some eight years later, Wichita State basketball fans still bring up the play to Zach Brown.
For many Shocker fans, when they think about WSU’s 2015 NCAA tournament win over Kansas, one play comes to mind: Brown deflecting a pass, beating KU’s Kelly Oubre to the ball and then slamming it home at the other end to highlight a 78-65 win.
“It was a very in-the-moment thing,” Brown said. “There’s this picture of me looking at the ball when I’m catching it, and I swear I blacked out on the way to the basket. I didn’t even feel the ball in my hands.”
With Brown’s professional career currently on pause while rehabilitating an injury, the former Shocker made sure he was in attendance on Saturday at T-Mobile Center for the first WSU-KU showdown since that fateful day in Omaha.
Being back in a large arena with a sea of blue even reminded Brown of the setting for the March 22, 2015, game when the Shockers stunned the higher-seeded Jayhawks.
He laughed when reminded of teammate Fred VanVleet’s comment to Oubre, who admitted to reporters before the game that he took a nap during WSU’s first-round game, about how he “probably should have woke up on that play.”
“Man, it’s definitely nostalgic,” Brown said of being in attendance for a WSU-KU game. “I still don’t know if I’ve ever seen a play like that. But that’s why it embodied this program for a very long time. Hopefully we can continue on with that tradition.”
Even though the program is at a much different place than when Brown graduated in 2018, the Houston native has kept close tabs on the Shockers during his professional playing career.
The program is now being led by first-year head coach Paul Mills and the team features a new generation of players. In the first regular-season meeting between the two in-state programs in 30 years, KU prevailed with an 86-67 win over WSU on Saturday.
“I’ve been watching them all year, so I figured I had to come to this one and see how they fare against a really good team,” Brown said before the game. “I want to see how they compete. I think that’s the biggest thing in my eyes, how you compete, no matter the score, you have to have that dog mentality.”
It’s been a long climb back for Brown, a 6-foot-6 wing, since he suffered a major knee injury this past spring after winning his first championship in the Hungarian Cup with Falco Szombathely.
Brown said he had knee surgery in Hungary to repair his ACL and MCL, then returned to Wichita in the summer to finish his rehabilitation. When he felt like progress had stalled, he visited a local doctor and discovered his meniscus was torn.
Since that cleanup surgery, Brown said he feels “1,000 times better” and is targeting a late February or early March return overseas.
“The main thing is just getting better, getting my body right and making sure I’m prepared for my return,” Brown said.
For Saturday at least, Brown said it felt good to be on the sidelines with other former Shockers like Xavier McDaniel, Garrett Stutz and Brycen Bush in attendance.
“Man, I’m not going to lie, my heart used to be racing so much on game days,” Brown said. “It feels kind of good to be able to sit back and just watch these new guys play.
“I feel like our group helped build up this program. It started in the 80s and then the Final Four run and then the run that we had. Now I hope that these younger guys can do the same.”
