Wisconsin Embraces Clean Slate for Tournament Run
MADISON, Wis. - If any program in the Big Ten should be anxious for the records to be wiped away and the season to start anew, it would be the University of Wisconsin. Perhaps it's why senior Brad Davison gave an impassioned speech in the locker room moments after the Badgers finished the regular season Sunday, or why senior D’Mitrik Trice took to Twitter lunchtime Monday with a simple tweet: 0-0.
After going 0-8 against teams above them in the standings and going two months without winning consecutive games, the Badgers are ready to turn the page.
“You just kind of forget about it,” Trice said. “You blow it off. You missed your last two shots, but you don’t think about it. You think about that next shot. I think that’s the mindset we’ve had as a team, even after the Iowa game. We’re starting over. We’re starting fresh, and I think the guys are super excited to just play the game again and be in this position that we didn’t get a chance to last year.”
The inability to write a conclusion to last year’s season still bothers members of the team. The Badgers had recently polished off their eighth straight win and clinched the No.1 seed in the conference tournament for the fifth time in school history. But just before they were scheduled to leave, COVID canceled the entire postseason.
This year the Badgers (16-11) are the sixth seed and enter tonight’s second-round matchup with No.11-seed Penn State (11-13) having lost five of six. But while the situations are largely different, analytics don’t see a large difference between Wisconsin 2020 and Wisconsin 2021.
Last season, the Badgers’ adjusted offensive efficiency was 110.8 points per 100 possessions and their defensive efficiency was 91.9 points per 100 possessions. This season Wisconsin has a higher offensive efficiency (113.3) and a better defensive efficiency (89.4). The difference is the Big Ten had six teams ranked in the top 35 of KenPom’s analytic rankings and last year had only three.
In its two recent losses, Wisconsin showed its potential with better offensive efficiency, an improvement tied to better shot selection, cutting, executing screens and moving the ball via passing instead of over dribbling. The Badgers put five players in double figures in a four-point loss at No.23 Purdue and averaged 1.516 points per possession in Sunday’s loss at No.5 Iowa, shooting 53.3 percent and going 7-for-13 from 3-point range.
UW was down by as many as 12 points against the Hawkeyes but managed to lead by four with 2 minutes, 26 seconds left before Iowa made the final push.
“The last couple of games, we haven’t been playing bad under any circumstances,” sophomore forward Tyler Wahl said. “We’re just right there. It’s 0-0. There’s always something to look forward (to) with the tournaments. It’s that time of year. We’re a little more energetic, the sun is out, time for some more basketball.”
UW split its two meetings with Penn State in a rare back-to-back schedule in late January because of a COVID cancelation. Wisconsin gave up 50 points in the second half of its 81-71 loss in State College but bounced back three days later with a 72-56 win in Madison.
The Nittany Lions outscored Nebraska by 20 points in the second half Wednesday to erase a 14-point halftime deficit in its 72-66 win to set up the rubber match with the Badgers.
Despite the up and downs of the season, Wisconsin enters the postseason leading the Big Ten in points per game defense (64.0) and ranked in the top 30 in both defensive (13th) and offensive (28th) efficiency according to KenPom.
“This is a very persistent group, a very resilient group,” head coach Greg Gard said. “They come to practice as they just did (Tuesday) with a bounce in their step, a smile on their face, ready to go and practiced very well again. We just got to continue to stack their successes on top of each other and take the good things we’ve done the last couple games and build on those.”
Doing a diagnosis of where his group is at mentally, Trice points to the positives (better movement/growth offensively, more engaged/focused defensively) over the last week while still acknowledging the lapses on both ends of the court that have cost them wins.
Most encouraging though is that he sees Wisconsin trending in the right direction at the right time, close to reaching that complete performance the Badgers have been long searching for.
“I think guys are excited to progress forward,” he said. “We know it’s win or go home. We’ve got to bring our “A” game for each and every game."
“I think we’re right there, and the coaches have been saying, and I think the players believe it as well. If we really start to click on both ends of the floor, we can be a really dangerous team here in March.”