The 2008 Wisconsin Badgers trailed Michigan State in a Big Ten Tournament game by 10 points with a little over six minutes left. That 2008 team was a very good Wisconsin team, but it was nowhere near as talented as the 2015 team, one of the two best teams in Wisconsin history, the other one being the 1941 national championship squad.
Great teams reveal themselves in moments of crisis. Could the 2015 Badgers respond when they fell behind Michigan State, 57-46, with roughly seven minutes left in the 2015 Big Ten Tournament final?
Their answer was decisive and memorable, filled with classic Wisconsin plays.
Josh Gasser saved the ball from going out of bounds with Wisconsin trailing by two points in the final minute. Sam Dekker came up with a steal after Michigan State’s Denzel Valentine got the ball. Bronson Koenig hit the tying foul shots. Wisconsin forced overtime, scrambling back from a large deficit.
Then, Wisconsin played its best overtime period, ever.
That is not an exaggeration. When has any college basketball team produced a shutout in the championship game of a conference tournament? Some examples exist, but not very many. Wisconsin delivered precisely that achievement, and it did so against a Tom Izzo-coached opponent which — two weeks later — would join Wisconsin as a Final Four team. Michigan State beat Louisville in Syracuse to win the East Region. Wisconsin beat Arizona in Los Angeles to win the West Region. Both the Badgers and Spartans traveled to the Final Four in Indianapolis, but before they did, they met on the mountaintop in the Big Ten Tournament, and Wisconsin slapped an 11-0 overtime beatdown on Michigan State to win its third Big Ten Tournament championship.
“I thought it was really good for us to have a game like this where we were behind with seven minutes left,” Koenig said. “They kind of thought they had us when we were down 11, but I just kept telling our guys you keep fighting, never give up, and that’s what we did.”
On. Wisconsin.
A great team marked its greatness at the Final Four, beating 38-0 Kentucky, but before that, the 2015 Badgers stopped Tom Izzo in the Big Ten Tournament yet again.