Micah Potter isn’t the most important player on the 2019-2020 Wisconsin Badgers, but he is the player who most profoundly and aptly symbolizes what the Badgers have gone through.
Potter didn’t play in the first 10 games of the season, through no fault of his own — darn NCAA! — and his team could have used him. Small doses of minutes in his arrival to the lineup in late December seemed to snap the rotations into place. Potter gave Greg Gard and his own teammates more flexibility.
Yet, Potter didn’t play too many minutes because of his defensive limitations. Wisconsin has needed to win primarily with its defense, so Gard accordingly tried to restrict Potter’s minutes. The Badgers will generally win by containing damage rather than exploding past the opposition. To that extent, there was and is a clear logical coherence to the decision by Gard to limit Potter’s minutes.
However, Wisconsin’s offense dies much too often in games. Potter unquestionably makes the Badgers a much more potent team. On a broader level, Potter can’t improve his defense without getting more minutes and being exposed to more situations. This doesn’t mean he has to play 30 minutes, but the 15 minutes per game he averaged coming into the Iowa game put him eighth on the roster, behind Tyler Wahl and Aleem Ford.
Before this Iowa game began, though, something happened which magnified Potter’s importance to the Badgers: Kobe King would not play for personal (non-health-related) reasons. The rotation would be shortened by one player. This increased the odds that Potter would play more minutes.
As it turned out, Potter played 15 minutes against Iowa, right in line with his current average of 14.9 per game, but he played 15 minutes while getting into foul trouble and then suffering an ankle injury (severity unknown) with just under four minutes left in regulation.
Getting into foul trouble was to be expected, given his defensive deficiencies, but it has to be said that Wisconsin’s defense was generally very good in this game. Potter might not have been particularly impressive, but he didn’t bring the team down with him. Picking up fouls isn’t fun or positive in itself, but such an experience makes a player aware of how — and why — his defense has to improve. Potter learned, and Wisconsin’s defense didn’t suffer — not severely, at any rate. There were some encouraging developments to note in Potter’s play and the way he fits into this rotation with King out.
Yet, the ankle injury (even if not especially serious) left Potter and Wisconsin with a story which was ultimately anything but happy. That individual story mirrored the loss to Iowa: UW made great progress from the Purdue game, but the bottom line was a negative one, since this game needed to go in the win column and did not.
Potter’s game against Iowa was a microcosm of the whole season to this point: Potter, like the team, needed time to find itself. It improved in the middle stages, then weakened later on. Notable improvements were overshadowed at the end by larger and more negative realities.
The only good news is that the “end” refers not to the full season, only the portion of the season which has been played to date. The month of February awaits. Hopefully Potter, Greg Gard, and the whole team will be able to evolve in ways which don’t create moral victories, but actual ones.
