Over the past few weeks, D’Mitrik Trice had done a lot to help the Wisconsin Badgers, but he did so in an unselfish way. Yes, the Wisconsin way IS the unselfish way. Trice was playing exactly the way Greg Gard wanted him to. The Badgers’ turnover numbers remained very low, but their assist numbers had been steadily climbing. The assist-turnover differential kept moving in the right direction. The wins piled up. The wasted possessions went down. Wisconsin turned a tenuous season into a positive and productive one.
Yet, for all the ways in which selflessness is great, and for all the valid reasons it is important to distribute the ball and set up teammates, there ARE times in a basketball player’s life — and a basketball team’s season — when someone has to step up and be THE MAN, the guy who is not only unafraid to take big shots, but good enough to make them. Ball movement and five-as-one cohesion are great and absolutely necessary; they are central, not peripheral, to the development of an elite offense. Yet, for an offense to fully realize its potential, it needs some bad-a** brother-truckers to hit daggers in opponents’ faces. It needs players to create their own shots at times and provide instant offense in the face of good defense.
This is something D’Mitrik Trice had not done on a large scale — at times, yes, but not as a regular feature of his season.
Thursday night against the Michigan Wolverines in Ann Arbor, Trice played the “eff you” offense this team had not shown very much in 2020.
Trice hit daggers. He popped Michigan — to use the familiar Kevin Harlan phrase — “RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES!” He dished out a modest four assists on a night when Wisconsin created only 10 assists as a team, on 29 made buckets. This was not a night for high assist totals and facilitating the offense. This was the night to be an alpha dog, a mean sonofagun, and punk a good defensive team on its own floor in Ann Arbor.
D’Mitrik Trice became THE MAN… and now Wisconsin seems to have a much, much higher ceiling of potential entering the Big Ten and NCAA Tournaments.
Just look at this: 10 of 16 from the field, 5 of 6 on 3-pointers, 28 points, all on the road, all against a hot defensive team (which held Rutgers and Purdue to 7 of 34 on 3-point shooting in two recent road wins), and in the face of Zavier Simpson, one of the toughest players in the Big Ten.
Being unselfish is good, but any basketball player knows that sometimes, he has to be selfish and take the shots great players take.
D’Mitrik Trice took — and made — those big shots. That’s what an alpha dog does. That’s what a player does on a team capable of making a deep run in the NCAA Tournament.
