Tag: ohio state basketball

There is still more to say about Wisconsin’s win on Friday over Ohio State — not because we are trying to overemphasize one victory, not because of any sense that Wisconsin’s season has been permanently set on the right course (it hasn’t been), but because the characteristics displayed in that win are so central to building a good season.

The Badgers haven’t fully arrived as a team, but they have fully realized what they need to do to make it happen. It is one thing to say that resilience is important; it is quite another thing to demonstrate resilience under pressure against a good opponent.

Wisconsin didn’t need much resilience against Tennessee. The Badgers dominated that game the whole way. It was surely a big step forward for the team, given its struggles away from the Kohl Center, but the game didn’t involve much of any adversity. It was a day when nearly everything went right, and a team doesn’t learn what it is made of in those games.

A team learns what it is capable of when it stares down the barrel of a six-point deficit midway through the second half against Ohio State, in Columbus, with Kaleb Wesson on the other side, and manages to shut out Wesson in the final 6:32 of regulation, en route to a win in spite of terrible 3-point shooting. Wisconsin fired lots of blanks but still won. Resilience was the Badgers’ number-one weapon, and that is the big takeaway for the rest of this season.

What is the best illustration of Wisconsin’s resilience, you might ask? Good question. I have just the statistic for you.

How awful was Wisconsin in the first six minutes of both halves against Ohio State? Try this: Wisconsin was outscored 20-2 in those 12 minutes — the first six minutes of the first half, combined with the first six minutes of the second half. In the first six minutes of the game, Wisconsin was outscored 7-0. In the first six minutes of the second half, the Badgers were outscored 13-2.

Twice, the boulder was rolling downward, beginning to become a snowball. Twice, the Badgers somehow gathered up the strength to prevent the boulder from a full-tilt crash down the slope. That is an enormous feat of resolve.

We know this team doesn’t have the high-end talent of the Frank Kaminsky-Sam Dekker team. We don’t have to pretend it is going to dominate any especially good team. The victories it attains against quality opposition away from Kohl Center are almost always going to be close. It’s just the way it is.

However, in a college basketball season where no one is especially strong, Wisconsin has a path to the Final Four: the Dick Bennett path of 2000. This team will go far if it can be annoying as possible on defense and find buckets of added resilience, as it showed against Ohio State. That’s the path. Wisconsin isn’t going to strut into the NCAA Tournament and hang 80 on somebody. It’s going to win rock fights.

Resilience is this team’s biggest weapon. Let’s at least hope the Badgers can start halves less terribly, though — we wouldn’t want that to remain a pattern.

Wisconsin picked up its most impressive victory of the season in Columbus, upsetting Ohio State in a 61-57 affair. Here are our top three takeaways from the game for the Badgers.

It wasn’t pretty, but Wisconsin finally found a way to win on the road despite ugly offense.

Upon first glance at the box score from last night (at least Wisconsin’s half), most would be understandably perplexed as to how on earth the Badgers won this game.

It looked as though the Badgers were going to get routed early on. On their first ten possessions, they went 0-5 from the floor and turned the ball over five times. Bucky didn’t even get on the board until the 13:53 mark and committed seven total turnovers in the first half.

Overall, Wisconsin shot the ball as poorly as we have seen from them in their previous woeful road performances this season, converting just 37.5 percent of its looks from the field, including 26.1 percent (6-23) from long-range. Many of those misses were on clean looks.

However, the difference between this performance and their previous poor outings on the road? Wisconsin locked down Ohio State defensively.

Aside from Kaleb Wesson, who was the best player on the floor last night on either side with his 22 points (7-10 shooting, 7-9 free throws) and 13 boards, the Buckeyes fared about as poorly as the Badgers on offense. Take Wesson out of the equation, and Ohio State was just 12-37 (23.4 percent) from the field.

The Buckeyes are certainly not playing their best basketball right now, but there’s no question that they are still one of the Big Ten’s best teams, and the Badgers went into a hostile arena and took them down despite horrible shooting numbers. While you could certainly consider this a bit of a steal of a win for Bucky, it won’t do any less to provide this team with a boost of confidence that it can play with anybody, in any environment.