We told you earlier this season after the North Carolina State and Rutgers losses: The Wisconsin Badgers, for all their struggles on offense in games played away from the Kohl Center, had the chance to become a much better team if they developed at the defensive end of the floor. Offense might not always travel, but defense does. Defense doesn’t depend on a familiar shooting environment. Defense doesn’t depend on the lighting in the arena or the depth perception a shooter has in a given building. Defense doesn’t need the rims to be soft or the backboard to be accommodating for a shooter’s touch.
A shooter likes the feel of the ball and the way a gymnasium looks. A shooter wants to know what to expect from the rim. A shooter likes getting up in the morning and shooting in his (or her) own building. There is comfort to shooting in the place you love, the place where you spend most of your time, like a pitcher knowing what his home-ballpark pitcher’s mound feels like. Defense has nothing to do with that. Defense is about work, hustle, positioning, communication, and other components which can exist regardless of one’s visual, physical surroundings.
Basketball players with limited ceilings in terms of talent or physical capacity won’t become elite scorers, but they CAN become elite defenders. Dick Bennett enabled Wisconsin basketball fans to see this when he took the 2000 team to the Final Four. Several of Bo Ryan’s teams manifested this same reality. In 2019 — with 2020 just days away — the current iteration of Wisconsin basketball has the ability to change its season not by shooting better, but defending better.
So it was that on Saturday, the Badgers took a big step forward. They did make a lot of threes on the road, but their biggest improvement was on defense. Wisconsin — whose great 3-point shooting certainly didn’t hurt the cause against the Tennessee Volunteers — nevertheless did something it had rarely done over the past eight weeks: It held an opponent under 50 points.
Even if Wisconsin hadn’t torched the nets; even if D’Mitrik Trice hadn’t busted loose; even if Brevin Pritzl didn’t have a strong game off the bench, the Badgers might still have beaten the Vols.
The big lesson from this game is not “When Wisconsin shoots threes well, it is very hard to beat.” That is a lesson to take from this blowout of Tennessee, but it’s not the main one. The main lesson is this: “When Wisconsin defends well, it gives itself a large margin for error.”
There will be Big Ten games — perhaps as early as this coming Friday at Ohio State — in which Wisconsin doesn’t shoot threes well and labors on offense. When those games arrive, and you know they will at some point — will UW’s defense be able to win a game in the mud, pulling out a 53-51 victory which looks ugly in the box score, but very beautiful on an NCAA Tournament nitty-gritty report on Selection Sunday?
We would all love Wisconsin to continue to play well at both ends of the floor, just like this Tennessee game, for the rest of the season. Yet, the key insight into UW’s defensive improvement is that it will enable the Badgers to win when they’re not at their best. Wisconsin — heading into Knoxville on Saturday — had generally not won games in which the offense struggled. UW received great performances from its offense in many of its victories (Marquette second half, all of the Indiana game, all of the Milwaukee game), but the losses were mostly comprised of struggle-bus showings (Saint Mary’s, Richmond, New Mexico, N.C. State; Rutgers was the exception).
Saturday’s win over Tennessee did involve great 3-point shooting, but if the Badgers can carry that defense into 2020, they will give themselves the best possible chance of returning to the NCAA Tournament.