Following through
Badgers didn’t shy away from expectations
Minneapolis — With only two regular-season games remaining on the schedule, Wisconsin occupies the position predicted months ago by college basketball analysts:
Alone atop the Big Ten Conference.
UW (26-3, 14-2 Big Ten), which leads second-place Maryland (25-5, 13-4) by 11⁄
2 games, can clinch the outright title with a victory over host Minnesota (17-12, 6-10) at 6 p.m. Thursday.
Achieving a goal expected by most of the college basketball world isn’t as sexy as seeing an underdog rise up to surprise and conquer the competition.
Yet UW’s rise to the top of the Big Ten for the first time since 2008 has been impressive nonetheless.
Bo Ryan’s team entered the season a unanimous pick to win the league title and was the highestranked Big Ten team in the national preseason polls, No. 3 in The Associated Press poll and No. 4 in the USA Today coaches’ poll. The Badgers, now No. 6 in the AP poll and No. 5 in the coaches’ poll, have been alone in first since late January.
“I think we’re pretty good at looking at the big picture,” junior forward Sam Dekker said. “People want to come in here and knock us off. When we’re going into their gym, they’re going to want to storm the court.
“I think we’ve kind of embraced that. It’s fun. It’s fun going into venues that don’t like you and they want to get on you.
“It brings out the competitive nature in you, and I think we have 16 guys that have the competitive spirit that want to win wherever they’re at.”
Ten of UW’s league victories have been by double digits.
UW’s first loss, a fivepoint decision Jan. 11 at Rutgers, came with Frank Kaminsky sidelined and Traevon Jackson out the last 12-plus minutes after breaking his right foot.
Rutgers (10-20, 2-15) has lost 13 consecutive games since upsetting UW. Only once — Feb. 24 at Maryland — did UW not feature the best player on the floor that night. Maryland’s Dez Wells dominated UW with 26 points, seven rebounds and four assists.
Except for those two games, UW has methodically dismantled its Big Ten opponents. Some nights UW has won with remarkable offensive efficiency. Other nights UW has won with defense.
“I think we can hang with anyone in the country,” senior guard Josh Gasser said. “We’ve proven that. We’ve played teams who play fast. We’ve played teams who play slow.
“We’ve played against a team like Indiana, who’s got basically five guards out there, and other teams with a lot of bigs. . . .
“It’s been rough at times especially when Traevon went down. We were able to stick together as a team.”
Pressure to meet expectations? Hardly. Ryan’s players embraced those expectations and attacked the season with the mentality of an underdog because no player on the roster had won a Big Ten title.
“Obviously people are going to put pressure on us in terms of how they picked us as the preseason favorites,” senior forward Duje Dukan said. “We didn’t want to look at it that way.
“We wanted to look at it in the sense that we haven’t won a Big Ten championship in a while. We want to add to the legacy. We wanted to experience that for ourselves. That has been a goal of ours ever since we stepped foot on campus.”
After clinching at least a share of the title with a 68-61 victory over Michigan State, the players held a low-key celebration at the Nitty Gritty.
The outright title is next, followed by the Big Ten and NCAA tournaments.
“For as laid back of a group as this is at times, they’ve been very businesslike in situations where it calls for business,” UW assistant Lamont Paris said. “That comes down to practice habits, their approach to games, their attention to detail on the scouting report. . . .
“They have multiple goals but they know that they’re sequential. They have the ability to knock those down one at a time in their minds.
“Get one. You can’t get the second one without getting the first. And then go on to the next only after the task at hand is handled.”