Anyone who has watched a Wisconsin game this year has been aggravated by its incredible inability to make shots in the paint. Despite Vitto Brown's tremendous improvement in the mid-range game, the Badgers have made just 45.7 percent of their shots from 2-point range, good for 276th in the country. Four schools are currently shooting better from 3-point range than UW is from two-point range, and 111 are shooting better overall.
In recent years, the Badgers have found their success on the offensive end of the floor. Bo Ryan was one of the first head coaches to embrace points per possession as a meaningful statistic, and it has shown: UW has ranked in the top 20 of Ken Pomeroy's offensive efficiency rankings (a slight variant of points per possession, adjusted for opponent) in five of the past six years, and last year's national finalist team set the highest mark in recorded history.
This year, as any Badger can attest, the offense has looked very inefficient. Four of the Badgers' 10 games this season rank in their bottom 30 shooting performances of the past five years. For the season, they're shooting 41.7 percent, the lowest mark in the Bo Ryan era.
Their field-goal percentage season is strikingly similar to the 2012-'13 squad that was knocked out in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, which made just 42 percent of its shots. Those Badgers finished the season ranked 108th in Pomeroy's offensive rankings, the only Wisconsin team to ever finish worse than 51st.
However, the latest version of the Badgers' offense is ranked 31st in offensive efficiency despite the poor field-goal percentage. This is a surprising anomaly, as the correlation between field-goal percentage and points per possession has an r-squared value of .713, which means changes in field-goal percentage account for 71 percent of the changes in offensive efficiency. Teams with low field-goal percentages almost universally have low efficiency ratings, but the Badgers break that mold.
What's kept this UW team efficient on the offensive end and, to a lesser extent, the defensive end, has been offensive rebounds. Since offensive rebounds don't count as a change of possession, they are an integral part of efficient scoring. So far, the Badgers have hauled in the 21st-most offensive rebounds per game. But even that impressive number doesn't tell the full story.
The Badgers have always played "slowly," working the shot clock down and making sure they get the best shot possible. The 2015-'16 Badgers, when adjusted for the shortened shot clock, are the slowest team ever under Bo Ryan. This means there are far fewer opportunities for them to snag offensive rebounds than most teams. Adjusted for tempo, UW has recorded the eighth-most offensive rebounds per possession, behind only Louisville, Baylor, Georgia Tech and West Virginia among major conference teams.
This would mark only the second time under Ryan that the Badgers even ranked in the top 100 in offensive rebounding rate (they ranked 56th in 2007-'08). Even more impressively, the Badgers are significantly shorter than the power-conference teams ahead of them; all consistently play at least two players 6-foot-9 or taller except Baylor, while UW’s tallest rotation players top out at 6-foot-8.
The Badgers boast four top 400 players in offensive rebounding rate in Ethan Happ, Charlie Thomas, Nigel Hayes and Vitto Brown, not to mention they are without 6-foot-11 Andy Van Vliet for the year due to an eligibility issue. Thomas points to the mindset of the team as the underlying reason for its rebounding success.
“It is a crash the boards mentality, that’s what we’re really focused on,” Thomas said.
Happ added that because this team lost a lot of talent in the off-season, they need to find other ways to be successful.
“We don’t have the same skill as last year’s team did, so we have to make up for it in other ways,” Happ said. “Just being gritty down there in the low post.”
That stellar rebounding rate seems sustainable, too, as the Badgers have had at least 14 rebounds in every game they've played against ranked teams this year.
Keep in mind, this team isn't missing shots because of a lack of playmakers. Rather, it's been a lack of focus and execution. And these young players making those mistakes—this is the youngest roster ever under Ryan—will correct them, those shots will start falling and that rebounding prowess isn't going anywhere. When that day comes, this team is going to get very good, very quickly.
