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Friday, March 29, 2024
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Zak Showalter will take the Kohl Center floor for a final time Sunday hoping to lead the Badgers to a victory they desperately need. 

Wisconsin hopes to turn skid around with Senior Night game against Minnesota

It’s been almost five years since Zak Showalter first stepped foot onto the floor of the Kohl Center. Sunday evening, with a No. 2 seed in the Big Ten Tournament on the line, he’ll do so one final time.

After dropping five of their last six games, the No. 22 Wisconsin Badgers (11-6 Big Ten, 22-8 overall) will get one more shot to right the ship when they welcome the Minnesota Golden Gophers (11-6, 23-7) to Madison for senior night.

The fact that this is his last game on the court he grew up idolizing is not lost on Showalter, but with the team in a virtual free-fall, he and his fellow seniors are more focused on getting back on track before the postseason rolls around than anything else.

“It’ll be emotional,” Showalter said. “but it’s a good opportunity for us to turn things around and get some momentum before the tournament.”

While the Badgers have been tumbling through the AP rankings of late, Minnesota has been playing its best basketball of the season. After dropping five games in a row, including one to UW, the Golden Gophers have won eight straight and are just a shade away from cracking the Top 25.

It wasn’t long ago that the two programs’ situations were flipped; an eight-game Badgers winning streak in the middle of the conference season coincided almost exactly with Minnesota’s five-game losing streak. By early February, UW was 10-1 in the conference and looked like a lock for at least a share of the regular-season title.

The Golden Gophers, meanwhile, sat at 3-6 in the Big Ten and were on the verge of an implosion. But then, something clicked. A flurry of wins, including a 101-point outing in double-overtime against Iowa and a survival of surging Michigan, set Minnesota up in position to steal the No. 2 spot in the conference.

“Minnesota's playing probably the best basketball in the Big Ten right now,” Showalter said. “So it’s a great opportunity. We got a really good team coming in here and we gotta handle our business.”

To handle their business, the Badgers will have to start making shots from outside. Though their problems during this stretch have often come on the defensive end, against the Hawkeyes Thursday a made open jump shot here or there might have changed the outcome.

When UW traveled to Minneapolis in late January, it was redshirt sophomore forward Ethan Happ that kept the team afloat in an overtime victory. He delivered arguably his best all-around performance of the season with 28 points, 12 rebounds, six assists and five blocks and neutralized Amir Coffey’s surprising 19-point outburst.

With postseason play looming, and the Badgers trending in entirely the wrong direction, something has to change. Senior night presents the last chance to find their antidote. And after four years of Showalter, Bronson Koenig, Nigel Hayes and Vitto Brown, the third-winningest four-year stretch in UW history, it would be a shame to close those bright careers by fading quietly into the shadows.

Senior night tips off from the Kohl Center at 5 p.m.

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