Improvement?

The Badgers "rebounded" from the home loss to Marquette with a 61-39 point thumping of UWM in Milwaukee. Unfortunately, I, and pretty much every other person not living in the Milwaukee or Madison metro areas didn't get to see it. So I can't really offer that much commentary, besides messing around with stats. The result looks quite positive, as holding any team to 39 points on its home court is impressive. Doing a little statistical analysis, it appears that UW held UWM to .68 points per possession in a 57 possession game. That's ridiculously effective defense. However, UW's offense was only ok, reaching slightly above the Mendoza line of offensive efficiency (which is 1.00 PPP)-- by averaging 1.07 PPP.

Now, I hate to be mean to Rob Jeter, a former UW assistant under Bo, an apparently nice, smart guy, and a good recruiter, but UWM is not doing well this season. Ken Pomeroy's ratings have the Panthers listed as the 171st most efficient offensive team, and the 256th most efficient defensive team. So it's not super surprising that UW shot over 50% for the game, and outrebounded the hell out of the Panthers, gathering 81% of the available defensive rebounds and, ludicrously, gathering more of their own misses than UW-M did. (This means UW had more offensive rebounds than UW-M did defensive rebounds.) What bodes poorly though, is that UW continues to turn the ball over, committing 18 TOs in a 61 possession game. That means the Badgers failed to even get a shot off on almost one-third (31.7% to be precise) of its offensive possessions. That is awful. Seriously, that is as "not good" as "not good" can be and is something that plagued UW against Marquette (especially down the stretch) and against Duke. In these next two games building up to the December 29th match-up at Texas, that's something to keep an eye on-- can UW turn the ball over less? They play UW-Green Bay at 5 pm Central on Saturday night (Big Ten Network), then have a week off before facing Valparaiso next Saturday (also on BTN). Both those games are in Madison. Valpo is relatively legit this year and has a shot at winning the Horizon league, and UWGB is likely better than UWM. So the competition won't be bad, and certainly far better than the relative patsies the Badgers played to open the season. So, if you have the means to see the games, keep an eye on UW's offense. If the team improves its rate of holding onto the ball, that should bode quite well for the Big Ten season.