The Wisconsin Badgers men’s basketball team is coming off the best two-year stretch in program history, but face a myriad of uncertainty heading into the 2014-’15 season.
The memory of back-to-back Final Four runs is still fresh in the minds of Wisconsin fans, even if each deep trip into the NCAA Tournament ended in agonizing heartbreak.
The Badgers went 66-12 over the last two seasons, including a 36-4 mark posted this past year by what was widely considered to be the best team in school history. Powered by Wooden Award winner Frank Kaminsky and fellow NBA prospect Sam Dekker, UW won both the Big Ten regular sea- son and tournament titles, and ultimately fell just one win short of bringing a national championship to Madison for the first time since 1941.
But now, Kaminsky, Dekker, Josh Gasser, Traevon Jackson and Duje Dukan have all departed, leaving next year’s team without a majority of the core that helped make the last two unforgettable seasons possible.
The Badgers do return two starters for the 2015-16 campaign—juniors Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig.
Hayes, along with Kaminsky and Dekker, was part of Wisconsin’s formidable frontcourt that combined to score over 62 percent of the team’s points last year. Hayes averaged
12.4 points and 6.2 rebounds per game on the season, while also ranking third on the team with a 39.6 shooting percentage from 3-point range despite not attempting a single shot from beyond the arc during his fresh- man year. He also made tremendous strides at the charity stripe, improving his free-throw percentage from 58.5 to 74.4 percent as a sophomore.
For his considerably heightened level of play, Hayes was named a consensus third-team All-Big Ten selection.
Meanwhile, Koenig was thrust into to the spotlight after starting point guard Traevon Jackson went down with a bro- ken foot midway through the season. Koenig certainly rose to the occasion, posting a solid 2.97 assist-to-turnover ratio and shooting 40.5 percent from behind the arc to assert himself as one of the Big Ten’s top floor generals. He also played some of his best basketball during the NCAA Tournament, where he dished out 17 assists and turned the ball over just five times.
But outside those two, the Badgers’ starting lineup for next year is a bit murky.
Returning reserves from last season such as forward Vitto Brown and guard Zak Showalter will likely start, along with redshirt freshman Ethan Happ. Outside them, redshirt sophomore Jordan Hill, redshirt sophomore Riley Dearring and redshirt senior Jordan Smith will all jockey for position in the rotation along with incoming freshmen Brevin Pritzl, Khalil Iverson and Alex Illikainen.
Though an 18th straight appearance in the NCAA Tournament seems like a foregone conclusion for the Badgers, the departures of so many key players and uncertainty outside Hayes and Koenig could put their streak of consecutive top-four finishes in the Big Ten standing in jeopardy, especially with the conference expected to be extremely competitive at the top next season.
But then again, a bet against Bo Ryan is rarely a winning wager.
