How Did Wisconsin Badgers Players Fare Against Ohio State?

How Wisconsin Badgers players performed in a Bucky victory

In my last article, I looked at how the Wisconsin Badgers did as a team against Ohio State (spoiler: they did pretty darn well). This time around, let’s look at which players fueled the win.

There are two main ways to look at player value. The first is on a possession-adjusted basis, which removes issues of playing time from the analysis, but which brings in the problem of small sample size. This can be valuable in uncovering players who aren’t getting much playing time, but who may deserve more.

The second way of looking at player value is in terms of total value, where opportunities to accumulate stats (playing time) factors into things. This removes the small sample size and gives a better sense of the best players on the team. However, its weakness is in equating players with moderate efficiency,who accumulate more stats because of playing time, with players who accumulate those stats in less playing time, and are, therefore, probably better.

I like to take a look through both lenses, but let’s start with Player Efficiency.

The bars show how each player did in Offensive Rating, as adjusted for usage (dark red), Defensive Rating (salmon), and the Efficiency Difference between the two (gray). The thin, red line shows the average Efficiency for a D-1 team. Note that all of these are denoted in points/100 possessions.

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As you can see, this game was all about the offense, as SEVEN players ended up with above-average Offensive Ratings. On the other hand, only Nigel Hayes played D-1 average defense.

Jordan Hill is the surprise Badger MVP, while Khalil Iverson picks up the ignominious LVP hardware. Hill and Vitto Brown came to play, last night, bringing crazy efficient offense. Hill had a 90% Effective Field Goal Percentage for heaven’s sake!

In my preview article, I worried that Ethan Happ‘s below-the-rim game would be a problem against Ohio State’s shot blocking. While he didn’t get stuffed often, you can see that he had trouble offensively, which you don’t normally see from Wisconsin’s second best player.

Now that we’ve seen how each player did on a per-possession basis, let’s take a look at the changes when playing time comes into the picture. For this, I have created something called Net Points Added (NPA) and it takes the Efficiency Difference, shown above, and adds the playing time into it. This gives us as estimate of the net points contributed to the overall margin of victory.

The big changes are that Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig shoot ahead of Brown, because they played more minutes in the game. From the above, you can see that Hill single-handedly made up for Iverson’s poor performance, Happ had negative value, and Alex Illikainen is justifying my and Greg Gard’s faith in him.

This look at player value will replace what I was doing, before. It is easier to compile and will enable me to look at interesting questions, like, who is the most valuable Badger, so far, what is the best single game played by a Badger, this season, and how did Brevin Pritzl play in that one game.

Next: Nigel Hayes Drops Mic in Press Conference

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