The Wisconsin basketball team went into enemy territory last night riding a six-game winning streak and a chance to climb into the top spot of the conference. The Northwestern Wildcats were coming off of a big win over Michigan State in East Lansing and looking to take down another top-10 opponent.
This was your classic ‘trap game’ for Wisconsin. A seemingly lesser opponent in front of you with a big game against a ranked opponent just a few days later. It would be easy to see why the Badgers would overlook the Wildcats, who were coming into the game with a 2-4 conference record.
The Badgers were able to withstand a close game, as they have all season to push their record to 15-2 on the season and the no. 1 spot in the Big Ten standings.
There’s a lot to take from this game, but here are the three biggest things I took away from the Wisconsin basketball team’s latest win.
1. Teams are going to do anything they can to take Johnny Davis away and still won’t be able to stop him
Johnny Davis isn’t going to be sneaking up on anyone anymore. He is a household name for anyone who even pays a little attention to college basketball these days. So naturally, teams are going to be giving Davis a lot of attention and focused on taking him out of the game and making someone else beat them.
Well, we saw how well that worked out last night. At the start of the game, Davis wasn’t exactly taking the game over. The Wildcats would have a guy sticking to him and when he had the ball, defenders were sagging in quite a bit to help out. They were also being very physical with him. Bumping into him, reaching in, anything they could do to make everything hard for him.
Sure, he got a few calls, but there were also plenty of missed calls where he got hit and there was no whistle, including a hit to his face that caused his nose to bleed. You could tell he wasn’t very happy about the no-call and the TV commentator mentioned it as well.
To be honest, pissing Johnny Davis off is probably the last thing you want to do. He doesn’t get out of control when he gets mad, he just makes you pay for it. He ended up hitting a few huge buckets at the end of the game making the Wildcats’ comeback attempt nearly impossible.
He finished the night with 27 points, hitting 4-of-5 three-point shots and grabbing 8 rebounds. For a guy to get that much attention and still put up that stat line is exactly why the Wisconsin basketball star is a frontrunner for the Naismith Award.