Wisconsin Basketball: Badgers Have Really Improved at Free Throw Line

The Wisconsin Basketball team is coming off of two huge road wins and a big reason is because of their improved free throw shooting from last season.

Fourteen games into the 2019-20 season and the Wisconsin Basketball team is 9-5 and at least up to this point, it has been fairly up and down. So far we’ve seen five games in which the Badgers have scored over 75 points, with four of those games going over 80. However, we’ve also seen long stretches of poor shooting and a team that is consistently out rebounded.

But it appears Wisconsin – at least for the time being – is on the right track after back-to-back road wins against Tennessee and then No. 5 Ohio State. Not to mention that this is after they started the season 0-5 away from the Kohl Center. And while they still have their challenges as I alluded to above, one monumental difference between this year’s Badgers team and lasts, is their performance at the free throw line.

Any success that the Wisconsin Basketball team had last season was in spite of their free throw shooting. For the season they shot just 64.8 percent from the stripe, which ranked 332nd in college basketball. And yes, you read that correctly, 332nd.

For a team that averaged just 15.6 free throws per game in 2018-19, which ranked 318th in the country, coupled with their poor shooting when they were at the line, and you have a recipe for disaster. Especially in the final minutes when trying to put a close game away.

In fact, there were times last season when coach Greg Gard chose to sit Ethan Happ at the end of games because he would shoot just 46.6 percent from the free throw line in his final year and opposing teams deployed the “Hack-A-Happ” tactic when the game was close. Certainly that creates a difficult situation for the team when their best player has to sit on the bench during crucial moments of a game.

However, to their credit, the Badgers have been much better this season. And I don’t just mean a marginal improvement, I mean Wisconsin went from one of the worst free throw shooting teams to one of the best. Through their 14 games, the Badgers are shooting an impressive 77.7 percent from the free throw line as a team which ranks 15th nationally and is first in the Big Ten Conference.

This includes a 13/16 performance on the road against Ohio State that helped put the game away and I’m confident in saying that this likely wouldn’t have happened a season ago.

For the most part, across the board many of the Wisconsin basketball players are performing much better at the free throw line this season and that especially includes three of their most important players. Brad Davison is up 8 percent at the line from last year, while D’Mitrik Trice is up 9 percent, and Nate Reuvers has improved by a whopping 17 percent at this point in the season.

Moving forward there are going to be a number of difficult games ahead as Wisconsin enters the heart of Big Ten play, and in order for them to continue winning, they will need to do the little things right. And that all begins with them having continued success at the free throw line.