After three games with four players averaging double-digits in scoring, the Wisconsin women’s basketball team (3-1) only had two eclipse 10 points Tuesday night against UW-Green Bay (4-0). As a result, the Badgers fell to the Phoenix 60-58 after senior guard Rae Lin D’Alie’s last second heave came up well short of the basket.
Coming into Tuesday’s game, four of the five Badger starters were averaging at least 10 points per game; junior guard Alyssa Karel led the way with 11.7 ppg, while junior forwards Tara Steinbauer and Lin Zastrow and senior guard Rae Lin D’Alie also posted double-digit averages.
Against UW-Green Bay, however, only Karel and starting senior guard Teah Gant passed the 10-point mark, with Karel leading all scorers with 21 points and Gant contributing 13. From the beginning of the game, Wisconsin was sloppy with the ball and seemed to lack energy until a 12-0 run late in the second half, something that surely led to the disappearance of the balanced offensive attack.
“We have to start that at the beginning of the game,” D’Alie said of the Badgers’ second-half energy. ” I got up my pressure, seemed to get up late in the game where I knew we had to go, and somehow we’re just going to figure it out at the beginning.”
Further taking away from the balanced scoring for Wisconsin was the lack of production from the interior.
Steinbauer, the team’s best offensive post player, contributed only two points in a foul trouble-shortened 12 minutes of play. Zastrow also was limited by foul trouble in the second half, scoring seven points in 25 minutes of play.
Compared to the Badgers’ previous game Sunday against Cleveland State, it was Zastrow who rebounded from early foul trouble to come off the bench and score seven straight second-half points to key the comeback in the 70-68 win. For head coach Lisa Stone, the foul trouble is starting to become an alarming trend.
“The common thread appears to be, statistically, foul trouble,” Stone said. “We’re strapped with fouls, you’ve got Tara in foul trouble right away in the first half; we were hit with the foul bug early in the game. We were going with some odd combinations, but there’s no excuses; we need to be able to step up to the plate.”
With Wisconsin’s 58 fouls, Green Bay was able to convert 31 free throw attempts into 26 points. In the first half especially, the Phoenix were able to capitalize by hitting eight of nine from the line, while the Badgers hit just five of eight. Additionally, Wisconsin managed only 14 free throw attempts in the second half, while Green Bay had 22. By the end of the game, the Phoenix had nine more attempts from the line than the home team.
“They took it at our defense and got to the foul line 31 times,” Stone said. “That’s something that I thought we adjusted to late in the game, and that’s when we made our run. We got eight straight stops to end the game, kept them off the foul line, but we turned it over at some costly times.”
For Karel, Tuesday night was still another hot shooting night.
Connecting on 10-of-16 attempts from the field, the Badgers’ offensive sparkplug scored the team’s first four points after the Phoenix began the game on a 8-0 run. Later in the game, Karel helped spark Wisconsin’s run, and had a chance to tie the game at 59 with 42 seconds left in the game.
With the Kohl Center raucous and the majority of the crowd on its feet amidst a five-minute scoring drought for Green Bay, Karel drove the paint with a deft spin move and hit an off-balance layup as she was fouled. Karel missed the free throw, however, leaving the Badgers down 58-59.
“I think kind of that streak where I got a little bit cold, I really wasn’t attacking the basket as much,” she said. “We had to recognize that we were getting called on fouls when they were attacking the basket, and I think it took us a while to recognize that ourselves. In the second half, I just tried to recognize that and keep trying to take it to the basket.”