NCAA Basketball: How strong will Wisconsin be in 2018?

The Wisconsin Badgers men's basketball team are coming off their worst season this millennium after failing to get into the NCAA men's basketball tournament for the first time since the 1997-1998 season when the team went 12-19 with a Big Ten conference record of 3-13. However, are they poised for success in the 2018-2019 season?

Wisconsin finished this season with a 15-18 record and a 7-11 record in Big Ten play, which earned them the #9 seed in the Big Ten conference tournament out of 14 teams. They defeated the #8 seed Maryland Terrapins before being eliminated by the #1 seed Michigan State Spartans in the conference quarterfinals.

However, given the fact that they lost four of their five starters from last season and they played a gauntlet of a schedule, their season really wasn't all that terrible despite the fact that their 19-year streak of NCAA men's basketball tournament berths, which was tied for the fourth-longest active streak and is still the sixth-longest active streak of all-time, came to a bitter end.

Wisconsin played the #1 Virginia Cavaliers early in the season, and they held them to a season-low 49 points. They also played non-conference games against the Baylor Bears, the UCLA Bruins, the Xavier Musketeers, the Temple Owls and the Marquette Golden Eagles.

The Badgers lost to each of those six teams, but only once did they lose by more than 12 points. Three of the games were decided by margins of five points or less, and two of the other three games were very close throughout.

On top of that, Wisconsin played the Michigan State Spartans and the Purdue Boilermakers twice in the regular season in conference play, and they also played the Ohio State Buckeyes in conference play.

What killed Wisconsin was dropping eight of nine conference games, including five in a row, toward the middle of the season. But after that, they won five of their next seven games before meeting the Spartans in the Big Ten conference tournament. They lost that game by just three points, which shows just how much they grew together as a team throughout the extremely tough season.

What does this mean for the Badgers moving forward? It means with great certainty that the 2018-2019 season will be a bounce-back season for head coach Greg Gard and his team.

This is Wisconsin. This is not Duke or Kentucky, two schools that reload with top recruits pretty much every season, as their previous top recruits typically head to the NBA draft following their freshman seasons. The Wisconsin Badgers men's basketball program prides itself on developing young stars and helping them grow over the course of several seasons.

There is just one senior currently on the team's roster, and that is forward Aaron Moesch. Moesch, however, averaged just 6.0 minutes per game this last season. He averaged 1.2 points per game, 0.5 rebounds per game, 0.3 assists per game, 0.0 blocks per game and 0.1 steals per game on a 77.8% field goal percentage, a 100% three-point field goal percentage, and a 93.3% free throw percentage.

As a result, assuming star junior forward Ethan Happ stays for his senior season, in which case he looks like a top contender for the 2019 Wooden Award, the Badgers are set to return roughly 98.53% of their scoring production next season.

Couple that with the fact that guards D'Mitrik Trice and Kobe King and forward Andy Van Vliet are set to return if healthy after missing tons of time this past season, and you get a team very capable of making a third Final Four run since 2014 and potentially even winning their first championship since 194

At this very moment, there are probably only a handful of teams who the Wisconsin Badgers would not be able to compete with. After their three-point loss to Michigan State, it is clear that the Badgers are starting to jell and can play with just about anybody in the country.

Next season, the Badgers should return to their usual position toward the top of the Big Ten conference standings, and they should be national championship contenders again like they have been in many recent seasons. All signs point that direction following the 2017-2018 season.