Why Wisconsin is a top 5 team -- a thread:

Quick hitters:
- Wisconsin ranked 3rd at http://EvanMiya.com 
- Brad Davison is 7th in nation in Bayesian Performance Rating
- Badgers have 4 players in top 10 in BPR in conference
- Results look better when taking out garbage time

Wisconsin is ranked 3rd in team ratings at http://EvanMiya.com , with the top defensive rating of all top 10 teams. When filtering out garbage time possessions, the game scores are more impressive:

58-25 vs Louisville
50-19 vs Green Bay
68-54 vs Rhode Island
54-18 vs AR-Pine

It all starts with Wisconsin’s core 4 of Brad Davison, Nate Reuvers, Micah Potter, and D'Mitrik Trice, who are all in the conference’s top 10 players in Bayesian Performance Rating, which quantifies a player’s overall impact on the court.

Davison is 7th in the nation in BPR.

Tyler Wahl has had a huge impact on the court for the Badgers, with the highest plus-minus through 7 games. When he's on the floor, Wisconsin is outscoring opponents by 57 points per 100 possessions (Team Efficiency Margin). No other teammate has a TEM above 46.

When looking at most effective teammate pairs for Wisconsin, Tyler Wahl is in all four most effective pairs. With Wahl and Davison on the floor, Wisc is outscoring opponents by a ridiculous 81 points per 100 possessions. By contrast, the Davis/Ford duo is being outscored by 10.5.

Brad Davison is not only playing well, but positively affects other Wisconsin players. Of Wisconsin's main rotation players, each teammate is playing better when on the court with Davison, compared to his individual averages, as seen by the "Above/Below Average" metric.

Here's the production of Wisconsin's most used five-man lineups. It's a small sample size so far, but the lineups with Tyler Wahl are all fairing pretty well.

And for some fun bonus content, here's Wisconsin's Circle Assist Network.

If a band connected to a player is his own color, that represents assists he provided for another player. If a band is not his color, it represents assists he received.

Graph courtesy of @recspecs730.

Dive into the metrics yourself at http://EvanMiya.com .