What's the deal with Wisconsin's freshmen not playing much this season?

While watching Wisconsin play Michigan State last week, I was struck by the effectiveness of their freshman post play Ines Sotelo. The 6-foot-3 Spaniard dominated the Badgers on both ends of the court to the tune of a career-high 17 points (8-of-11 FG), three rebounds, three assists, one steal, and one block. She did all of this in only 18 minutes of playing time too.

On a Michigan State team without a ton of depth (6-foot-3 forward Isaline Alexander was lost for the year due to an injury in the offseason) in the frontcourt behind 6-foot-3 Grace VanSlooten and 6-foot-2 Julia Ayrault (who plays a more perimeter oriented game on offense), Sotelo’s emergence has been key to MSU’s 9-5 record in Big Ten play. Sotelo, despite only coming to the United States over the summer, started earning minutes in the first game of the season.

She played 15 minutes in MSU’s first game of the season, scored in double-figures in the third game of the season, and scored a then career-high 16 points against Purdue on Jan. 1. She has recorded three steals in four different games and done the same with assists. Sotelo hauled in five offensive rebounds (six total) in that game against the Boilermakers and she has done all of this by shooting 50.9% from the field and 61.5% on two-pointers alone.

As a freshman she has certainly suffered some lumps, for example: the game after her breakout performance against the Badgers, she only played 10 minutes against UCLA, picking up four fouls and scoring zero points. But the most important thing is…Robyn Fralick has allowed Sotelo to learn by doing.

That has, uh, not been the case for Wisconsin’s freshman big, Alie Bisballe. Standing at 6-foot-4, the native of Lake City, Mich. has only played in 14 games for UW this year and has reached double-digit minutes in exactly one of them. As luck would have it, that one game was against Michigan State and it was intriguing to compare Bisballe to Sotelo.

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Bisballe had a career-high seven points and one block in this game (she also had a steal) while playing against some of Michigan State’s starters. In limited action, Bisballe has shown promise but there hasn’t been a large enough sample size to say anything about the trajectory of her career with even 25% certainty.

And, quite frankly, that’s a problem.

Marisa Moseley’s Badgers have been a disappointment this season. While no one was predicting them to finish in the top half of the Big Ten, there was a legitimate hope that they’d at least be in contention for an NCAA Tournament at-large berth into February. Instead, the team went 1-6 in January before starting off February with four straight losses, the closest of which was a 13-point loss to a Purdue team that hadn’t won a game in the Big Ten up to that point.

Wisconsin has improved their record every year under Moseley but here, in year four, a big step was hoped for after three little steps. From eight wins in her first year, to 11 in year two, to 15 last year, it wasn’t outrageous for fans to expect a veteran team with a pair of potential high-impact transfers to improve again. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened.

UW sits at 12 wins and, while they have three games left in the regular season in which to tie last year’s 15 wins I find it a bit hard to believe that they’ll upset UCLA (undefeated until last week) and Iowa (have beaten Wisconsin 27 straight times) in back-to-back games to end the year. A win against Northwestern and then a slight upset in their first Big Ten Tournament game? Sure, I could see that maybe happening. But that only puts them at 14 wins and only one (vs. Michigan) against an NCAA Tournament team.

Those sort of facts put Wisconsin squarely in the bottom fourth of the conference and it makes you wonder…why can’t any freshmen see the court for more than just garbage time this year? Here are some numbers for you:

Wisconsin Freshmen Minutes % Under Marisa Moseley

• 2024-2025 (brought in two transfers who have started all 26 games so far)

  • 5,250 minutes played so far

  • 315 minutes played by freshmen so far

  • 6% of team’s minutes played by freshmen so far

  • Jovana Spasovski has played in 20 games, starting one so far

• 2023-2024 (didn’t bring in any transfers)

  • 6,394 minutes played

  • 1,062 minutes played by freshmen

  • 16.6% of team’s minutes played by freshmen

  • D’Yanis Jimenez played in 29 games, starting nine

• 2022-2023

  • 6,250 minutes played

  • 2,460 minutes played by freshmen (Maty Wilke, 982 mins., was redshirt freshman)

  • 39.4% of team’s minutes played by freshmen

  • Wilke and Serah Williams started 29 and 30 games respectively

• 2021-2022

  • 5,825 minutes played

  • 631 minutes played by freshmen (Krystyna Ellew only freshman on roster to play)

  • 10.8% of team’s minutes played by freshmen

  • Ellew played in 29 and started 15 games

Things have gotten worse every year for Badgers freshmen and their on-court development in actual games under Moseley. Her first season in Madison she had one healthy freshman (Krystyna Ellew) on the roster and she ended up starting 15 games while playing in all 29. The next year Maty Wilke (redshirt freshman) and Serah Williams started 99% of Wisconsin’s games and acquitted themselves nicely. Things were set up for them to be a lethal inside-outside duo for three more years, but Wilke, an in-state kid, transferred to Utah in the offseason.

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In her third year at the helm, freshman D’Yanis Jimenez started nine games and played in 29 while battling nagging injuries. However, this year? This year Wisconsin’s freshman class has barely seen the floor.

Part of that is because Moseley regularly rides her starting five pretty hard and plays them a lot of minutes, especially when they are as veteran as this year’s unit:

• PG: Ronnie Porter, junior
• SG: Tess Myers, grad student
• G: Natalie Leuzinger, grad student
• F/C: Carter McCray, sophomore
• F/C: Serah Williams, junior
• 6th woman: Halle Douglass, grad student

Even the next player in the rotation, Lily Krahn, is a junior and she wasn’t fully trusted until Christmas, a full dozen games into the season. It didn’t have to be like this!

Wisconsin’s first four games of the year, in which they went 3-1, all saw final score margins greater than 18 points. Bisballe played 14 combined minutes and scored four combined points. In Michigan State’s first four games (4-0), none of which were closer than 42 points (!!!), Sotelo averaged 15 minutes per game and averaged 7.3 points per game. Who has been contributing more to a team winning games down the stretch of the season you ask? Well,,,

It makes no sense to me that a player, especially a young player, can perform well enough in practice to get in at the end of some games, but not others. Also…how do you expect that player to get better if they aren’t facing off against real opponents in real games?

This isn’t a video game where players just progress a little each year even if they don’t play! Throw Bisballe out there to get abused by Lauren Betts of UCLA or Hannah Stuelke of Iowa because she will learn infinitely more from those matchups than from running with the second team in practice again.

It’s also important to play against these types of players because next year…Bisballe should be an integral part of the rotation. Three of the top six UW players in minutes per game will have exhausted their eligibility and there is always the looming specter of The Transfer Portal taking players away from Madison.

Sotelo isn’t going to make the Big Ten All-Freshmen team this year, but she has multiple statistical categories on which to hang her hat moving forward. Among Big Ten freshmen she is second in block percentage, third in off. rebound percentage, fourth in eFG%, and first in 2P%. Bisballe isn’t even ranked because she hasn’t played enough to qualify for any statistical leaderboards.

However, if we look at both players’ per 40 minutes stats (listed below), we can see that Bisballe isn’t as far behind Sotelo as you might think, especially in points per game, rebounds per game, and steals per game. Imagine if she had been given more playing time earlier in the year when the Badgers were blowing out Wright State or Milwaukee!

Alie Bisballe - 6-foot-4, freshman, Lake City, Mich.

• 14 games played

• 4.2% of Wisconsin’s minutes played (4.6% in B1G games); 3.1 mpg

• Per 40 minutes stats

  • 13.8 ppg

  • 4.6 rpg (0.9 orpg)

  • 0.9 apg

  • 1.8 spg

  • 0.9 bpg

  • 3.7 topg

  • FG: 5.5-of-15.6; 35.3%

  • 3P: 0-of-1.8; 0%

  • FT: 2.8-of-3.7; 75%

• Advanced metrics

  • 25.3% usage

  • 0.65 PPP

  • 0.79 PPSA

  • 35.3% eFG

  • solid percentile steal percentage

• Value

  • 9.1 PER

  • 399 PER*MIN

  • -0.0 WS; -0.05 WS/40

  • -0.0 OFF WS

  • -0.0 DEF WS

  • -6.7 BPM; -4.8 OBPM, -1.9 DBPM

  • 0.1 PRPG!

Ines Sotelo - 6-foot-3, freshman, Ourense, Spain

• 25 games played, 8 starts

• 40.5% of Michigan State’s minutes played (44.4% in B1G games); 16.2 mpg

• Per 40 minutes stats

  • 14.4 ppg

  • 7.5 rpg (2.8 orpg)

  • 2.9 apg

  • 2.3 spg

  • 1.3 bpg

  • 3.5 topg

  • FG: 5.6-of-11.1; 50.9%

  • 3P: 0.9-of-3.4; 26.5%

  • FT: 2.3-of-3.5; 65.7%

• Advanced metrics

  • 17.9% usage

  • 0.90 PPP

  • 1.14 PPSA

  • 54.9% eFG

  • Solid overall rebounding percentage; very good off. rebound percentage

  • 82nd percentile steal percentage; 87th percentile block percentage

• Value

  • 17.6 PER

  • 7,123 PER*MIN

  • 1.2 WS; 0.12 WS/40

  • 0.6 OFF WS

  • 0.6 DEF WS

  • 4.0 BPM; 0.5 OBPM, 3.6 DBPM

  • 1.5 PRPG!