Wisconsin Badgers
How they got here: Won the Worcester Regional, beating Dartmouth 5-1 and Michigan State 4-3 (OT)
Overall season record: 23-12-2
Top players: D Ben Dexheimer (7-20-27), D Luke Osburn (6-15-20), F Quinn Finley (17-16-33), F Christian Fitzgerald (16-15-31), F Gavin Morrissey (9-27-33).
Top goalie: Daniel Hauser (20-7-2, 2.56, .899)
Why they’ll win the national championship: Wisconsin is a team that knows how to learn from mistakes – from the Badgers’ sixth-place Big Ten finish a year ago to the whatever led to their 7-1 home loss to Ohio State in the Big Ten semis. That ability to bounce back helped Wisconsin play itself into an at-large bid after opening the second half of Big Ten play with six straight losses. After the conference tournament loss to the Buckeyes, the Badgers beat Dartmouth 5-1 in the Worcester regional before coming from behind in their 4-3 overtime win over Michigan State. Wisconsin is resilient and can adjust in-game. People sometimes forget, too, that the Badgers average 3.76 goals per game for the fifth-best offense in the nation. Goalie Daniel Hauser can steal a game, too.
Why they won’t win the national championship: All of the things that make Wisconsin a contender are in direct response to the things that can undermine the Badgers, especially in a one-and-done tournament. While Wisconsin manhandled Dartmouth, the Badgers needed a little magic in the third period of their game against Michigan State to advance out of that regional. Luke Osburn and Gavin Morrissey scored 34 seconds apart late in the third to send that game to overtime against an opponent they knew well, one with whom they’d split the regular season. Does that kind of lightning strike twice during the NCAA tournament? On paper, Wisconsin has the weakest defense in this field, allowing 3.03 goals per game (tied for 36th nationally) with the second-worst penalty kill (70.9 percent) among all Div. 1 teams. And the Badgers take penalties, averaging 13.78 minutes per game (sixth nationally).
*****
Wisconsin has been to the Frozen Four twice in the last 20 years and each time faced off against Boston College in the championship game. The Badgers’ most recent Frozen Four appearance came 16 years ago in Detroit and resulted in a 5-0 loss to the Eagles. In 2006, they beat Boston College 2-1 in Milwaukee.
The gap between their 2006 national championship victory and their previous trip to the Frozen Four was 14 years and their second-most recent championship came two years before that, in 1990.
“There’s a certain expectation of success here,” said coach Mike Hastings, “and what you find is this state puts its arms right around it when you can put a product in an environment [like] the Kohl Center that shows the value of honesty and working, and playing for something greater than the name on the back. I think it’s been fantastic. I think it’s something that we want to keep going.”
Now in his third season with Wisconsin, Hastings has steered the Badgers to the NCAA tournament for the second time. In 2024, Wisconsin dropped a 3-2 semifinal game to Quinnipiac in the Providence regional. Last year, the Badgers went 13-21-3 and finished sixth in the Big Ten.
“I want to give credit to the leadership group in our upper class,” said Hastings, “because they’ve been through some really tough times. And they were the ones that kind of sat down and said, ‘OK, we need to change some things. We need to look in the mirror.’”
The Badgers finished fourth in the Big Ten this season and following a 7-1 home loss to Ohio State in the semifinal round of the Big Ten playoff tournament, Wisconsin made it into the NCAA tourney as an at-large bid.
That loss to the Buckeyes — where the Badgers have worked so hard to show the home crowd that they were playing for more than the names on the backs of their own sweaters — was a bit of a wake-up call for Wisconsin.
Hastings credits team leadership for initiating some conversations about how to go forward and said that coaches also “had a meeting and talked to each” player.
“It was about just accountability from what we were doing on our day-to-day,” said Hastings, “and our leadership did a great job of delivering that message and then holding the group accountable, as the coaching staff did. We did it together.”
The reckoning following the loss to Ohio State led to two very different wins in Worcester. With the first game against Dartmouth tied 1-1 at the start of the third, the Badgers simply turned up the volume and won the game, outshooting the Big Green 11-6 in the final period and scoring four goals for a 5-1 win.
In the regional title game, Wisconsin scored two goals in the final five minutes of regulation to tie Michigan State 3-3, and just Just 24 seconds into OT, team captain Ben Dexheimer scored the game-winning goal.
“Ben Dexheimer and where he started, at least for me, three years ago and where he’s at now,” said Hastings, “the willingness to be as selfless as he has been over this journey is just it’s pretty special to see a young man go through it.”
It wasn’t just Dexheimer stepping up in Worcester. Alternate captain Gavin Morrissey had the first assist on Dexheimer’s goal and Quinn Finley picked up the second. Those three players accounted for four goals and seven assists in Worcester. Christian Fitzgerald, the third-leading goal scorer on the team, had a goal and an assist in the regional, and goaltender Daniel Hauser improved both his goals-against average and save percentage in the regional.
And now Wisconsin is again where fans expect the Badgers to be.
“I don’t want to sound real simple here,” said Hastings, “but it’s one thing to get there, it’s another thing to stay there, you know? And so we’re chasing this with this group because they deserve it. They put the work in, but we want the expectation of this program to be in that conversation on a yearly basis.”