Sometimes a season is a tragedy; sometimes it's a math problem. Milwaukee's 2025–26 campaign was the second kind — and the arithmetic is brutal. Picked No. 1 in the Horizon League preseason poll for the second straight year, the Panthers lost three projected starters — John Lovelace Jr., Seth Hubbard, and Danilo Jovanovich — to season-ending injuries by midseason. No team in college basketball wins when it loses 100 games to injury. The final record, 12–20 with an 8–12 Horizon mark and a tie for eighth, was the first losing season of the Bart Lundy era. Given the circumstances, that the Panthers still managed the second-most wins of any team in the country that lost 100+ games to injury says more about the coaching than the record does.
Lundy, now in his fifth season in Milwaukee, has earned the benefit of the doubt ten times over. His first three years produced three straight 20-win seasons — 22–12 with a CBI quarterfinal in 2022–23, 20–15 in 2023–24, and 21–11 with a tie for second in the Horizon in 2024–25 — making him the first head coach in Milwaukee's Division I history to win 20+ in each of his first three years, and the first to stack three consecutive 20-win seasons since the Bruce Pearl run of 2002–06. Along the way he picked up career win No. 500 against IU Indianapolis on January 11, 2026, a milestone from a career built through DII power Queens and years of postseason success. This is a program builder with a proven blueprint, and 2026–27 is about getting back to it.
What that blueprint looks like, everyone in the Horizon League already knows. Lundy's motto is "Tilt The Floor," and the 2024–25 Panthers were the most fun team in the league to watch: they finished first in the NCAA in fastbreak points (18.4 per game), set program records in rebounds per game (39.2, 21st in the nation) and rebound margin (+9.3, second in the country), and posted top-five marks in school history in scoring average (78.4 ppg), total points, and field-goal percentage. Up-tempo, physical, relentless on the glass — that team lost close ones it shouldn't have and still won 21. Lundy was named a finalist for the Skip Prosser Man of the Year award, the national honor for a coach who wins with integrity. The 2025–26 team, depleted as it was, still took care of the ball at a historic level, setting the program record for fewest turnovers per game (10.4). The culture never broke. The bodies did.
The health report is the story of the season. Lovelace (6–8, Youngstown State transfer), Hubbard (Toledo transfer), and Jovanovich (Louisville transfer) were brought in precisely to raise the ceiling — big, versatile, high-major-adjacent wings and forwards — and all three were gone by midseason. Their absence forced Milwaukee to play deep into its bench, including two true freshmen, Stevie Elam and Josh Dixon, who got thrown into the fire years ahead of schedule. There's a silver lining buried in the wreckage: those freshmen now have real Horizon League experience, and the program got a preview of its future earlier than planned.
The Panther Arena split is part of the identity, too. Milwaukee plays its big nights at UW–Milwaukee Panther Arena downtown and mixes in the intimate Klotsche Center on campus — two different rooms, two different atmospheres, one program trying to own its city. The 2025–26 Panthers went 8–6 at home, a respectable mark for a team running on fumes, and the building still gets loud when the fast break gets going.
The history here deserves respect, because Milwaukee basketball has been nationally relevant before. Four NCAA Tournament appearances, and the 2005 run under Bruce Pearl is one of the great mid-major March stories: the No. 12 seed Panthers knocked off No. 5 Alabama and No. 4 Boston College in Cleveland to reach the Sweet Sixteen, playing with a swagger that put the program on the map. They backed it up in 2006 with a first-round win over No. 6 Oklahoma as an 11-seed. The 2014 team, a 15-seed, drew No. 2 Villanova. This is a program that has been the bracket-buster, and Lundy's rebuild was aimed squarely at getting back to that — the 2023 CBI quarterfinal was step one.
Now the reset: 2026–27 is Year Five for Lundy, and the mandate is obvious — get healthy, get back to 20 wins, get back to the top of the Horizon League race. The conference is as open as it's been in years, and a Milwaukee team at full strength with Lundy's system, his portal savvy (eight new faces arrived in 2025–26 alone), and a few freshmen who've already survived a season nobody else could have, has every right to be picked near the top again. The Panthers were supposed to contend last year; the injuries stole that. This year, it's not about projections — it's about payback. Tilt the floor, own the glass, run them out of the gym. That's Milwaukee basketball, and it's back.