She kept waiting and waiting and waiting.

But the hot streak University of Wisconsin women's basketball coach Lisa Stone was expecting never came.

Stone watched her team miss shot after shot Sunday in a 64-54 loss to Illinois at Assembly Hall in Champaign, Ill.

There were 12 misses in all to open the game -- the Badgers' only field goal in the opening 10 minutes, 1 second was a 3-pointer from senior guard Jolene Anderson.

"You go with some people, they're going to get going, they 're going to get going, they're going to get going," Stone said, "and it doesn't go in."

And it didn't just happen against the Fighting Illini.

UW opened Big Ten Conference play by shooting just 31.3 percent in a 65-48 loss to Purdue in West Lafayette, Ind., two nights earlier.

In that game, though, Stone thought her players rushed shots and took them when they weren't in rhythm. Against Illinois, the Badgers missed open shots, putbacks and layups on their way to making 32.3 percent -- 25.7 in the first half -- of their attempts.

Suddenly scoring has become the main concern for a team that entered Big Ten play second in the conference in points per game (72).

And the shooting slump has been a widespread problem for UW (7-5 overall, 0-2 Big Ten) heading into tonight's matchup with Michigan State (9-5, 1-1) at the Kohl Center. Stone likened it to a disease that's swept through the team and thinks her players are pressing rather than playing relaxed.

"Usually you'll just have one person off, but right now our whole team has been off the past two games," Anderson said. "And so it's just a matter of everybody getting on the right track."

The Badgers badly need Anderson to get back on track.

The preseason Big Ten Player of the Year went a combined 7-for-33 from the field (21.2 percent), including 1-for-12 from behind the 3-point line, for 16 points against Purdue and Illinois.

Her struggles date back further than the start of conference play, though. Anderson was averaging 24.3 points per game entering UW's Dec. 4 game with UW-Milwaukee.

In the past six games she's seen her average drop to 18 per contest, shooting 27-for-87 (31 percent) for an average of 11.7 points per game during that span.

It's the most prolonged slump of her career.

"It's just not going in the basket," said Anderson, who came in early for practice Monday to shoot with assistant coach Donna Freitag. "They're right there. It's just a matter of I'm being short or I'm long. It's not a matter of like I'm air-balling every shot I take.

"It's just shots that I've been taking probably since I was in third grade. I've made a million of them. It's just the fact that they're not falling right now."

And it's not going to get any easier against Michigan State. The Spartans are giving up only 56.4 points per game -- they held preseason conference favorite Ohio State, the top scoring team in the league, to 53 points in a win Sunday -- and are limiting opponents to a Big Ten-best 35.3 shooting percentage.

And Michigan State has the conference's top shot blocker in 6-foot-9 sophomore center Allyssa DeHaan (4.93 per game).

"Eventually one of them will fall," Badgers senior forward Danielle Ward said, "and then that just breaks the ice and you know that it's just going to keep coming."