The Wisconsin Badgers were embarrassed on the road last week in a 90-60 loss to the Nebraska Cornhuskers, marking the worst loss of the Greg Gard era.
While Wisconsin was ice-cold from three, what was even more appalling was the lack of effort defensively, which Gard was not happy about after the game.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday ahead of Wisconsin’s matchup against the Villanova Wildcats, Gard broke down the film and shared what he thought about the defense.
“Well, a lot of work on the defensive
side of the ball,” Gard acknowledged. “A lot of film work when we got back on Thursday, took time to really peel that apart and sit and talk the guys through everything with it. And then a lot of, you know, we’ve had to bounce around final schedules here too, so a lot of time on that end. And quite frankly, we got play harder. You can solve a lot and cover a lot of warts if you play harder. And that’s something I didn’t think we did.
“When I watched it in person, and going through the film, it was obvious. I felt that we needed to just play with more bite to us. And good teams will make you look foolish if you don’t. And secret: I don’t want to take anything Nebraska, but we got way out of character from who we need to be and how hard we need to play, because we play hard. We’re a pretty good team. When we don’t, and I think you see that anywhere in the country, if you’re not where you need to be, teams are just too good. It’s not the physicality. I don’t think it was the physicality. And it’s all about playing harder. And when you don’t play hard, it looks like you’re not physical. And when you play hard, your physicality comes out. You just engage more. So we just have to play. The biggest thing is playing harder will cure a lot of the ills.”
How did the Badgers address that in practice this week?
“You continue. They come back and practice pretty well. And then you got to make sure you take the steps forward,” Gard continued. “For whatever reason, we didn’t bring it like we need to bring it and like we had before. It better be an anomaly. And then you shuffle guys in that understand how important that is. But we just also got disconnected. Did we not handle success well from the week before? Do we not handle adversity well? If they make a run on us, we don’t punch back. So we’ve got to mature and grow in those areas, and starts with just playing harder.”
Who has been doing things right defensively?
“For the most part, we’ve been decently doing the right things,” Gard said. “I think [Jack] Janicki has been solid. [Andrew] Rohde has been very solid. I don’t know if I found anybody really consistently from last week’s game, but like I said, that better be an anomaly, and we’ll move past it and learn from it.
“But I think they understand just how important the spacing is. And when we get spread out, the lane opens up, and we end up with too much. Even though we made 11 threes, it wasn’t the threes. It was all the stuff at the rim. So we’ve just got to understand and be more connected. I mentioned after the game: we guarded like we were guarding individually instead of as a team. And it looked like it on film, too. We were hugging our guys way away from the basket, way away from the rim. You know, just completely got completely away with how we had been and how we were going to need to be going forward. So, just re-emphasizing all those things under how important the team concept of our defensive scheme is.”
Wisconsin now turns to the 8-2 Villanova Wildcats, who are led by a young backcourt in sophomore Bryce Lindsay and freshman Acaden Lewis. They haven’t played too many games against top competition, but Villanova lost to BYU by only five and has beaten Pitt by 18. They’ve also lost to Michigan badly in a 89-61 blowout.
Villanova has averaged over 80 points a game, while shooting over 47 percent from the field and over 36 percent from deep. So, Wisconsin will need to show some improvements defensively in another marquee matchup.
