The Wisconsin Badgers finished off their year at the Kohl Center with a bang, beating the Maryland Terrapins 78-45 in a blowout at home to improve to 21-9 on the year and 13-6 in Big Ten play.
While the crowd was electric on Senior Night, it wasn’t all good news for the Badgers, as starting center Nolan Winter left the game with an apparent ankle injury after a putback layup. Winter went down after the score, grabbing at his ankle, and was tended to by trainers for several minutes before being helped
to the locker room.
That instantly created worry in the building, as the Big Ten Tournament is coming up next week, with the NCAA Tournament after that. After the game, head coach Greg Gard alleviated some of those concerns, noting that the hope is they avoided the worst with Winter’s injury.
“We’ll know more tomorrow,“ Gard said about Winter. ”Early indications, hopefully we avoided the worst. We’ll see where everything with the testing and stuff goes tomorrow and the evaluation goes tomorrow. We will know more in 24 hours or so.
“But obviously, he hasn’t rolled that ankle. It’s the other one that’s been [hurt before]. Always when you do that the first time, there is always an extra amount of pain. We’ll see. He was in decent spirits in the locker room and stuff. So, he’s already doing treatment, and we’ll see what we learn tomorrow, and then have a path forward to getting him healed up.”
Winter has been dealing with ankle issues recently, but none seemed as serious as Wednesday’s injury. Still, that’s a good sign from Gard with the early outlook.
The Badgers finish off their season against the Purdue Boilermakers this weekend, with a chance at a top-four seed still alive if they get some help. After that comes the Big Ten Tournament, with the NCAA Tournament to follow. We’ll see soon how the Badgers handle Winter’s injury, but it wouldn’t be a surprise for them to err on the side of caution to get him as healthy as possible for March Madness.
