The Wisconsin Badgers had an ugly 90-60 loss to the No. 23 Nebraska Cornhuskers on Wednesday, marking the biggest loss under head coach Greg Gard.
It was a porous showing defensively, as the Badgers collapsed to end the first half and never recovered from there, marking their third double-digit loss of the season and second by more than 25 points.
After the game, head coach Greg Gard wasn’t pleased with his team’s defensive effort and shared some hard truths as Wisconsin heads into a nine-day break
before its next game.
Here is everything Gard said after the blowout loss to Nebraska.
On the team’s toughness…
“We don’t have a defensive identity. Haven’t had one all year. So we’ll search to find one, and I’ll find guys that want to play defense.
How?
“Sit guys on the bench. They’ll find out in the next nine days. We haven’t had a defensive identity all year, and everybody gets all rah rah about our offense, but it’s the other end of the floor that’s caused us the trouble for the most part. And obviously tonight it was, you know, credit to Nebraska. They beat us every way possible. There’s not another facet in the game of basketball that they couldn’t kick our rear end with. They did it all.”
On if Nebraska surprised them with anything…
“No, no, they’re playing well. Fred’s doing a good job. I mean, when you got Rienk Mast kind of anchoring that and quarterbacking, what they do offensively puts a lot of pressure on you. And when you’re not connected defensively, when you’re guarding individually instead of collectively as a team, they feast on that. Any good offensive team does.
On where the defense came up short…
“Maybe there at the end, I thought we had some better defensive possessions. Hayden Jones was in the game. He did what we wanted him to do and handle screens. So I’ll watch the film and really evaluate it from then. But there wasn’t.
“We started well, but then offensively, specifically, I thought we were doing some good things early and then we went completely away, what was treating us really well, and took bad shots, put them in transition, put them. Let Sanford get loose for some threes. Then we get back cut right away. Hoiberg gets a wide-open three. Just consistent mistakes that we’ve got nine days here to work on things.”
On the paint struggles…
“Yeah, we stopped moving the ball. I mean, and I’ll go through the film and see exactly where and when I’ve got a good idea, but I’m not going to make a comment until I verify it on film. But we stopped moving the ball. Our best possessions were possessions with the fewest amount of dribbles. And then when we did get to the paint, you know, we. We didn’t execute and finish like we could, or plant and find the open shooter.
“So, you know, we played into their hands. We did them a lot of favors from an offensive standpoint, from what we. How we executed early. We did. I thought we were good. We got the ball at the rim, hit some rollers. We were taking advantage of some of the things they were doing defensively. And then, for some reason, we decided to go away from it and stop moving the ball. And that led to a lot of bad offense.”
On why the defense is struggling with same concepts from years past…
“Well, it’s new guys. I mean, and sometimes it’s old guys. That’s the challenge every year. It doesn’t carry over from one year. You start over in terms of what you’re doing and what you’re building. Every year with the cause, roles have changed. You know, we’ve got a new, you know, two or three new guys in that starting lineup. But it’s not just the newcomers. It’s everybody.
“And I don’t know if anybody played, as I grayed out the tape, a great defensive night. I don’t think grades are going to be real high in terms of that, but that’s the problem. We were individually guarding and not guarding as a team. And when you do that, and the paint’s that wide open, that’s why you give up those wraps and those cuts to the rim. Because we’re not connected defensively. We’re too spread out.
“And that’s a credit to Nebraska, too. They got us spread out. The three. The fear of the three will do that to you. But I didn’t think we handled that well, really, any part of the game. But specifically in that stretch that back part of the first half.”
On how to be more physical and tough offensively…
“Well, if you get your shot blocked, that’s a bad decision. Shouldn’t have shot the ball. So you either need to pump fake and draw a foul, or that means you’ve drawn a lot of traffic, and one of your teammates is probably open. So, it’s the decisions.
“So, you know, Nolan went there twice. I thought the second one, I thought he got fouled on the first one. Yeah, he should have planted and played off two feet. When you’ve got the team bus coming at you and meeting you at the rim, odds are you’re not going to jump over them or go through them. So you have to make somebody else’s open. They’ve left to rotate multiple people to the rim for a reason, and that, you know, somebody else is open.
“So we didn’t do a good job of understanding that and spraying it and kicking it like we have earlier in part of the year. And again, we just got out of sorts. We. I don’t want to say we lost our minds, but we did. We got completely out of whack of who we have been or who we need to be to be successful.
On spiral after early start…
“I’ll look through the film, but I think we changed the types of shots we were getting and not. And it was to our undoing to see why we did that, why we chose to take some of the shots we did. You know, we just completely got away from what had been treating us well and what had been working the first five, six, seven minutes. And for whatever reason, we thought we were gonna solve the puzzle a different way, and it didn’t work.”
