Badgers look to rise to the occasion again
Can Wisconsin challenge Baylor? That has to be an slightly uncomfortable consideration for the Bears after the Badgers put together a complete game by dominating North Carolina on Friday night in the Round of 64 of the NCAA Tournament.
Wisconsin put up a whopping 85 points – 15 more than its season average per game – and had eight blocks, more than double its average.
Senior guard Brad Davison scorched UNC with 29 points, nearly triple his average of 10 per game.
It was a stunning performance all the way around for the Badgers.
“I hadn’t seen any (of that) explosiveness,” UNC forward Garrison Brooks said of Davison after the game. “But he showed it today, so that’s all that matters.”
These gaudy numbers are uncharacteristic for the Badgers, who spent the last month and a half navigating a brutal Big Ten schedule and falling out of the Top 25 national rankings. But this was not: The Badgers continued to protect each possession with very few turnovers and rebounded, especially on offense.
These are the things the Badgers must continue to do when they take on the top-seeded Bears at 1:40 p.m. Sunday.
“They’re obviously phenomenal,” Badgers coach Greg Gard said Friday night after the 85-62 victory in West Lafayette, Indiana. “It goes from playing a really good team ...
“To playing one of the nation’s best.” Indeed.
Baylor has only suffered two losses all season and features a guard-driven offense. Jared Butler, MaCio Teague and Davion Mitchell all average between 17 and 14 points for an offense that puts up 84.4 points a game. The Bears are one of the four top seeds in the tournament, and have been ranked among the top three teams all season.
Wisconsin simply cannot count on repeating its red-hot shooting performance against the Tar Heels when it faces the more talented Bears.
“Because shooting can be fleeting, as we’ve seen through this year,” said Gard.
Now more than ever, the Badgers must rely on defense. That’s what helped Wisconsin in the first half against UNC. Early steals and blocked shots by Wisconsin allowed senior guard D’Mitrik Trice to pick and choose whether to really push the ball up-tempo – something Wisconsin rarely does – or slow it down and control the possession by using the full 30-second shot clock.
Did you blink and miss it? Yes, there were a couple of fast breaks by Wisconsin to challenge the defense, and even resulting in points.
It was brilliant basketball.
And we’ve all waited for this: For the first time, Gard got to take his upperclassmen into the NCAA Tournament and see how their poise and leadership would hold up. Everyone was denied that opportunity in 2020 of course when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the tournament to be canceled.
This year finally Davison and Trice could put all that experience to good.
“Well, you hope it’s an advantage,” Gard said Friday night. “Obviously you still got to go play – experience does matter.”
It was exactly what North Carolina didn’t want to see happen. Last week, UNC forward/center Armando Bacot lamented that the Badgers could not be allowed open looks and could not jump out to a modest lead.
“Because they can really shoot the ball – and also not foul them because they’re such a good free throw shooting,” said Bacot. “We know we can’t turn the ball over, they kind of like slow pace of style so we got to really value the ball because usually they’ll have 18 seconds of possession which makes them one of the top 10 slowest teams. We got to really value every possession, because this will be a slower game.”
That’s exactly what happened in the first half when the Tar Heels had four turnovers in their first 13 possessions and UW had none. With great timing, playing their best basketball of the season at the very end, the Badgers finally put together a full 40 minutes to maintain that lead and never allow the Tar Heels back in the game.
“Absolutely, our defense was great during the first half, forcing turnovers, blocked shots but also limiting them to one shot,” said Davison. “Ultimately, you can take advantage of getting out in transition and getting easy shots. We always say that good defensive leads to is a great offense.
“There was some defensive lapses there in the second half where their bigs were getting downhill or getting get good position. But you know what, in March, when you’re up by a lot, teams are going try to come back and you got to you got to take their punches, kind of got to roll with them, but you got to throw some back.”
Baylor will be an entirely different challenge with one of the best backcourts in the country – if not the best – that scores in bunches. And Wisconsin will have only a day to prepare.
In doing so, the Badgers must rely on the three tenets of Gard’s program and hope the shots fall.
“We defended pretty well,” said Gard. “We rebounded. We took care of the ball. We don’t really talk about making shots. We talk about defending, rebounding and taking care of the ball.
“Those are really the three primary foundational pieces we talk about the most. Shooting can be fleeting, as we’ve seen through this year. There are going to be nights that you have a hard time scoring and then there’s nights like (Friday night).”