The Wisconsin Badgers suffered a humiliating 90-60 loss to the No. 23 Nebraska Cornhuskers on Wednesday in a game that was close for the first 15 minutes before the latter broke open.
Wisconsin really struggled defensively and seemed like their effort was much lower than usual as they had the worst loss of the Greg Gard era.
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After the game, the coach was not happy, pointing out the defensive effort and the lack of identity on that side of the field.
“We don’t have a defensive identity. We haven’t had one all year. So we’ll look for one and find guys that want to play defense.”
How exactly will Gard do that?
“Sit the guys on the bench. You’ll find out over the next nine days. We haven’t had a defensive identity all year, and everyone gets mad at our offense, but it’s the other end of the floor that gave us the problem for the most part. And obviously tonight was, you know, credit to Nebraska. They beat us in every way possible. There’s no other facet of the game of basketball that they couldn’t kick our ass with. They did it all.”
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Wisconsin has already done that, benching Austin Rapp for Aleksas Bieliauskas, which seemed like a good move from the start.
There were some better moments, particularly when Hayden Jones was on the court for the Badgers late, but it was an ugly turn at the end of the first half for the Badgers.
“Maybe at the end I thought we had some better defensive possessions,” Gard said. “Hayden Jones was in the game. He did what we wanted him to do and he handled the screens. So I’ll watch the film and really evaluate it from then on. But it wasn’t like that.
“We started off good, but then offensively, specifically, I thought we were doing some good things early, and then we got completely off track, which was treating us really well, and we took bad shots, we put them in transition, we put them up. We let Sandfort loose for some 3s. Then they cut us off right away. Hoiberg hits an open 3. Just consistent mistakes, we’ve got nine days here to work on things.”
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While these might be more of the most talented teams Greg Gard has ever had, there is surely a lot to figure out. Wisconsin has a nine-day break before its next game next Friday against Butler in Indianapolis. We’ll see how much they change going into that one.