SPORTS
Men’s basketball nearly folding under the pressure
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Also by Drew Hansen:
- Wisconsin stuns No. 12 Maryland (December 1, 2004)
- Bo's Badgers roll in 2004 opener (November 22, 2004)
- Wisconsin prepares for Maryland's athleticism (November 30, 2004)
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- Badger basketball anxious to take on familiar foe (November 19, 2002)
- Men's basketball wrap-up (May 6, 2004)
- Wisconsin readies for in-state battle (December 14, 2004)
- Panthers claw into NCAA tourney (March 12, 2003)
by Drew Hansen
Monday, November 25, 2002
Every basketball team has a weakness. Sometimes it is hard to find such a flaw in the opposition. Other times it is painfully obvious. Saturday night at the Kohl Center, the UW-Milwaukee Panthers found that flaw in the Badgers, exploiting the team’s ineffectiveness when faced with full-court pressure.
Going back to last season’s NCAA tournament, the Badgers looked extremely ineffective against the full-court pressures of Maryland and St. John’s. Though the Badgers went on to defeat the Red Storm 80-70, they watched a larger lead slip away once head coach Mike Jarvis turned up the pressure.
Two days later, the Badgers faced the Maryland Terrapins and stuck with the rising champs for the first half before the Terps brought the pressure and cruised away with an 87-57 win.
The same held true this past weekend against UW-Milwaukee, as the Badgers were swallowed up by the Panther pressure late in the game. The Badgers squandered a 22-point lead with less than 10 minutes remaining in the second half to see the Panthers come within five points in the game’s final minute and a half.
“I give a lot of credit to those guys,” Devin Harris said. “They turned up the pressure tremendously in those last couple of minutes. We didn’t do some of the things we needed to do, like take care of the ball. We had three or four turnovers that we shouldn’t have had.”
The Panthers scored 22 points off 13 Badger turnovers, as Milwaukee star forward Clay Tucker found his shooting touch in the second half. Sophomore forward Mike Wilkinson had a hard time making in-bound passes under the Panther pressure, as it seemed Milwaukee had a fix on the entire Kohl Center floor. But for Tucker and company, their push came just a little too late.
“It was too far away when we made our run,” UW-Milwaukee head coach Bruce Pearl said. “We just couldn’t get over the hump. Part of it was the fatigue factor, in the sense that the pressure going to work late in the half, and late in the game — it sort of takes its toll. We made plays with the pressure that we weren’t making in the first half.”
Fortunately for the Badgers, Devin Harris and Kirk Penney were able to draw fouls and get to the line and counter the Panther push.
“We made a few decisions that we wanted to have back,” Badger head coach Bo Ryan said. “If they are aggressive, you have to keep making hard cuts and get to the free-throw line. Fortunately we did, and stepped to the line and hit them.”
To counter the Panther pressure, Ryan implemented a smaller lineup that was used earlier in the season against Eastern Washington. By going with a four-guard lineup, the Badgers were able to spread the floor and use their quickness to open holes in the Panther defense.
A big contribution to the smaller lineup was the addition of freshman guard Boo Wade into press break.
“[Wade] did an excellent job — he makes good decisions,” Ryan said. “He’s been in tough environments with the high school program that he played for, and he didn’t rattle. I liked the things he did.”
“It makes it a lot easier when you have another point guard in the game,” Harris said. “You can stretch the floor and hit either the middle of the floor or the wing, and it makes things a lot easier for me as well as Freddie and the other guys, so we don’t have to work so hard when we spread the floor a little bit more.”
Though Wade only accounted for three of the Badgers’ 83 points, his calmness under pressure played a big part in helping the Badgers avoid the upset.
“We hit a spell with that ‘banana’ press, where it comes in bunches when you turn it over,” Ryan said. “In practice I can simulate some things, but when it happens quickly you rattle a little bit until you experience it.”
After their first brush with the full-court press on the season, the Badgers will work on mending their problems in practice, hoping their first major problem of the season will be one of their last.
