Sports

Crowd roars as Badgers soar

The Kohl Center might not have been full and the game may have been little more than just a 5-on-5, but it sure didn't sound like it at the Wisconsin men's basketball team's Cardinal-White scrimmage on Tuesday night.

With an entertaining, hard-fought scrimmage followed by a slam-dunk contest, the almost 4,000 in attendance were on their feet and rowdy in the Badgers' initial on-court appearance of the season.

"For a Tuesday night … there are a lot of things to do in Madison," head coach Bo Ryan said. "A lot of the reason that these young men came here is for this atmosphere in the Kohl Center, even for something like this. Just to get the lights on, the scoreboard on and get the noise going in there, that's what a lot of them are here to experience. They love it."

The evenly matched Cardinal and White squads battled in a high-energy 72-69 victory by the pale shirts.

"I thought the fact that you get in a close game like this … is similar to what we do in our situations [in practice]," Ryan said.

Star forward Alando Tucker of the White team led all scorers as the senior dropped 22 points on an impressive 10-14 shooting, including hitting two of three from beyond the arc.

"Tucker's still tough to stop," Ryan said, adding that Tucker's work in the offseason showed. "In order to be a good perimeter shooter you can't shoot line drives and he's worked on that and looked pretty good today."

Cardinal starters Brian Butch and Jason Chappell both had 18 points and pulled down 20 rebounds between them, with Butch grabbing nine and Chappell 11.

Most impressive, however, was the play of the Badgers who weren't on the court when UW last played as a team in front of fans. Greg Stiemsma and Marcus Landry — both ineligible for the second half of the season a year ago — gave fans reason to believe they won't suffer from any rustiness, while several Wisconsin newcomers also looked good.

"I thought it was kept very equal simply because the younger guys really played well," Ryan said. "I thought they played better than expected for their first time out on the floor, guys like [Jason] Bohannon and [Trevon Hughes]."

Landry, wearing protective goggles, was active, blocking four shots and tallying four points, drawing "oohs" and "ahs" from the crowd, and Stiemsma, sporting a Mohawk, reeled in six boards and picked up a block of his own.

"I thought he was just prematurely balding on the sides," Ryan joked of Stiemsma's hairdo.

After the game, the fans were treated to a show — or at least were supposed to be — as five members of the Badgers participated in a slam-dunk contest. Marcus Landry, Jason Bohannon, Kammron Taylor, Morris Cain and Trevon Hughes were the contestants in what was one of the ugliest slam-dunk contests in history, as dunk after dunk was missed, until Landry stole the show.

"There aren't too many dunks that Hughes or Bohannon had in games … same thing with [Cain] and Michael," Ryan mentioned, comparing the skywalker Landry to the competition. "Maybe it was a setup for Marcus to win. You never know."

Landry, looking about as focused and intense as a guy at the Laundromat, proceeded to throw down two 360-degree spinning dunks off a bounce to score a perfect 60 and win a somewhat hollow victory. The team's resident dunk-master, Tucker, did not officially partake in the festivities, though at the encouragement of the fans he did give an encore to the show, jamming home a lightning-fast reverse tomahawk.