In the decisive final seconds of Tuesday night’s thriller, forwards Alando Tucker and Mike Wilkinson were the only Badgers to touch the ball. The pair combined for two misses, two offensive rebounds and the game-winner. It was a fitting end to a game that revolved around the frontcourt tandem.
Wilkinson and Tucker combined for 45 of Wisconsin’s 62 points. The rest of the team had 17. The Badger duo poured in a combined total of 16 field goals. The rest of the team had four.
“Tucker and Wilkinson, they stepped up and made plays,” Indiana head coach Mike Davis said. “On that last possession, Wilkinson got the first attempt and missed and then Tucker came and finished it up.”
With Wilkinson pouring in a game-high 28 points and Tucker matching Indiana’s leading scorer with 17, the two forwards were the difference Tuesday. On a day in which the Badgers saw little production from the perimeter, Wisconsin could not have survived without heroic performances from both of its post leaders. Fortunately for the Badgers, Wilkinson and Tucker were up to the task.
“We’d like to see some more scoring from the perimeter, but we’ll take it from any place we can get it,” Wisconsin head coach Bo Ryan said. “We aren’t known to have guards that can blow to the rim unless Kam (Taylor) can get on an open side, on a wide open side. Teams have known that after six, seven, eight, 10 games into our season. You got to stop those two guys (Wilkinson and Tucker).”
In the first half, Wilkinson was simply unstoppable. The forward exploded for 19 points on 8-for-9 shooting, including 3-for-3 from beyond the arc, in the opening stanza. The only shot he missed was a put-back as time expired, which barely rimmed out.
While Wilkinson shot 8-for-9 in the first half, the rest of the team shot 5-for-16. While Wilkinson shot 3-for-3 from 3-point range, the rest of the team shot 2-for-8.
“Well, I got some good looks,” Wilkinson said. “My teammates made some great passes and set me up with some good looks. I just knocked them down … I was just fortunate enough to get a couple looks with them being half a second slow, so I could get it off. They were just going down tonight.”
Wilkinson cooled off a bit in the second half, scoring a mere nine points, but Tucker picked up the slack with eight second-half points of his own. Simply put, Wilkinson and Tucker were the offense Tuesday. It should come as no surprise that they were the ones who closed it out with the game on the line.
Second-half struggles: In the first half, Wisconsin shot 52 percent from the field and 45.5 percent from beyond the arc. In the second half, the Badgers shot 29.2 percent from the field and 11.1 percent from beyond the arc.
As a result, a 37-30 halftime advantage dissolved into a 60-60 deadlock with 10 seconds to play before Tucker saved the day with his put-back at the buzzer.
The second-half meltdown even extended to the free-throw line, where the Badgers shot 66.7 percent in the first half and 55.6 percent in the second. But nowhere was it more apparent than from the perimeter. After knocking down five of 11 3-point attempts in the first half, the Badgers connected on just one of nine from long range in the second stanza.
“We didn’t force threes. We didn’t do that,” Ryan said. “I thought there were some pretty good looks there.”
The Badgers’ long-range struggles seemed to revolve around guard Clayton Hanson. Typically a reliable sniper from beyond the arc, Hanson missed all six of his 3-point attempts Tuesday.
“The looks that Clayton Hanson had, he’s knocked those threes down for four years and today he didn’t knock them down,” Ryan said.
Hanson did manage to redeem himself on the defensive end, however, teaming up with defensive specialist Michael Flowers to take Indiana standout Bracey Wright out of his game. Averaging 18.7 points per game coming into the contest, the Hoosiers’ leading scorer shot a dismal 3-for-13 from the field Tuesday, including 1-for-5 from 3-point range.
