Winning their second game in a row in dramatic comeback fashion Sunday, the Wisconsin men’s basketball team will be painted by many as a resilient group that keeps finding ways to win, despite missing its leading inside presence in junior forward Jon Leuer.
While resilient sounds nice, stubborn might be more accurate.
In the four game stretch since Leuer has been sidelined, the Badgers have hoisted 109 threes — an average of 27 per game — and have connected on a weak 27 percent. Compounding the poor 3-point shooting, Wisconsin has only attempted 103 two-point field goals during the same four-game run.
Still, with a 3-1 record over the past two weeks, UW has little plan on changing their offensive strategy.
“We have struggled, but we have gotten good looks,” UW senior guard Jason Bohannon, who finished the game with 13 points on 3-of-10 shooting from beyond the arc, said. “It’s not a matter of getting good looks, we should get the ball in the paint a little bit more through penetration or post touches, but we have been getting good looks… it is just a matter of us hitting them.”
Wisconsin head coach Bo Ryan was even more adamant in his defense of the team’s perimeter-happy offense.
“When people start asking about [three-pointers] I go, ‘alright, what did we shoot in this one?'” Ryan said. “Thirty-three. Maybe next game we will shoot 40. Or ten.
“We are going to try and take whatever we can get, and if people are going to want to shut down certain things, then we are going to want to find next.”
With the Badgers trending towards bombing from downtown as it was, Penn State forced UW to settle for jumpers by mixing defense between straight man-to-man and a 2-3 zone. Usually employing the zone after made baskets, the Nittany Lions packed in behind the three-point line to cut off dribble penetration, practically daring UW to fire away from the outside.
From a statistical standpoint, the defense was effective. Wisconsin finished the game shooting a paltry 43 percent from the field and a mediocre 30.3 percent from 3-point range.
“We tried to change rhythm on them,” Penn State head coach Ed DeChellis said.
“We thought that was going to be important for us.”
As Ryan constantly likes to remind the media, stats don’t tell the whole story, and the Badgers came through with big threes when it mattered most.
Trimming a 16-point deficit to one in a little over four minutes time, UW nailed three long distance attempts in the scoring barrage to force themselves back in the game. Five minutes later, Jordan Taylor hit two threes on successive possessions before forcing overtime with a two-point jumper.
As the clich? goes, live by the three and die by the three; UW was just able to survive tonight.
“Now that I have grandkids I am studying when they get that board — you know, that has triangles, circles, squares,” Ryan said launching into a story. “My mom said that if it didn’t fit, I made it fit. I pounded it until I broke it into pieces and I could fit it in… our guys do not get frustrated.
“They don’t pound a hammer to make a square go into a round hole… if people are taking away one thing you have to find another.”
Taylor hero this time around
Taylor finished the game against Penn State with a stat line showing 20 points, solid shooting percentages, six assists, zero turnovers and three steals.
While those numbers are impressive in any circumstance, the fact that Taylor was mired in a 0-for-18 shooting slump that stretched over 88 minutes of game time makes the sudden explosion even more noteworthy.
While senior guard Trevon Hughes usually plays the hero late in games — and he was still sharp today scoring five crucial points in overtime — Taylor got his turn this time, delivering UW’s final eight points of regulation and forcing PSU star guard Talor Battle into a contested jumper for what would have been the game winner.
“I hadn’t made a shot in three halves, almost four, so I figured one has to go down eventually,” Taylor said. “I was just trying to keep shooting, and fortunately I started to get hot a little bit.”
