Members of the Wisconsin men’s basketball team walked off the Kohl Center floor the night of Jan. 3 having racked up yet another victory, this time withstanding a late comeback attempt from rival Minnesota to improve to 11-2 and 3-0 in the Big Ten. The Badgers had ascended one day earlier to No. 14 in the AP Top 25 and seemed destined for an NCAA Tournament berth with a gritty group of tough-minded competitors. A typical Wisconsin team.
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No way the Badgers, who simply needed to hover near the .500 mark the rest of the way, would miss the Big Dance. Right?
Well …
Wisconsin finished the regular season 6-11 to plummet to 12th in the league. Then, clinging to its NCAA Tournament life as one of the last potential bubble teams in, it fell behind by 27 points to Ohio State in a Big Ten Tournament opener and lost 65-57. Wisconsin didn’t manage consecutive victories at any point after Jan. 3.
By the time Selection Sunday arrived, Wisconsin’s fate was a foregone conclusion. The Badgers missed the NCAA Tournament for just the second time since 1998 and the first time since 2018 in head coach Greg Gard’s third season in charge. Wisconsin (17-14) will instead play host to Bradley (25-9) in the first round of the NIT at 8:30 p.m. CT Tuesday.
In retrospect, this was a team that overachieved early in the season and fooled everybody into believing it was better than expected. Still, it also should’ve been capable of doing enough to avoid this kind of finish.
Over the last month alone, Wisconsin lost at home by two points to Northwestern, allowing the Wildcats to sweep the season series for the first time since 1995-96. The Badgers blew a 17-point lead to Nebraska and lost in overtime. They lost by one point at home to Rutgers. They squandered a late lead by surrendering the game-tying 3-pointer at the regulation buzzer to Michigan’s Hunter Dickinson in another overtime defeat. They lost a neck-and-neck battle at home by two points to No. 5 Purdue. And then they faltered in the conference tournament.
Gard acknowledged afterward that his team “had a lot of opportunities to put ourselves in position” for the NCAA Tournament.
“There’s been a lot of lessons that haven’t been pleasant to go through that these guys have experienced,” Gard told reporters after the Ohio State loss. “We obviously have maturing to do in some of these areas, and we’ve seen that. I think that’s the one thing with younger teams is the inconsistency, and sometimes we change colors right within a game. …
“That’s always a challenge with a younger group to have them understand that and always approach it that way and it usually comes more natural and more consistent with older guys. So that’s something I’ve got to help them with. Leadership has to grow organically within. There’s a lot of hurtful lessons this year that we’ve had to go through that have stung that we have to bottle and use to our advantage.”
A loss to Ohio State sealed Wisconsin’s NIT fate. (Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)So, what do we make of this season, Gard’s role in its failures and what he needs to do to fix them?
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Gard said he couldn’t question his team’s effort, but the lack of consistency was clear. He is responsible for maximizing and developing the potential of his best players. Too often, the three leaders who were supposed to carry the team — forwards Steven Crowl and Tyler Wahl and point guard Chucky Hepburn — disappeared for key stretches. Wahl struggled to regularly finish at the rim most of the season. He shot 43.6 percent on 2-pointers after connecting on 56.9 percent of those attempts last season. Hepburn scored six points or fewer in four of the last seven games and shot 33.8 percent from the field in that stretch. He missed more shots from the field than he made in 18 of Wisconsin’s last 19 games.
Crowl, meanwhile, had some outstanding performances and made big strides during his junior season. Yet he was timid during critical stretches, and Gard said his most significant jump needed to be becoming more “assertive and aggressive” and looking to score rather than “always looking to pass.”
Wisconsin wasn’t built to blow out many teams and played 18 games that were decided by five points or fewer — the most by a major conference team since at least 2009-10 — and a school-record six overtime games, which meant the Badgers needed to regularly be at their best. A major problem for Wisconsin’s team this season, however, was that when its stars faltered or were unavailable, Gard didn’t have a deep enough bench to help the Badgers through the Big Ten gauntlet. Wahl and guard Max Klesmit missed a combined five games due to injuries, and the Badgers went 0-5. Gard needed to secure more help in the frontcourt from the transfer portal during the offseason and was unable to do so.
As a result, the only reliable reserve frontcourt player at Gard’s disposal was former walk-on Carter Gilmore, who got the most out of his talent but contributed minimally from a statistical standpoint. He played 18.5 minutes per game and averaged 2.8 points and 2.3 rebounds. Neither Markus Ilver nor Chris Hodges was ready to be a major contributor. The lone reserves to average more than 7.1 minutes per game were Gilmore and guard Jordan Davis, who lost his starting job midway through the season. Guard Jahcobi Neath, a potential contributor, appeared in just three games and underwent season-ending hip surgery.
Gard found himself in a difficult spot because he lost three players to the transfer portal after last season. Backup point guard Lorne Bowman transferred to Oakland University, forward Matthew Mors transferred to South Dakota State and forward Ben Carlson transferred to Utah. Carlson, a four-star prospect and the top-rated Badgers signee in the 2020 class, was a particularly difficult loss because of his potential.
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This figured to be a transition year of sorts anyway after Wisconsin lost an NBA lottery pick in guard Johnny Davis, a consensus first-team All-American last season, as well as five-year starting guard Brad Davison. Gard added Klesmit from Wofford to help offset Davison’s loss, but that simply wasn’t enough.
“I can’t say that I didn’t know, I didn’t see this coming in terms of just things we had to grow through,” Gard said. “And the only way you grow through it is you have to go through it. Adversity and some of those adjectives that align with that are most often our best teachers. They have to go through it and understand how important you name it is in order to be a good team and be a good, consistent team.”
Given the way this season spiraled, a faction of Wisconsin’s passionate fan base has, not for the first time, called for Gard to be fired. Athletic director Chris McIntosh has shown in less than two years on the job that he isn’t afraid to make difficult decisions and dismiss head coaches for poor performance. He fired Paul Chryst five games into last season with the Badgers at 2-3, marking the first time Wisconsin’s head football coach had been dismissed in the middle of a season. Last week, he fired men’s hockey coach Tony Granato, whose final record in seven seasons was 105-129-16.
I would never say never with McIntosh after what happened during the football season. But Gard’s situation strikes me as different. Gard has earned a share of the Big Ten regular season title twice in the past four seasons (2020 and 2022), picking up league coach of the year honors on each occasion. Chryst never won a Big Ten title in football and did not qualify for the conference championship game over his last three seasons, with the program clearly trending in the wrong direction.
Granato’s hockey team did win a Big Ten regular season championship two years ago, and he was named the league’s coach of the year twice. But, unlike Gard, Granato’s teams did not show a generally consistent pattern of success. Granato made just one NCAA Tournament appearance and went 23-47-3 overall and 12-35-1 in the Big Ten over the past two seasons.
It’s important to note that an occasional dip happens for even the most successful college basketball programs. Virginia coach Tony Bennett’s team, three seasons removed from winning a national championship, missed the NCAA Tournament last year. John Calipari’s Kentucky team missed the NCAA Tournament two years ago, finishing seven games under .500. Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke team missed the tournament that same season.
The good news for Wisconsin is that, despite the results this season, there is reason for optimism about the future.
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Klesmit, who started every game in which he was available in his first season at Wisconsin, will be back for his senior season. So will Crowl. Hepburn, a two-year starter, will be a junior. Shooting guard Connor Essegian, a gem of a recruiting find, set the program’s freshman record for made 3-pointers and has tremendous upside. Wahl has the option to come back for a fifth season and hasn’t publicly announced his decision, but the Badgers should have at least four starters returning.
Four-star Class of 2023 signee Gus Yalden, a 6-foot-8 and 240-pound forward, is coming into the program with the potential to immediately help. Forward Nolan Winter and combo guard John Blackwell also are signed to provide depth.
Gard has shown before when his back is up against a wall that he can do some of his best coaching. He turned a .500 team into a Sweet 16 team to earn the full-time job in 2016 after replacing Bo Ryan at midseason. His 2020 team, seemingly dead in the water in early February, surged to eight consecutive wins to earn a share of the regular season league title. His 2022 team, picked to finish 10th in the Big Ten and dealing with the fallout from leaked audio of a private meeting between seniors airing their grievances with Gard the previous season, again earned a share of the regular season crown.
Missing the NCAA Tournament at Wisconsin in any season stings because of the program’s proud tradition of success. Gard, like his players, must now use the lessons learned this season to ensure that what happened doesn’t become a trend. McIntosh and Wisconsin fans understandably demand it.
(Top photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)
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