Wisconsin men’s basketball: post-game reactions from Greg Gard, Aleem Ford and D’Mitrik Trice

The No. 6 Wisconsin Badgers fell to the Maryland Terrapins on Monday night at the Kohl Center. Here are the post-game reactions from head coach Greg Gard and seniors D’Mitrik Trice and Aleem Ford.

D’Mitrik Trice

• On if he was surprised about how they played, “Yeah, honestly I really am. We came out kinda flat and we didn’t really stick to the game plan of what we wanted to do which was establish the post early and it came back to bite us especially in the second half.”
• On not getting it into the post, “Yeah, I think early on we definitely settled for threes and deep twos.”
• On what the Badgers can do to gain offensive consistency, “I think the biggest thing, obviously we have a lot of shooters, but I think it is getting it into the post and establishing that post presence early in the game.”

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• On their defense, “We gave up way too many points in the second half.”
• Trice noted, after a question about “holding serve at home” in the Big Ten, that there is still a game at Maryland that they’ll have to pickup to counteract the home loss.

Greg Gard

• “Obviously, credit to Maryland.”
• “I just didn’t think we were ever in sync.”
• “I didn’t think we established ourselves in the paint well enough.”
• “We left a lot of points at the line.”
• These first four quotes are all from Gard’s opening statement and they kind of sum up all the reasons that Wisconsin lost.

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• On Maryland scoring in the paint, “The lineups they played...playing as small as they did...we had some busted coverages. I thought we were a step slow on both ends of the court.”
• On Wisconsin’s post play, “Early tonight I think we didn’t throw it in. We had guys open.”

“Whether it’s not seeing it or not trusting it to throw it. We don’t shoot enough free throws from positions that should shoot a lot of free throws.”

• On some of the lineups that Maryland rolled out, “They played small...and I think that gave us trouble, even when we went to lineups with only one big.”
• “We gave them some confidence and the fed off that.”
• More on the lineups that Maryland used, “I was about to go smaller but then Nate (Reuvers) started making some plays against the zone. Then they had Donta Scott at the five, who is probably a three, and had four guards around him.”
• On Reuvers struggling with fading away on some shots in the paint, although Gard doesn’t single him out in his answer, “We need to be more aggressive in the paint. We need to be more forceful.”

Aleem Ford

• “We knew they were going to come in and be hungry.” Ford went on to say that they didn’t really match Maryland’s energy.

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• On how Maryland’s offense made things difficult for their defense, “As a team defense we weren’t in the right spots for each other.”
• On Maryland switching up their defensive looks, “They did a good job of mixing it up on us where we couldn’t get into a rhythm offensively.”