Wisconsin men’s basketball: shooting your shot

The Badgers struggled from three on Saturday against Ohio State. You saw it during the game, you read about it after the game and you’re probably sick of hearing about it again, HOWEVAH, it was interesting to hear head coach Greg Gard and basically all players interviewed say that the shots were good shots.

Below we’ve got some quotes from Gard as well as seniors Micah Potter and Brad Davison as they close the book on the Ohio State game and look ahead to Wednesday night’s road tilt with the Maryland Terrapins.

Micah Potter

• On Maryland playing “small” on offense, “When you’ve got five guys who can handle the ball like that it’s very tough. Going back to the fundamentals of defense. Against a team like this it doesn’t change.”
• On consistency or lack thereof, “You wanna be playing your best basketball in March. This is a learning process...obviously we are not as consistent as we’d like to be.” He called Big Ten deepest league in the country.
• On freshman Steven Crowl, “Steve is just a guy that brings it every singe day. He’s gotten stronger...mentally it’s his ability to be patient. As he gets stronger it’ll make him that much more dominant. His biggest thing is he’s got a good feel for the game. Defensively he’s super long so it’s hard to get shots over him.”
• On Nate Reuvers breaking out of his slump, “Honestly with Nate, the biggest thing that he’s started to do well is be more patient. When you’re kinda in a slump, picking the right spots and picking your shots is important. Just simplifying his game.”

Greg Gard

• In his opening statement, he mentioned that they’ll be staying on the road between the Maryland and Penn State games.
• On defensive adjustments from the first game against Maryland, “Dribble penetration, keep the ball out of the paint. Because of how they play and matchup-wise there are a lot of challenges. Against Minnesota they played exceptionally small. We gotta be better on the ball in terms of containing dribble penetration initially.”
• On shot selection vs. Ohio State, “In analyzing all the shots...there’s a point in time too where you don’t want to over-analyze it and micro-manage shot selection because then you have players second guessing. There were 11 or 12, maybe 13 that I would take every day of the week that were wide open, and I’m talking wide open. There were five or six, no don’t take at a give time...but by and large I thought we had some exceptional good looks. I thought that watching it live and after watching the film a few times.”

“What’s the type of shot that we’re getting? The ones that are going in are the ones that we are stepping into, running into, ten toes to the rim, the ball is coming from inside out. The type of shot impacts the percentage more than anything else.”

• On how the defense has grown over the last month, “You always hope you’re better, but there were some things defensively Saturday that we need to be better at. Although Ohio State did hit an inordinate amount of tougher twos, challenge twos, but we still have to be better.”
• On Steven Crowl, “I like him. I think he’s gonna be a really good player here. I like the trek he’s on, I like how much he has improved. He’s a handful cuz he’s so skilled, passes it really well got a great feel for the game. Gotta get stronger. He’s off to a very good start.”

Brad Davison

• On what needs to change defensively against Maryland, “Way too many points in the paint. Definitely remember them getting to the rim a lot.”
• Davison said they’re looking to “string a few together and get on a roll” instead of winning two and then losing one.
• On the balance between shooting threes and working it inside, “We always say ‘averages average out’ so you can’t stop shooting. We don’t necessarily talk about twos and threes, we talk about good shots.”
• On Nate Reuvers bouncing back, “We know that he can play better and he will.”