From the moment he took over as interim head coach, Greg Gard has been fighting an uphill battle.
Taking over for a coach as iconic as Bo Ryan was always going to be tough, but replacing him in the midst of the Badgers’ worst start in 14 years made his task all the more difficult.
A radical shift in philosophy was never going to be on the table for Gard, who spent 23 years as an assistant under Ryan, but there have been significant changes in the way he coaches this team when compared to his predecessor.
Of these changes that Gard has made since taking over in late December, none have been more pivotal than the switch back to a swing offense and an increased reliance on the bench.
For years, the swing offense was a staple of Bo Ryan-coached teams. Whether it was at Platteville, Milwaukee or Madison, the swing offense was the bread and butter of each of his teams. But recently, the Badgers had deviated from the swing, instead altering their game plan to focus on getting the ball in the hands of players like Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker as much as possible.
With so much personnel turnover from last year’s team, a return to the swing seemed like a smart move given the amount of inexperienced, unproven players that Wisconsin would be relying on this season. Instead, the Badgers were overly dependent on Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig on the offensive end, resulting in plenty of stagnancy and struggles on that end of the floor.
But under Gard, Wisconsin has once again implemented the swing offense in the hopes of getting more movement and fluidity on offense and less standing around and waiting for Hayes or Koenig to make a play.
The Badgers still have their fair share of struggles on offense (it’s a seemingly predestined fate for a team this young), but the offense as a whole has looked better and Hayes’ efficiency has improved without the weight of the team resting on his back. In the 12 games this season under Ryan, Hayes shot 35.9 percent from the field. In the seven games since Gard took over, he’s shot 44.4 percent. As a team, UW shot 41.2 percent under Ryan compared to a 45.5 percent mark with Gard at the helm.
While Hayes has had a couple of poor performances over the past month, including a two-game stretch against Rutgers and Indiana that saw him go 5-20 from the floor, he’s clearly benefited from the offense getting greater contributions from a wider variety of players, including some that rarely saw the floor under Ryan.
Despite Hayes and Koenig being the only returning starters from last season’s team, Ryan mainly relied on a rotation of seven or eight players this year, with freshmen Charlie Thomas and Khalil Iverson being the only two to see significant playing time off the bench.
Gard, on the other hand, has been more reliant on his bench, with the main benefactors being freshman forward Alex Illikainen and sophomore guard Jordan Hill. Whereas Illikainen appeared in 10 of 12 games and averaged 4.8 minutes per game under Ryan, he’s played in all seven games of Gard’s tenure while averaging 16 minutes per game. Meanwhile, Hill played in just seven of the 12 games Ryan coached this season, averaging only 3.9 minutes per game, but has played in all seven games under Gard and has averaged 20.7 minutes per game.
Even redshirt sophomore forward Aaron Moesch, who mainly served as Bo Ryan’s human victory cigar, has seen some playing time under Gard, including 12 minutes in Sunday’s win against No. 4 Michigan State, which his coach attributes to his mastery of the swing offense.
As a whole, 19.18 percent of the team’s minutes came from the bench during the 12 games coached by Ryan, while that number has risen to 27 percent with Gard patrolling the sidelines. If you remove games where Wisconsin won by 15 or more points, those numbers change to 16.38 percent with Ryan and 26.5 percent with Gard.
Though the Badgers have only registered a 3-4 record under Gard, their average margin of defeat is 3.75 points and came against a quartet of Big Ten foes (Purdue, Maryland, Indiana and Northwestern) that have combined to go 62-12 this season. And they finally broke through Saturday afternoon at the Kohl Center, pulling out a 77-76 win over the Spartans thanks to a late bucket from Ethan Happ.
Whether or not that victory proves to be a turning point in the season for the Badgers as they look to reassemble the pieces of their tattered NCAA Tournament résumé remains to be seen. But with Gard’s emphasis on the swing offense and getting major contributions from the bench, they appear to be trending in the right direction.
