The 20th-ranked Badgers men's basketball team (1-0) will look for a little California love this week as they take on two opponents from the Golden State.
The first game is tonight at 7 p.m., when the University of California-Santa Barbara (1-0) comes to the Kohl Center for what will be the first ever match up between the Badgers and the Gauchos.
The representatives of the Big West Conference enter Tuesday's game off an improbable 80-72 overtime win over San Diego State and for the second game in a row will only have nine men suited up for action.
With two starters out, the Gauchos will rely heavily on the productivity of junior Josh Davis, the reigning Big West Conference Player of the Week. Davis dropped in a career-high 18 points (hit four of five from three-point range) and nabbed four steals in the win over the Aztecs, but played a more important role in racking up minutes at three different positions within Head Coach Bob Williams' rotation-shooting guard, small forward and power forward.
Combined with senior forward Casey Cook, the team's leading returning scorer from last season (9.9 points per game), UC-Santa Barbara poses a formidable inside-outside combo, one area defensively the Badgers will look to control, but not exclusively.
\They have a pretty good post player who can score in a variety of ways and their guards seem to shoot the ball pretty well,"" UW senior guard Clayton Hanson said. ""So it'll be another battle with us sticking to our rules, handling screens and being able to play defense as a unit.""
""But with the system we have instilled right now, we aren't playing defense one guy on one guy, we're playing five guys versus the other team,"" Hanson added. ""We know each player's strength and weakness, but at this level, any player is capable of scoring points and taking over a game.""
One of the team principles the UW squad will have to improve upon is better ball control. The Badgers coughed up the rock 16 times versus Penn in the season opener, and will now face a UC-Santa Barbara team which tallied 13 steals versus San Diego State.
For the Badgers, their success is contingent on maintaining the flow of the game from the start and dictating possessions by either their motion offense or stifling defense-something they did extremely well versus the Quakers. In the game, UW shot 51.1 percent from the field (57.1 percent from beyond the arch) and scored 15 points off of turnovers to Penn's mere five. So for UW, it's going to come down to attacking the Gauchos' defense, early, often and on all different fronts.
""They don't beat themselves defensively,"" UW Head Coach Bo Ryan said. ""They play some zone. They play some man. It's sound. The best way to describe them is sound.""
Following Tuesday's contest with UC-Santa Barbara, the Badgers will head to Malibu, Calif. for a game with Pepperdine Saturday night.
