Bronson Koenig might be the best 3-point shooter in the Big Ten, but on Tuesday night in Madison it was a layup that was his prettiest play.
The senior guard took a few crossover dribbles at the top of the key and glanced up at the shot clock, which showed six seconds. He took one dribble and gave a head fake at the 3-point line to freeze a defender before gliding to the rim for a high-off-the-glass finger roll that went just millimeters over the outstretched hand of Davis Zemgulis.
Koenig’s big night led the No. 15 Badgers (6-1 Big Ten, 17-3 overall) to an 82-55 blowout of the Penn State Nittany Lions (3-5, 11-10), but the lopsided score wasn’t always a foregone conclusion.
Despite forcing seven turnovers in the game’s first eight minutes, UW struggled to pull away from the pesky Nittany Lions in the first half. The Badgers had a rough go of things on the offensive end, shooting just 39.3 percent from the floor, and were dusted in transition by PSU’s shifty guards and athletic big men.
“Those that have been around this program know that we emphasize [transition defense] quite heavily,” head coach Greg Gard said. “We had to kind of recheck ourselves at halftime a little bit and emphasize some things.”
That rechecking worked to perfection, as UW held the Nittany Lions without a single transition point in the second half and kept them to 22 points on 26.9 percent shooting.
But if Gard’s halftime emphasis on transition defense wasn’t enough, sophomore forward Khalil Iverson gave the Badgers a spark on more than one occasion with his inspired play. He threw down a monstrous two-handed dunk on an inbounds alley-oop that lit up the Kohl Center crowd, and a few plays later, flung himself to the floor to grab a loose ball.
“I know my role coming off of the bench, and that’s to make the little plays, get rebounds, play tough defense,” Iverson said. “I think the dive on the floor gave us a little spark, so that’s just what I try to do.”
UW came out of the locker room firing on all cylinders, opening the half with a 19-5 run that gave the Badgers enough of a cushion to play as loosely as they’d like. Redshirt sophomore forward Ethan Happ scored seven of those 19 points, quickly matching his first half total in less than four minutes. After being blocked twice in the first half on short-range shots, Happ took over around the rim early in the second.
“The blocks came from me trying to be too aggressive almost, instead of doing what I usually do, which is take my time, pump fake, get them up in the air,” he said. “I was trying to go up too soon and I played right into their hands.”
That was far from the case in the second stanza, as Happ played steady basketball and got to the basket however he wanted. On one particularly lengthy possession, he got the ball on the right wing and took seven dribbles all the way into the teeth of the defense and bullied his way up for a strong layup.
Though the Badgers ultimately wound up with a 27-point victory, Tuesday night was far from a complete game. There were numerous lapses on both ends of the court in the first half, and the team knows that it has had trouble playing 40 minutes of solid basketball this season.
“I don’t think there’s any magical potion to be able to play two halves consistently,” Gard said. “We play good teams, so we’re not going to come out and all of the sudden roll up by 25 in the first half. It’s a process.”
“We don’t play to the scoreboard … We talk about that a lot. Play the game the right way, play every possession as well as possible, and usually the scoreboard takes care of itself.”
This weekend, the Badgers head to Madison Square Garden along with the men’s hockey team to play Rutgers Saturday night, a team they beat by 20 points to open the Big Ten season.
