Greg Gard helps Badgers stay loose

MADISON - With the Badgers mired in a shooting slump in their game against Rutgers at Madison Square Garden on Saturday, Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard decided to break out the big guns to keep his players loose as they tried to mount a comeback against the Scarlet Knights.

Gard dipped in to his bag of corny jokes – supplied to him by his two younger children – and sprinkled them in to his in-game huddles to lighten the mood.

“Some of the better ones were: ‘Why did the cookie go to the hospital? Because he was feeling kind of crummy,” Gard said Monday at his weekly press conference when asked which jokes he told to his players.

If you didn’t like that one, there’s always “Two satellites got married – the wedding wasn’t much, but the reception was great.”

But while the jokes weren’t quite enough to turn around what was a poor shooting game for UW, the team stayed loose enough to keep chipping away at Rutgers’ lead and force overtime, where the Badgers (18-3, 7-1) pulled out a 61-54 win, with sophomore forward Ethan Happ leading the way with a career-high 32 points.

Wisconsin finished the game shooting just 33.3 percent from the field (20 for 60), including a ghastly 20 percent in the first half and 34.5 percent in the second half before making 5 of 6 field goals in overtime. And while Gard’s jokes weren’t quite enough to get his team’s shots to fall more often, Gard said keeping the mood light was a better option than yelling at his players during timeouts.

“As you can tell, none of them worked,” Gard said Monday. “But they did a good job of staying loose. That’s the benefit of having seniors – they’ve been in those situations before. You can’t yell people in to shooting better.”

“That’s one area where you can’t bring emotion into that component of the game. You can get emotional about how we play in transition defensively. You can get emotional about how physical we are. But the shooting component, you can’t make that … emotional. It has to be a feel and relaxed instinct that they need to draw upon.”

It helps that from Gard’s perspective the Badgers were taking good shots – and the right people were taking them. The Badgers just couldn’t get their 3-pointers to fall: they made just 3 of 25 shots from behind the arc, with senior point guard Bronson Koenig hitting just 2 of his 10 shots from distance. But Gard said that he told Koenig to keep taking shots if they were there, and he delivered when it mattered most with a key 3-pointer with less than a minute left in the game to keep UW within striking distance of tying the game up or winning at the buzzer.

“In going through the shots, specifically the 3s, of the 22 that we didn’t get to go in I would take 16 to 17 of those again,” Gard said. “I thought there were 5, 6, or 7 of them that I would say ‘no, we shouldn’t have shot that.’ But for the most part we were getting good shots that guys have hit and for the most part we had the right guys shooting them most of the time.”

Only time will tell if the Badgers can get their shooting back on track on Tuesday when they take on Illinois (13-9, 3-6) in Champaign, with the Illini allowing opposing teams to shoot 49.2 percent from the field in conference play. But even if the Badgers struggle to put the ball in the basket again, Gard said he has a few more jokes up his sleeve – just in case.

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John Veldhuis covers Wisconsin football, basketball and recruiting for BadgerBlitz.com on the Rivals.com network. Follow him on Twitter at @JohnVeldhuis.