In all his years of coaching, Greg Gard had never experienced a game being stopped for nearly 20 minutes due to a pulled fire alarm.

That was the only thing unique about Tuesday night at Assembly Hall, as the rest of the script has become somewhat familiar to the University of Wisconsin.

The Badgers allowed a team below them in the standings to find an early rhythm offensively, parlay that into an efficient shooting performance and a big lead and suffer too many breakdowns to prevent a comeback.

Wisconsin’s 74-70 loss to the Hoosiers puts a cap on two things. One is that the Badgers can finally put behind them an awful month of February, in which they went 2-6 and lost all five road contests. The second is the Big Ten title, as the Badgers fell four games behind Purdue with three games remaining.

Here are my takeaways from Wisconsin’s fifth straight road loss.

It’s beginning to sound like a broken record, but Wisconsin’s defense was somewhere between bad, awful, and nonexistent against a Hoosiers team that was 12th in the conference in scoring and 113th in adjusted offense.

In Indiana’s four losses coming into Tuesday, the Hoosiers averaged .881, 1.01, 1.00, and 1.10 points per possession. Against the Badgers, Indiana was at 1.25 on a night where it shot 61.7 percent from the floor.

The final numbers shouldn’t be a shock because the Hoosiers attacked the weaknesses countless teams have exploited against the Badgers' defense.

For starters, Indiana’s first 10 points came from post penetration, leading to eight points in the paint and a pair of free throws. Indiana scored 38 points in the paint for the fourth straight game, but it was how the Hoosiers scored the game’s final six points and how it created additional offense off the paint touches that was a killer.

Playing less than 100 percent because of a foot injury, Trey Galloway was terrific in facilitating the offense. Although going 3-for-10 from the floor, he finished with 12 assists. He got UW guard John Blackwell out of position a handful of times, as the freshman was slow on closeouts or rotations, allowing Galloway to drive the lane and dump the ball off to center Kel’el Ware for an easy look or to kick it out to the perimeter.

He's not as quick as some of the guards that have hurt the Badgers with dribble penetration in the past, but he was fast enough, with his bad foot and all.

Indiana was 16 of 70 from three on its four-game skid (22.9 percent), but the amount of open looks the Hoosiers got saw them go 6-for-14 (42.9).

Wisconsin has done a good job this season in running teams off the three-point line (fifth-fewest attempts in the league) but its opponent’s 36.5 percentage is second-worst in the league.

As for Ware, the sophomore center showed Wisconsin they should feel fortunate that he missed the first meeting in Madison. He was un-guardable most of the night in torching them for 27 points on 11-for-12 shooting.

Ware bullied countless Badgers through the first half, rolling through freshman Nolan Winter for dribble-drive layups, easily pushing past Chucky Hepburn’s soft hand checks for paint buckets on lobs to the rim, and catching Steven Crowl unprepared for long-range jumpers.

“Kel’el Ware has an All-American-type night,” Gard said. “Twenty points in the first half, he was terrific, but we also gave him easy buckets early and he got some confidence going. He’s a really good player, but he did whatever he wanted in the first half.”

With Malik Reneau scoring 14 points before fouling out, Indiana’s two starting sophomore forwards combined for 41 points on 17-for-20 shooting, 19 rebounds, five blocks, and two assists, easily better than Wisconsin’s two starting senior forwards Tyler Wahl and Crowl (19 points, 9-for-20 shooting, 10 rebounds, 0 blocks, 1 assist).

UW continued to struggle with starting halves well, giving struggling teams confidence and being unable to shake them from that with sustained defensive stops and pressures. The Hoosiers went 23-for-33 from two-point range (69.7 percent), carving up the Badgers’ interior defense.

Wisconsin is at the point where it needs to be exceptionally efficient to win ball games. The Badgers were OK at 1.1 points per possession in the first half and 1.19 in the second and played clean with only three turnovers.

The problem was UW only scored five points off 10 offensive rebounds and wasn’t nearly as aggressive in drawing fouls. UW attempted only three free throws, none in the second half, and didn’t do enough in the final minute to put pressure on Indiana.

A.J. Storr (14 points, 6 of 13) had a rough night at the hands of Ware, who blocked and contested the sophomore’s shots at the rim early on and forced him to do more hunting from the mid-range and the perimeter. Storr’s pull-up three-pointer with 36 seconds left with 12 on the shot clock and UW down two was likely a result of Ware’s presence, as Storr chose to shoot over the slightly smaller Mackenzie Mgbako.

Wahl couldn’t stop Reneau with a low-post bucket on one end, as the sophomore muscled through him to put the Hoosiers up 72-70. He couldn’t do the same when he went against Ware in the lane, as Wahl altering his shot to get over Ware’s reach didn’t yield results. Ware was credited with five blocks, but he altered countless other shots.

UW had three looks at three on the final two possessions and missed all of them, as the Badgers finished the game missing six of their final seven shots. When they have a defense that can’t string together stops and five on the floor who aren’t drawing contact, they aren’t going to win many games.

While he suffered defensive breakdowns at the hands of Galloway, Blackwell was a catalyst for the Badgers in several areas.

Playing just under 23 minutes, the most since January 16 at Penn State, Blackwell was responsible for 11 points from UW’s reserves. He attacked and scored early when the Badgers were digging themselves a first-half deficit, as well as being aggressive with ball pressure and attacking the glass.

His points were his first double-digit game since the last time the Badgers played Indiana on January 19, as he finished 5 of 8 from the field. One of his more impressive plays was when he lowered the shoulder right into Mgbako and made a layup to tie the game at 54.

“John gets it,” Gard said. “John understands the complete package defensively. He’s good on the ball. He understands where you need to bump ball screeners running to the rim. He dug balls loose off the dribble. He dug balls loose off the post. He just gets it. He understands the game. He’s a very cerebral player.”

After missing or being limited in three straight games, Blackwell has been the difference maker off the bench for the Badgers in his last two outings.

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