Jan. 26, 2012
Recap | Box Score | Notes
Wisconsin vs. Indiana
Kohl Center – Madison, Wis.
Head Coach Bo Ryan Quotes
On the consistency of the program since Coach Ryan has been at Wisconsin:
“You know, I never really think about it and that’s probably a good thing. All I’m thinking about now is go over this game when I go home, take some notes, look at Penn State stuff tomorrow and get ready for Penn State. You know, other people can be the judges of our guys. Our players have played hard, our players have bought in. Great example of that is tonight—to be on the left-hand side shooting the way we did and the way things looked there for a while. This team has a lot of fight in it. And as long as they’re doing that, playing hard, you can always remind me later what the standings were. I just like the grit in this group.”
On shooting free throws under pressure late:
“Well, you know, we play our free throw games every day. And you know, I do them at the end of practice. Maybe I’ll start doing them in the beginning of practice. But no, we’ll shoot free throws early, when the guys foul, then the possessions. But, I’ve never tried to over-analyze free throws other than guys get their routine, they get comfortable, they get their elbow lift, they get their rotation, they get their target sights—some guys look to the front, some guys look to the back. And in every drill we do, you’ve got to be 80 percent or better. So, I think that’s helped us over the years. We were close tonight.”
On Ben Brust having the green light from 3-point range:
“Yeah, as long he’s on the side of half court that we’re on offensively— I think that’s fair to say. I don’t give him the Herbie Magee role. You guys can Google Herbie Magee—he would shoot threes from 90 feet and make them. Ben, yeah, when his shoulders are squared and his feet are set, he tends to shoot it a lot better that way, like everybody else. And he knows how to move away from the ball—he does a great job of spacing, he does a great job of cutting. And next thing you know he finds himself open. He’s very aware of where he is on the floor and what he’s trying to get accomplished.”
On Jared Berggren’s ability to recover for a block after initially being beat on defense:
“Well, I think he was in a help position and maybe got there a little late and tried to make sure that he didn’t foul and waited until [Cody] Zeller made his move, which every post defensive player tries to do and sometimes it’s pretty effective. He was fairly effective with it, but Zeller’s a good player—he got his offensive opportunities, he’s the real deal inside and fortunately we got some fouls on him and that helped us. But Jared is getting better with his feet. He got busted in the lip a little bit and I had the guys on the floor with all the timeouts that were used at the end of the game. So it looked like everyone was staying fresh so I kept that group out there. And they did a pretty good job. Not that I wouldn’t have been comfortable with Jared out there—it’s just that I was going with those five. That’s how we’re going to finish the game.”
Senior G Jordan Taylor
On the contributions of the Wisconsin bench:
“If I did that it would probably take all day. They were great, every single one of them. Mike (Bruesewitz) and Ryan (Evans) with their rebounds at the end. Jared (Berggren) did a great job on (Cody) Zeller. [Zeller] is obviously one of the best players in the country and what Jared was able to do to him was impressive.”
On how big it was to be dominant at home again after earlier season home losses:
“It was definitely fun. The crowd was unbelievable. We got the students back from break and they showed that they were back – they were awesome. We got Penn State next on the road, and we got a lot more tough home games coming up near. We just got to keep continuing to [hold home court].”
Junior F/C Jared Berggren
On the team’s mindset at halftime being down and not shooting well:
“(We) pretty much just had to keep fighting. It wasn’t going to be easy, we had to scrap to the very end. The mindset with shooting is the next one is going to go down. You’ve always got to keep the confidence and know that things are going to turn around and keep battling defensively too.”
On what kind of statement he believes he and his teammates made with the win:
“I think we had to just keep believing that we have a good team in here and we knew that. Despite the struggles at the start of the Big Ten, we knew what we had here. We knew we had guys that weren’t going to give up easy and we were turning things around. Scratch and claw our way back into things and now we’re right in the thick of things in the Big Ten race. We’ve got another big one coming next at Penn State. Every game is huge in the Big Ten and hopefully we can keep things rolling.”
Junior G/F Ryan Evans
On what it is about Wisconsin and Coach Ryan that allows them to always contend:
“I think it just starts with defense. That speaks for itself. We were able to hold (Indiana) on a bad shooting night and find other ways to win the game. That’s really a momentum builder and that’s why we’ve been successful.”
Indiana Head Coach Tom Crean
Opening statement:
“We did a lot of really good things tonight. It’s our first game holding a team under 30 percent on the field, but they got a couple of really big rebounds at the end of the game at crucial times. We put ourselves in position to win, we just didn’t finish it off.”
On the foul situation:
“I’m not even going there. Please. We watched some tape, and I’m not going to get into any of that stuff.”
On the lack of production from Cody [Zeller]:
“He got a foul called on him the second possession of the game. Cody did some really good things. He was one of our two guys to get to the foul line tonight. Not sure I’ve ever seen that. Cody did a lot of things tonight. There were a couple of times we tried to get the ball to him but they three-quartered him, and we didn’t give him the chance to post up like he’s used to. When we settled down we did a better job. Cody’s fine. Cody did a lot of really good things, some things that showed up in the background and some things that didn’t.”
On Verdell’s [Jones III] play:
“He did a good job. We knew where we needed to attack tonight and for the most part we did that.”
On how hard it is to decide when to put players back in with four fouls and what made him decide to wait as long as he did:
“It’s very tough. We had to bide our time as much as we could because we had no real reason to believe he [Cody Zeller] was going to get into a flow where he could play significant minutes at the end so we played it by feel as much as we could.”
On Wisconsin holding them to 50 points:
“We shot 50 percent in the first half and we shot 45 percent for the game. I thought we shot the ball pretty well.”
On playing at Wisconsin’s pace:
“We answered the bell on the pace of play. They’re going to play at a snail’s pace. That’s what they do, and you’ve got to steal possessions. We rebounded the ball well for most of the game, but they got the rebounds at the end. It was a contact sport at the end, and we struggled getting those balls. When a game is that tight and that competitive between two teams it comes down to just a couple of things, and their offensive rebounds were those things.”
