3 burning Wisconsin basketball questions in the OU exhibition
Wisconsin basketball continues marching through its new era with unprecedented roster turnover as Greg Gard has "some tough decisions to make"
In a first-of-its-kind public exhibition, Wisconsin basketball will showcase its new-look roster. The Oklahoma Sooners, facing similar turnover, and the Wisconsin Badgers tip off inside Fiserv Forum tonight, where fans and UW head coach Greg Gard are looking for answers.
Although both the Badgers and Sooners made the NCAA Tournament in March, neither team looks anything like what it did seven months ago. Wisconsin returns only six players from last year’s roster, its fewest of the Gard era. Oklahoma, led last season by eventual top-10 NBA Draft Pick Jeremiah Fears, returns only one starter from last season’s lineup.
Although the final score of tonight’s game will not count toward either team’s March Madness resume, the play on the court will provide invaluable data points. Both teams’ coaching staffs (and observing fans) will use them to inform the long march ahead to April.
What happens between the three-point lines?
The push-pull of an intra-squad scrimmage blurs the lines when trying to paint a picture-perfect preseason narrative. If you got lost in that mixed metaphor, here's the rub: Wisconsin shot terribly from deep in the Red-White Scrimmage, a performance that generated more questions than answers. If it means anything, it definitely means something—either good or bad.
Wisconsin is coming off a season in which it made a Big Ten-leading 9.9 threes per game—a stark contrast to the combined 10 of 44 performance from beyond the arc in Sunday’s scrimmage. Nolan Winter was the only Badger who made more than one three-pointer. With John Tonje, Steven Crowl, and Kamari McGee all exhausting their eligibility, UW lost its three top performers from beyond the arc in terms of shooting percentage. But the dropoff should not be as stark as what fans saw on Sunday.
UW’s incoming talent has more shooting prowess than it showed in the scrimmage. Austin Rapp, who led all players in the West Coast Conference with 83 three-pointers last season as a freshman, missed five of his six shots from deep on Sunday. Braeden Carrington, a transfer by way of Tulsa and Minnesota, is a self-described “three-and-D guy” who made 33.3% of his threes as a freshman with the Gophers, but missed six of his seven attempts in the scrimmage. Nick Boyd, who has a career 36.3% three-point shooting percentage and has never shot worse than 34.1% from deep in a season, made only one of his five.
Most likely, it was an off-shooting day. Perhaps, however, the Badgers have an excellent perimeter defense.
Throughout much of Gard’s tenure as head coach, his teams have consistently chased opposing offenses off the three-point line. Only once before last season did UW finish outside the top-75 in percentage of shots allowed from beyond the arc during Gard’s first nine seasons at the helm. While the percentage of those shots opposing offenses connected on varied, the philosophy was clear: force teams to beat Wisconsin’s bigs inside the paint.
The 2024-25 campaign was a different story. Wisconsin basketball allowed teams to shoot a greater share of their attempts from three than in any other season of the Gard/Bo Ryan era. While Oklahoma Sooners head coach Porter Moser’s teams are not particularly well-known for three-point shooting, OU’s current roster is chock-full of shooters UW will have to defend.
Xzayvier Brown, a highly-touted transfer from St. Joe’s, connected on 37.6% of his threes in two years with the Hawks, attempting 5.2 per game. Sixth-year guard Nijel Pack, college basketball’s original NIL poster child for the Miami Hurricanes, is a career 40.3% shooter from deep on 6.4 attempts per game. Pack’s only two seasons in which he shot below 40% from beyond the arc were plagued by lower-body injuries. Further down the rotation, reserve guard Dayton Forsythe connected on 21 of his 47 three-pointers last season as a freshman.
The Sooners present an intriguing test early for one of Wisconsin’s weaker defensive points in recent years.
How does the inexperienced Wisconsin basketball frontcourt measure up?
Crowl’s departure after four seasons as UW’s starting center is just one hole Gard has to fill in the frontcourt. Sixth-man Carter Gilmore exhausted his eligibility after five seasons with the Badgers. Rotational piece Xavier Amos transferred to join his hometown Loyola Chicago Ramblers after one season in Madison.
Other than Winter, nobody in Wisconsin’s projected rotation has played high-major college basketball.
That is not to say Gard’s additions in the frontcourt lack meaningful experience. Rapp has definitive inside-out offensive ability. Likely bench contributor and freshman Aleksas Bieliauskas, who turns 20 years old in December, spent the past three seasons playing professionally in Lithuania. Fitting Winter, Rapp, and Bieliauskas side-by-side in the Big Ten, as none profile as a traditional center, will likely be a challenge.
“There’s different combinations,” Gard said he will use in the frontcourt to defend traditional bigs. “They all have to get better and we’ll continue to work on that always. But it’s not always the guy guarding the big two that I know everything gets made about – a lot gets made about the matchups – but it’s the other pieces around. Is our ball pressure good? Are we squeezing gaps?”
Oklahoma’s frontcourt does not have a definitive size advantage over Wisconsin’s—only one Sooner measures in above 6-foot-10. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in experience.
OU’s projected starters at power forward, Tae Davis, and at center, Mo Wague, both have three years of experience at power conference programs. Wague is stepping into a starting role for the first time, but Davis was a centerpiece of the Notre Dame offense the past two seasons. Davis is among the best in the country at drawing contact, which could cause Bieliauskas some trouble after the Lithuania native struggled to defend without fouling in Sunday’s scrimmage.
Will Greg Gard show his hand?
Even before questions about how Wisconsin’s forwards, shooters, bench, or starters perform, there’s a more fundamental one: who plays and for how many minutes?
The Badgers have not played in a public exhibition game against a Division I program since a 2017 matchup against Northern Iowa. So-called “secret scrimmages” between power-conference programs have long been commonplace in college basketball, but never before has UW faced a high-major program in a preseason exhibition open to fans.
How does Gard approach this meeting with the Sooners? Does he treat it as a dress rehearsal for opening night against the Campbell Fighting Camels? Does the two-time Big Ten Coach of the Year use it as a test to help sort out ongoing battles for his rotation? There is simply no precedent out there to answer that question.
There are, however, some clues dropped in recent interviews with Wisconsin’s head coach.
In a preseason press conference, Gard said, “There’s 10 to 12 guys that could be in the mix” for playing time this season. Down the stretch of last year’s campaign, he employed a rotation of nine.
“Idealistically, you’d like to be able to play ten,” said Gard. “How each game plays out determines whether you can do that or not and to what extent. I think that’s something I’m still – we’ll be working through not only the exhibition games.”
If Gard is still trying to determine what his opening-night rotation looks like, Wisconsin basketball fans will watch quite the public tryout inside Fiserv Forum.
“We’ll work through rotations, and I have to learn. They have to learn, and we’ll see where we are,” said Gard. “But I like the depth of this group, I’m gonna have some tough decisions to make.”
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