'Magician' Nick Boyd wills Wisconsin basketball to victory
One miscue from Wisconsin basketball head coach Greg Gard was all that stopped Nick Boyd from a day for the record book
Madison, WI — As March and the NCAA Tournament loom just around the corner, Wisconsin basketball was tasked with responding after a 17-point road loss. After falling behind by nine points early and facing one of the most stout defenses in the country, it would have been predictable to see the Wisconsin Badgers, or frankly any college basketball team, falter.
Instead, UW got an all-time great individual performance and scored more points than any team has against the Iowa Hawkeyes all season.
“I was really happy with how we responded and some adjustments and things in the second half,” Badgers head coach Greg Gard said of his team’s 84-71 victory. With the win, Wisconsin clinched a winning record in Big Ten play for the 23rd time since 2001-01, the most of any program in the conference.
The win will prove to be what matters come Selection Sunday three weeks from now, but Nick Boyd missed out on a rare individual accomplishment when returning to the bench with 30 seconds remaining in regulation due to one slip of the mind by Greg Gard:
“I didn’t realize he had nine rebounds.”
Nick Boyd has near-miss with Badger basketball history
In Wisconsin men’s basketball history, only two players have ever recorded a triple-double. Josh Gasser established the Badger triple-double club as its first member in 2011. Ethan Happ joined Gasser by notching two triple-doubles of his own during the 2018-19 season.
Happ’s 13 points against the Northwestern Wildcats will remain the most scored by any Badger in a triple-double performance for now, but Boyd came within the slimmest of margins from shattering that record.
Wisconsin’s starting point guard poured in 27 points, assisted on ten buckets, and gathered nine rebounds on Sunday in what was perhaps Boyd’s greatest performance as a Badger yet.
“Letting Boyd get downhill to his left every single possession was not the game plan,” Iowa head coach Ben McCollum said in a post-game interview.
Boyd’s ten assists were a career-high. Only once before had he reached nine. Boyd is only the fifth Badger since the 2004-05 season to log 10+ assists in a single contest (Happ 2x, Gasser, Nigel Hayes, Jordan Taylor).
It was the San Diego State transfer’s fifth-highest scoring performance this season for Wisconsin. Boyd has managed 20+ points in 17 different games with UW. Sunday afternoon was just the most recent great performance by the New York native that has him on the verge of becoming the first Badger since Michael Finley (whose number hangs in the Kohl Center rafters) to average 20 points per game.
Wisconsin basketball forward Nolan Winter, who scored 18 points of his own on 8 of 11 shooting, credited Boyd’s “speed and his ability to to push the ball” in transition for the dazzling performance.
“He’s just kind of a magician with the ball,” Winter added. “He’ll hit you on rolls when you don’t think you’re open. He hit me a couple of times today where, you know, I thought there was no way, and the ball found its way to me.”
Austin Rapp provides much-needed secondary scoring in return
Outside of Boyd and John Blackwell, the highest-scoring duo in the Big Ten combining for over 40 points per game, UW’s secondary scoring has come from a rotating cast.
Austin Rapp, who has been sidelined at various points this season due to an illness, is the latest star in that cast.
The Australian forward sat out Wisconsin’s most recent contest, a road loss at the hands of the Ohio State Buckeyes, and made an immediate impact in his return.
Wisconsin closed the game on a 16-6 run over the final six minutes, sparked by an initial 10-0 stretch that began with a three-pointer by Rapp.
“I think we cut it to maybe three, and then actually we’re getting stops,” McCollum said of his team’s effort to trim a Wisconsin lead that had only gotten out to seven points by that time. “And then I think Rapp popped on one, and we had to close out and closed out short. And when you close out short, on him—it didn’t make a lot of sense to close out short, but we did.”
Rapp scored 14 points, shooting 4-5 from beyond the arc. The sophomore has scored 14+ in three of his last four appearances. When Rapp scores 10+, UW is 10-0.
Gard noted the all-around improvement for the Portland Pilots transfer that began the year as a starter before the staff asked him to make his contributions off the bench.
“There were so many other things, you know, parts of his game, on both ends of the floor that he had to improve upon in order to be on the floor more consistently,” Gard noted. “You can’t be a defensive liability, and you have to be able to do more things offensively than just shoot threes. So he’s added, and he’s worked at his game.”
Whether it was Rapp, who has hit four or more triples five times this season, or Winter, who connected on two of three attempts from deep on Sunday, UW’s bigs helped create the spacing necessary for Boyd’s standout performance.
“When you have those shooters, it really makes a big difference, because you can’t shrink and you can’t plug,” McCollum said of the challenge Wisconsin’s offense presents.
Winter added that when he and Rapp are connecting on threes, it “helps a lot. It helps Nick get downhill having, you know, the other big guys, not being able to just plug the lane, it helps all sorts of guards.”
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