If you want a moment of levity in a press conference or are looking for some sort of hypersensitive aural examination, find the post-game audio from last Thursday’s Wisconsin-Indiana basketball game.
Maybe, with the finest of senses, you can hear what Marcus Landry has to say about Bo Ryan’s idea of a certain inbounds play from the baseline with one second left on the shot clock.
“We have a 360, lob it up, slam dunk, twista, that we use Marcus Landry for,” he deadpans. Then, from the back of the room, Landry wryly reveals the name of the play:
“Black Tornado.”
From this point of view, there has seldom, if ever, been as hearty of laughter like that which followed in the media room at the Kohl Center.
But to the same degree that Landry was enjoying the spotlight after his double-double in a win that night, Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson told it like he saw it. His take that Wisconsin is in some respects superior to last season’s team did not go unnoticed by the media types covering the game.
“In a lot of ways, they’re better than they were last year,” he said. “They don’t have anybody as good as Alando Tucker, but that’s a really, really good team.”
And we know as much at this point in the season, with more determining factors to come over the next five days. In case a reminder is necessary, Wisconsin plays Big Ten co-leader Purdue at the Kohl Center Saturday night and then has to go to Bloomington, Ind., next Wednesday for a rematch with Indiana, whose coach let Wisconsin’s in on some of his thoughts.
“Wisconsin’s really good,” Sampson said. “And I told Bo, I think his team this year is maybe not as glamorous—although I don’t think glamorous really describes his teams—but they’re a little different. They’re good. I like his team this year almost as good as last year’s team.”
When asked why, in his opinion, Sampson thought the Badgers were a better team than last year, Ryan had a point.
“He’s not blowing smoke,” the coach explained. “I think what he meant was that, OK, there were certain things that were givens last year. This year with our group, OK, how do you prepare for us?”
That’s the big-money question, and teams, by and large, have yet to figure it out. The Badgers have no 20 point-per-game scorer to key in on. Whereas last year, Wisconsin had two double-digit scorers, First Team All-American Alando Tucker and Kammron Taylor. This year they effectively have four: Trevon Hughes, Brian Butch, Marcus Landry and Michael Flowers, who is slightly under 10 points per game.
A look at the team’s raw numbers suggests that this year’s group, while perhaps not as good offensively as they were last year, is better defensively. Teams are only shooting 38 percent against the Badgers, compared to 41 percent last year. And this year’s Badgers are better on the glass than Wisconsin was a year ago. Whether this is due to the absence of an Ohio State-like leviathan in the conference is, like the hockey fans tell it, debatable.
But at the least, one coach, whose basketball eye is credible even if his recruiting tactics are unsavory, has found out what is not a secret any longer: Wisconsin Badger basketball has a different, successful twist that is far harder to game plan against than the “Black Tornado.”
