Wisconsin men's basketball head coach Bo Ryan focused on the grind of the Big Ten season, practice habits and the development of freshman forward Jon Leuer during his Monday press conference.
Ryan's Badgers are coming off a week in which they went 2-0, gaining a victory against Minnesota in the Kohl Center and in Bloomington, Ind., against the Hoosiers. Their next game is at Illinois on Wednesday.
You have to just play [on the road]. There's no secrets,"" Ryan said. ""You can't be the kind of person that relies on the energy from your fans ... you have to be a player that's self-motivated on the team, so the team needs to be a group of self motivators.""
Ryan went on to discuss the fact that most of his players got the experience of going into very hostile environments in high school since their teams were usually successful. Last season the Badgers won 71-64 in Champaign, Ill., and took the first matchup of this season 70-60.
The progress and development of freshman forward Leuer was brought up, especially his physical growth this season.
""Unfortunately for Jon [Leuer], physically he's not an Eric Gordon or a [Robbie] Hummel. He's not as strong yet. I talked to him about this last week. I said, you just need to stay positive about your work ethic and keep doing what you're doing,"" Ryan said. ""We've already been through ... the growth spurts, things like that. I think he's done growing vertically now, so he's got to develop in other ways physically, and he's working at that, and he's going to be fine.""
Ryan also pointed out that Leuer's physical maturation will be critical to his ability to hold his own on the defensive end. Leuer is averaging four points in 11 minutes per game.
As the season wears on, small injuries begin to take their toll on players, and Ryan said that he adjusted his practice to account for that.
""You can't stop practicing. That's obvious. But what you do is ... you're not [practicing] as long. But you always play hard, make sure you maintain the conditioning that you're in. So the practices instead of being two hours, we're usually down to about an hour twenty, and hour and a half, on the floor,"" Ryan said. ""We do a little bit more with the video because of the extra teaching points that we have on the team that we're going to play.""
Sophomore guard Jason Bohannon hurt his ankle before Saturday's game and is still recovering from the injury.
""The longer you do something, the more chances there are that something doesn't go right physically, no matter what it is,"" Ryan said. ""Sometimes it happens early in the year to a guy, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end ... Once you do tweak something, an ankle or something like that, it tends to hang around for a while, very difficult to get it totally recovered and that's the case for a few of our guys.
