EAST LANSING, Mich.—The dam broke, the top-10 team asserted itself and at the end of the day, Wisconsin lost a game that it was… well, expected to lose.
Sunday's 61-50 loss to Michigan State can be seen as a missed opportunity, but it can just as easily be called a fine game that the Badgers were not playing well enough to win. Wisconsin hung around by doing things that were not its strengths and was simply pushed out of the game by the end.
""I thought when they were making their run … we need to get a bucket in there, squeeze between maybe if they score two, we need to get one,"" Wisconsin head coach Bo Ryan said. ""We missed some shots around the basket that always seem like they're easy when you're sitting there watching, but evidently they weren't as easy as they looked because they didn't go in.""
The Badgers controlled the early part of the game with the help of 10 first-half MSU turnovers, which, as Spartans head coach Tom Izzo put it, ""went for touchdowns,"" as the runouts led to easy buckets. Over a third of the Badgers' points came off turnovers including, a few fast breaks that seemed more suited to Michigan State's up-tempo style of play than it did to the Badgers' preferred pace.
Michigan State also struggled in getting second-chance points in the first half, and second-chance points are a focal point of Izzo's philosophy.
In the second half, the key change came as the Spartan defense slowly but surely pushed the Badger offense further out on the perimeter and forced it to confront a press after most made baskets. It was not an incredible shift, but guards had to receive the ball just a few steps farther out and an offense that struggled to score points from the field.
""I think we did wear them down a little bit,"" Izzo said about the way his team pressured Wisconsin. ""They've got guys that play a lot of minutes, especially Hughes and Bohannon, those guards. And we thought that was one of these things we were going to try to do.""
All told, Wisconsin shot 28 percent in the second half and only scored a pair of baskets in the final 12:31 of the game.
In the second half, that pressure also led to turnovers, which not only made the team's low shooting percentage that much more costly, but resulted in 11 MSU second-half points.
""The first half we have three turnovers and we nearly tripled it in the second half,"" Hughes said. ""That will hurt because it is taking away from us getting good looks at the basket, and we want to make sure that we get good looks at the basket every trip down.""
That defensive push was most clearly felt in the paint, however. Wisconsin only scored four points in the paint, missing six of its eight lay-up attempts and attempting over half its field goals from beyond the arc.
For a team that emphasizes inside play, that caliber of play around the basket spelled doom against a very strong team making its run at home.
Michigan State also got back to the offensive rebounding it is known for, pulling down nearly half their missed shots and wreaking havoc in the paint.
""You can only hold the dam back so long,"" Ryan said. ""That was it—our guys tried, but we didn't have the answer.""
Finally the Spartans ended it with a spurt of made jump shots off excellent execution and well-run plays.
Wisconsin did blow a 12-point lead, and had it held on for over 12 minutes the result would have been a huge resume win. But this was not a collapse.
Wisconsin could have won the game, but it would have needed to raise its level of play above where it had been for the whole game and assert its style of play. In the end the Badgers didn't, and they are left with the disappointment of a loss that doesn't hurt their tournament standing since it seemed unlikely they would carry the day to begin with.
Wisconsin senior forward Joe Krabbenhoft may have put it the best:
""It's simple—they executed, we didn't. They hit the shots when they needed them.""
And that simple fact made all the difference.
