Badgers shoot down Huskers with record night, 82-68

Nebraska’s defensive game plan for its road game at Wisconsin on Tuesday night was to pack the paint and dare the Badgers to win by shooting from the perimeter.

Well, that plan backfired in a major way, as UW answered that challenge by knocking down a school-record 18 3-pointers to hand the Huskers an 82-68 defeat.

Brad Davison and Brevin Pritzl combined for eight made threes and led eight UW players to hit at least one from behind the arc.

Dachon Burke scored a game-high 20 points with eight rebounds while Cam Mack added 14 points, seven boards, and six assists, as NU shot a solid 43 percent from the field as a team. But it was nearly good enough to keep up with Wisconsin’s red-hot night.

“Unfortunately, (Wisconsin) had a night where the basket looked like the ocean and ours looked like a little thimble up there,” head coach Fred Hoiberg told the Husker Sports Network. “They were hitting everything.”

Nebraska (7-12 overall, 2-6 Big Ten) started out hot and made its first four shots, but it followed that by missing six of its next seven attempts while Wisconsin made six 3-pointers in the first nine minutes of the game. An 8-0 run by the Badgers and a four-minute scoring drought by the Huskers resulted in a 24-15 UW lead midway through the half.

But the script would flip soon after, as Wisconsin suddenly went cold and didn’t score for five minutes, allowing Nebraska to rally with a 10-0 run and take a 25-24 lead with six minutes to go in the half.

A lay-up at the buzzer by Mack sent the Huskers into halftime down just 39-38, capping close to an ideal first 20 minutes for NU. Mack and Burke combined for 24 points on 10-of-14 shooting, eight rebounds, and five assists in the first half, as Nebraska shot 55.6 percent from the field.

The downside was that Wisconsin kept the lead by surpassing its season average (7.5) with eight made 3-pointers in the first half alone, with six different players hitting from behind the arc.

The second half couldn’t have started much worse for Nebraska, as Davison knocked down three 3-pointers to spark a 15-2 run out of the gates and gave Wisconsin its biggest lead yet at 54-40.

“That was hurtful,” Hoiberg said. “They came out and hit shots, and I thought we had a couple solid looks and didn’t convert. Give them credit.”

The Badgers would go up by 17 points and it looked as if the rout was on. But freshman Kevin Cross provided some life off the bench and helped NU answer with a 10-0 run that cut the deficit down to 63-58 with just over nine minutes still to play.

That would be as close as the Huskers would get, however, as the Badgers continued to light it up from behind the arc and responded with a 13-1 run to push the lead back up to 79-62. Nebraska ended up missing 10 of its final 11 shots and didn’t make a field goal for the last 3:28.

Cross scored 17 points and was 3-of-5 from behind the arc, while junior Thorir Thorbjarnarson added 14 points. Davison led Wisconsin with 14 points, as seven Badgers finished with nine points or more.

The Huskers will hit the road again on Saturday for a rematch with Rutgers, which handed NU 79-62 beating in Lincoln on Jan. 3. That game is set for a 1 p.m. CT tip on the Big Ten Network.

“From an effort standpoint, like I told the guys, if we go out there and we battle and we fight and we do it together for 40 minutes, win or lose, I’m going to be proud of them,” Hoiberg said. “That’s what we did tonight. We dug a couple holes where we battled back and kept fighting and we kept going and got ourselves back in that game.

“Like I said, unfortunately (Wisconsin) just bunched too many of those shots together, and once they got confident, we couldn’t slow them down.”

1. Nebraska picked its poison and didn’t adjust

Nebraska’s defensive strategy tonight wasn’t much different than most every other Big Ten game it's played this season.

Because of their notable lack of post depth, the Huskers are choosing to prevent high-percentage looks in the paint at the risk of giving up open shots on the perimeter. That plan worked to perfection in the upset over Iowa. It blew up in NU’s face at Wisconsin.

The Badgers are hardly a formidable 3-point shooting team, hitting just 32.5 percent from behind the arc coming in and not making more than nine threes in any conference game yet this season. But it was UW’s night from start to finish on Tuesday.

What was interesting was that the Huskers chose not to stray much from their scout and continued to give Wisconsin whatever it wanted from the outside.

One would think some earlier adjustments might have been made after the Badgers surpassed their season average for made threes in the first half, but Hoiberg and defensive assistant Doc Sadler stuck with their plan until the end.

Hoiberg said after the game that he thought a lot of UW’s 3-pointers were contested, but he’d have to review the game film on that. He’ll probably see that the Badgers were way too comfortable all night.

2. The Huskers did what they needed on offense

As bad as things were on the defensive end, Nebraska actually executed its offensive game plan about as well as it had hoped.

The overall shooting wasn't great (43.3 percent from the field and 6-of-22 on 3-pointers), but the Huskers achieved their goal of winning the paint and finally finished at the rim at a decent rate.

Nebraska out-scored Wisconsin 36-16 in the paint, marking by far their highest paint advantage of the season.

NU was also 18-of-27 on dunks and layups, which is hardly a stellar percentage but still a big step up from the dismal recent numbers at the rim. Burke scored all 20 of his points at the hoop, going 10-for-11 on dunks and layups.

Obviously it wasn’t enough to win the game, but the Huskers still took a step in the right direction offensively by converting in the paint. Their previous highest paint point margin in Big Ten play was +4, so to be a season-high +20 on the road against one of the better defensive teams in the conference is a silver lining.

3. Cross provided a spark

Nebraska continues to work with primarily an eight-man rotation, but only seven players saw more than 12 minutes at Wisconsin.

Junior Jervay Green came off the bench for 12 spot minutes, and senior Matej Kavas didn’t play at all as a healthy scratch per coach’s decision. That left freshmen Cross (20 minutes) and Charlie Easley (22) as the primary reserves on Tuesday night.

Easley again provided some nice hustle plays on both ends, but it was Cross who gave the Huskers a desperately needed boost to keep the game close in the second half.

The 6-foot-8 forward ranked second on the team with 17 points on 6-of-11 shooting, and 10 of those points came after halftime. In fact, with Nebraska trailing by 15 with 11 minutes to go, Cross scored nine points in a span of 3:23 to help cut the lead down to five.

Nebraska’s offense is so much better when Cross is shooting well because it forces opposing bigs to come out of the paint and defend him on the perimeter. Not only is that an advantage for him with the ball, it opens up the lane for guys like Mack and Burke.