Many see shades of a legendary Badger squad in this Wisconsin team’s success
This Wisconsin Badgers team is really good and has put themselves in a position to be talked about in all sorts of conversations.
Things like Coach of the Year talk for Greg Gard, and Player of the Year talk for John Tonje, or even just in the metrics like top half-court offense. They are quite literally the talk of the town. It’s starting to draw comparisons to one other legendary Wisconsin team. The 2015 team that made it to the National Championship game.
This season’s Wisconsin team is being compared to the 2015 Wisconsin team
Why the comparisons? Because it’s been a while since a Wisconsin team has been able to play at this high of a level and garner much national attention. There’s still a lot of work to be done for this season’s team to get to that season’s team. They can’t even get to either record, whether the Big Ten record or the overall record, as the 2015 only lost four games. They went 36-4 and 16-2 in the Big Ten, winning both the conference title and the conference tournament.
Greg Gard also isn’t ready to compare the two teams, and he had a front-row seat for both. For the 2015 team, he was an assistant to Bo Ryan, but now he’s the head coach. In an interview with Jon Rothstein, he said, “I think this is a team that has a lot of versatility, maybe as much as versatility, in terms of where we get our scoring.” He seemed to lean towards comparing this season to the 2020 year when they won 10 in a row and were on fire, but COVID shut the year down.
Why does Gard want to compare 2020 and now more than 2015 and now? The answer may lie in the fact that it wasn’t a couple of NBA draft picks running the show but a team that was connected together. It was a team that started the season with a few duds but ended the season as hot as any team. It was a team that had to grow and learn to play together, and that’s why Gard liked that team. He’s been clear: the Badgers have yet to hit their peak and they are still getting better.
