As No. 13 Wisconsin battles for the Big Ten regular-season crown, it will get a chance to take some revenge on Rutgers when the teams play Saturday evening in Piscataway, N.J.
Wisconsin (22-5, 13-4 Big Ten) is tied with No. 4 Purdue atop the conference standings, and No. 15 Illinois could make it a three-way knot with a win Thursday night. When the Badgers host Purdue on Tuesday, they may be in position to lock up the league title and the No. 1 seed in the Big Ten Tournament with a victory.
First, they must take on a team that came to Madison, Wis., on Feb. 12 and posted a 73-65 victory amid a string of four wins over Top 25 opponents.
“Yeah, they beat us at home too,” Wisconsin coach Greg Gard said of traveling to face Rutgers (16-11, 10-7). “Court is 94 by 50 (feet), so that doesn’t change. They got a new team. … They’re all experienced. Life in the Big Ten. It’s not going to be easy.”
The Badgers rebounded from the loss to Rutgers by winning three in a row, most recently a 68-67 nail-biter at Minnesota on Wednesday. Wisconsin played without reserve Jahcobi Neath, who served a one-game suspension for his role in a postgame altercation against Michigan. Fellow reserve Lorne Bowman II also missed the game with an illness.
Wisconsin trailed for much of the first half until Steven Crowl and Tyler Wahl provided personal scoring stretches that helped the Badgers land a three-point lead. They never trailed again, but they also never led by more than eight points, with rival Minnesota staying on their tails.
Crowl scored a game-high 20 points, Wahl had 12 points and 10 rebounds and Johnny Davis added 12 points and nine rebounds on a night when Wisconsin committed twice as many turnovers (12) as Minnesota and received only 11 bench points.
“Tyler, he’s kind of a jack of all trades,” Gard said. “He does more than what they can put in the stat sheet for us. Obviously those offensive rebounds to keep possessions alive for us were important. Obviously Steve I think is — I’ve said before — has continued to grow right in front of our eyes. (He’s) more and more comfortable all the time, specifically in the paint.”
Since a four-game winning streak against Michigan State, Ohio State, Wisconsin and Illinois put Rutgers on the national radar, it has dropped two straight at Purdue and Michigan.
In Wednesday’s 71-62 loss to the Wolverines, Rutgers used eight steals to help force Michigan’s 12 turnovers, and it shot comparably to Michigan, except from 3-point distance (2 for 12). Leading scorer Ron Harper Jr. guided the Scarlet Knights with 19 points and eight rebounds and Clifford Omoruyi had 17 points on 8-of-9 shooting.
“They got on a run and we had some timely turnovers too and some opportunities to make some layups and shots that we didn’t convert on,” Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell said. “It snowballs on you on the road like this. You can’t have stretches like this. We didn’t get stops three or four times in a row either which would have helped us a great deal.”
Rutgers is 13-2 at home this season, and it has beaten Wisconsin two of the past three times they’ve met at Piscataway. But the Badgers earned the bragging rights last season with a 60-54 road win, when they shot just 35.2 percent from the field but made 16 free throws to Rutgers’ two.
–Field Level Media
