Nov. 14, 2010
Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery 
Wisconsin Head Coach Bo Ryan
On if he liked what he saw out of Josh Gasser:
“Yeah I did, and if I didn’t they would be giving me an examination. He took care of the ball. He made great decisions. People remember the points, but he did some other things pretty well, and he also got a lesson about a guy hitting a three, and then hitting another, and then hitting another one and not making a guy move off a spot or making a guy put the ball on the floor. We guarded the three much better. They got into a little rhythm there. He (Gasser) got some help from his teammates, and plus he recognized an earlier pickup. But if a team is going to come out and shoot threes that deep in transition or whatever, in a hurry, a lot of times that doesn’t bode very well for the team that is shooting them. But when they are going in, it sure looked pretty good. Josh learned a lesson there, but he did everything else pretty well.”
On decreased turnovers after halftime:
“Well, you know, a couple of those turnovers maybe could have been the other way, but I think our guys did try to take care of the ball. We are trying to make the right decisions. But four (turnovers) a half is plenty for me. What did we have in the first half, seven or something? Eight, yeah that is too many. So you got to cut those out, was it because of pressure, was it because of bad decisions? I know of a couple that definitely were just bad decisions on our part, that we didn’t make the right decision at the time. And other times it is because of the quickness of the team or length, or things like that. So if it is the other team making a better defensive play than we are making an offensive play and we turn it over, we have to get better on our ball fakes. We have to get better with our handle, all the things that can be corrected.”
On Mike Bruesewitz’s offensive aggressiveness:
“He read the defensive player. That is in our shooting drills. Doing it in drills is one thing, you have to convert it to knowledge in the game. But I think the biggest key in the offseason was that he was open and he wasn’t getting the ball, so he wanted to make sure he was better this year. You can’t miss the Brueser out there. You are going to find him. Do you think you could miss Mike Bruesewitz on the court if he was open?”
On if they found some secondary scorers to go with Jordan Taylor and Jon Leuer:
“With the team we have this year we are going to have to do it by committee, there is no question. We have had teams like this before. Now you got to ham-and-egg it off each other enough to get by in some of the games that we are going to be in. It is going to have to come from different sources, so I think Josh (Gasser) is one of those guys that is a threat to score off the attack. He got to the free-throw line. He was active on the glass. Bruesewitz is the kind of guy who, as mentioned, put it on the floor, get to the glass, or pull up, or hit wide-open threes when open. Jared (Berggren) is going to have some games where people are going to go, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that guy could score like that,’ he is going to have some of those. And boy if we could ever get them all on the same night, that would really be something. But, it is going to be one of those where over the course of the game, we are going to have to find areas where we are able to attack the other team, areas where we can get an offensive advantage. Whether it is off a ball screen, whether it is off back cuts, shot-lobs, backdoor plays if a team overplays. They overplayed a few times, and we got some backdoor plays. You have to be able to counter that when a team is really quick like they were. They were pretty quick, and we countered that with getting some looks backdoor. So however we can get it, and I don’t care how we get it. But those two guys in practice have scored, so we feel confident in them.”
On Gasser’s aggressiveness in his first game:
“Again, the nice part is he knows he has to get better in some areas. I remember being in the press conference after Jon Leuer hit 24 threes against Michigan. I am exaggerating, but it seemed like it by the time we were done. He was open, and every scouting report after that, everybody had Jon Leuer down as a threat to shoot from the outside, so he didn’t get those same kind of looks and people played him a little differently. People are going to look at Josh Gasser and look at some things. The nice part about Josh is he does have versatility, so he will have some more games, I don’t know whether like this or not. But he will have some games where he will be that threat. He will get rebounds. He will make good decisions with the ball, and he will defend better. That is what we are hoping for.”
On better shot selection in the second half:
“Yeah, we were a little anxious. It is the first game of the year, we say the lights are on in exhibition games and Red-White and everything else, and those do help, believe me. But you don’t think they weren’t walking around class last week with everybody going, ‘Hey, glad the season's starting Sunday.” They know it is a little different. You have to play through some things. I saw a little bit of the Purdue game earlier, and then I saw where they picked it up in the second half. And what was the final in that one? If you saw the first 12 minutes, it was kind of like ours, it was heads butting and tough, hard, aggressive play, some shots not going down and the other team hitting some shots. It is still about that 40 complete minutes. But our shot selection was better in the second half, because they had to come out and play, do some things a little differently. Give our guys credit for recognizing that and making pretty good decisions, finding the open guy.”
On Jordan Taylor starting to take it to the basket more:
“Yeah in the second half, getting that steal. But what I didn’t like was they got a three-point play after that on a drive, where I thought we should have been in position to take a charge and we didn’t. We have to be better at protecting the rim than that, and we give up a three-point play. But Jordan’s (Taylor) defense, I thought he had another one, but I am not the one that makes the call. So we didn’t get that one, but even after that he did a pretty good job defensively of forcing people out of what they wanted to do. And Jordan can do that to you, Q (Wquinton Smith) can do that for you.”
On Wquinton Smith getting to start senior year as a walk on:
“Yeah his shot didn’t go down as we said before, but he did the other things. I thought defensively he chased on the screens pretty well, manned up on his guy, got on the class, was opportunistic. He is just hungry to contribute. You can’t go wrong with those kind of guys.”
Freshman G Josh Gasser
On his comfort level:
“I got a lot more comfortable as the game went on, obviously nerves were there a little bit at the beginning. Defensively, he got me a little bit with those three’s, but after that I felt comfortable. As the game went on I got a little better.”
On his rebounding:
“I’ve always tried to get my rebounds and have been good at that. I know I can bring that to our team. Guards are expected to rebound just as much as the bigs are. I was just trying to do whatever I could out there, and it worked out.”
On if his stats for the night were surprising to him:
“I wasn’t expecting that at all. Like I said, I was just out there doing whatever I could to help us win. I wasn’t the only one who had a great game. Those two (Leuer and Taylor) had a great game, Mike (Bruesewitz) had a great game, and others guys too. It was a team effort and got us the win.”
Senior F Jon Leuer
On Josh’s performance tonight:
“He did great. Talk about a good debut, that’s about as good as it gets. I was happy for him. To have another guy that can step up, that’s great. We’re looking for guys all over that can do that, whether it’s Ryan (Evans) or Rob (Wilson), when he gets healthy, or Keaton (Nankivil), we have guys right down the line that can step up. You don’t know who’s going to put up numbers or score points on any given night. That’s definitely one of the strengths of our team and to have a lift like that off the bench, it helps a lot.”
On how his shot selection improved in the second half:
“In the first half we got pretty good shots, but we weren’t able to knock some of them down. As the game went on, I think we kind of wore them down and we were able to run and push it, and if we didn’t get a good look we were able to slow it down and run the swing. When we do that, we’re pretty effective. As long as we’re not selfish, and getting good looks to the basket, we can usually find a way to score.”
On if the football team put pressure on the team by scoring 83 points:
“Yes, definitely. We couldn’t get shown up by those guys. No, it was great to see them able to dominate like that, but we were just out there to get better. That was the main focus of tonight and I think we did that. That was our goal from day one, to just keep getting better. We don’t focus on the numbers.”
Junior G Jordan Taylor
On Josh Gasser’s performance tonight:
“Jon Leuer pretty much said it all. Obviously that’s going to help his confidence level and that’s going to be great for us down the road. We knew what Josh could do. We’ve been talking about that since the start of the season about guys having to prove themselves, and he did take a step towards that tonight. We all did, I think, a little bit. We have a lot to work on, but Josh was efficient. He almost had a double-double, and had the second most points in a debut in Badger history, or something like that. Maybe he’s the next Devin Harris.”
On how his shot selection improved in the second half:
“I think we got good looks most of the game. I think shots started to fall more in the second half, but I think we played with a higher energy level, with more intensity, as well. Jon Leuer and Tim Jarmusz were in the locker room telling us we needed to come out with a little more intensity. We were a little flat in the first half. In the second half we just came out, pushed the ball, played better defense and it translated into shots for us.”
On how Mike Bruesewitz has improved:
“Mike looked like J-Bo (Jason Bohannan) out there for a stretch. I don’t think he hit the rim. Jared Berggren and Mike, the same thing as all of us. We’ve all been working hard, and it’s showing out there. If they keep bringing that out every night, it’s going to help us down the road. As long as we all stay healthy and keep working hard, I think the sky is the limit for our team. Especially with guys like that who are coming out of the woodwork, knocking down three’s. I don’t think a lot of teams expected Mike to come out like that, or Josh.”
Prairie View A&M Head Coach Byron Rimm II
Opening statement:
“That was a tough win, or a tough loss, I should say, for us. That’s a great basketball team Wisconsin has. They shoot the ball all around the floor, it was kind of hard for us to help. We kind of cater ourselves to our conference. We would never see that many shooters at one time, so we tried to work with our principles of help and recover, but it was a little too late because they have such great shooters at the University of Wisconsin.”
“I think our guys played hard. We gave a lot better effort than we did against Marquette. Like I said, I was impressed, and it’s great to be in Wisconsin. I grew up in Wisconsin in Green Bay. I haven’t been here since I was in 10th grade. I saw a lot of friends and stuff here, but it was a tough game. We did a good job of getting the ball to the right shooters. Trant Simpson did a great job. Brandon Webb did a great job. I thought he was shooting well. They’ve got three guys on Wisconsin that did a great job also of scoring. Our help and recover presence didn’t help us a lot in this game. We’re going to keep working on our stuff and, hopefully when we get to conference, that area will be perfected.”
On what Wisconsin did and Prairie View didn’t do in the second half:
“We didn’t work the ball around. We talked about taking quick shots. A lot of our guys got kind of depressed, I should say, about some stuff that was going on in the game, and kind of compounded a problem with another problem. So we had to just bite down and just know we were going to score, not worry about the officiating, not worry about the fans, and just work the ball around, get five or six or 10 passes and get a great shot.”
“We turned the ball over too much. We didn’t rebound. It’s kind of hard for us to compete with 6-10, 6-10, 6-9, 6-8 guys who were hustling. I really think that we got out-hustled today. Coach Ryan did a good job of getting the guys to play hard. Everything that was flying out of bounds, they were jumping up to get it while our guys were watching, so that’s something that we have to really need to work on in practice the next few days.”
