He has once again started to play around the perimeter and make his own moves to the basket, but has resulted in forcing shots down low and expressing obvious frustration with both himself and his teammates when they don’t get him the shooting opportunities he is seeking. Wojciechowski says he won’t pump extra noise into practices or change the way his team prepares in anticipation for the hostile Kohl Center crowd. Ellenson turned his defense around in the second half, though, and appeared to play more comfortably on that end.
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Marquette: The athletic Golden Eagles set the tone early in transition and used an 18-3 run spanning about eight minutes between the first and second halves to build a 13-point lead with 15:51 left….
Wisconsin is now shooting just 41.5 percent from the field and 32.2 percent from three-point range.
The Badgers already have more losses than all of last season, when they went 36-4 and advanced to the NCAA finals.
With Wisconsin’s top two scorers, forward Nigel Hayes and guard Bronson Koenig struggling to find the bottom of the net, forward Vitto Brown stepped up to score 15 points for the Badgers.
The game was expected to be an interesting match up as Marquette came off of a six game winning streak – while on the other hand, the Badgers were coming off of a loss to UWM on Wednesday.
However, in a scenario all-too familiar to the Badgers this season, they came short in a nail-biter.
“We did not do our job well enough for our coaches who work extremely hard to give us the recipes for wins”, Hayes said. Wisconsin led by 12 a little more than five minutes into the second half when UW-Milwaukee took off on a 13-3 run to get the deficit down to two. Marquette ended a two-game slide in a series that dates to 1917. Redshirt freshman Ethan Happ, who practiced against 2014 national player of the year Frank Kaminsky last season, has played relatively well averaging 10.7 points and 8.7 rebounds up front. “You’ve got to attack the post”, Jeter said.
“We thought we wanted to be really aggressive on ball screens against Koenig, and we were able to do that…and I thought Sandy Cohen had a remarkable game against Hayes”. But he missed a pair of free throws that could have tied the game with less than 25 seconds left.
“As the game went on, me being looked at as a leader of the team, I took it on myself to try and shoot through those and the ball didn’t go in this time”, Hayes said. Ellenson played 37 minutes and was involved on every play on the offensive end.
The Badgers averaged 0.89 points per possession, compared to Marquette’s 0.95.
Wisconsin will play Marquette this Saturday at the Kohl Center, with the game time scheduled for 12:30pm.
The Golden Eagles’ winning streak coincides with the addition of Traci Carter into the lineup, joining fellow freshmen Henry Ellenson and Haanif Cheatham in the starting five.
“It would solidify this stretch that we’ve been having”, Fischer said of getting a win in Madison.
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Then, it was a blown 12-point second half lead and 68-67 loss to Milwaukee.
