They floundered and fell behind, regrouped and responded, and with 8 minutes 19 seconds remaining, Wisconsin led UNLV by five. This was an enviable position for the second-seeded Badgers, who were blessed with veterans, a radiant star and a history of nursing these kinds of leads to the finish.
But Sunday, in a second-round game of the NCAA tournament at the United Center, they often belied that image of calm in a 74-68 upset loss to UNLV.
With just seven seconds gone, senior guard Kammron Taylor committed an egregious charge. With just 2:48 gone, Marcus Landry responded to a three-pointer by Rebels guard Michael Umeh by pointing to himself and asking if Umeh had been his man. With 7:42 remaining in the first half, Joe Krabbenhoft short-armed an 8-footer, missed and followed with a frustration foul. With 2:19 remaining in the first half, Jason Bohannon was abandoned by his teammates in the backcourt, trapped and forced to use a timeout.
They lost their poise under pressure. They launched quick shots when patience was in order. They allowed their swing offense to be stymied by the Rebels’ speed.
Those were some of the sins the Badgers committed, and now, with the lead, they committed the most grievous of all: They failed to protect it.
“We had some momentum,” coach Bo Ryan said with a look back to that moment. “But that’s another team where five of the top six players are seniors. They really showed their maturity.”
Their coach noticed.
“I liked the comments of our guys in the huddle at that time,” UNLV’s Lon Kruger said. “They simply said we’ve done too much, we’ve come too far to let Wisconsin come back and roll over us like that.”
That’s when the game finally turned and the Rebels began rolling toward their upset, moved them to a Midwest regional semifinal Friday in St. Louis against Oregon.
Their first jab came when 6-foot-6-inch Wendell Wright (22 points), who calls himself a power guard, put in a baby jumper at 8:05.
Then came a fusillade from Kevin Kruger (16 points), the coach’s kid who had missed all eight of his shots in his team’s opening-round win Friday and his first three shots Sunday. But he hit a three at 7:33 to tie the game 53-53. Just 106 seconds later, he hit another to put his team up two.
“They felt good the last game and even at the beginning of this game,” Kruger said of the shots he missed. “They felt like they were going in and . . . I just had a little faith. I mean, I feel like I’m going to knock down my next one every time. I don’t ever think I’m going to miss, as bad as that sounds.”
He did not miss his next one, another three from the deep right corner at 5:07, nor did he miss the three free throws he was awarded at 3:06, dropping them to push Vegas’ lead to eight.
“A lot of times when you get back into it, you don’t go ahead and create a gap,” his dad said. “I thought it was really significant that not only did we catch up, we went up.”
And they never went down again, nursing their lead as surely as the Badgers had blown theirs. The Rebels’ defense, which gave Alando Tucker the kind of attention usually reserved for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue–they doubled him, tripled him, smothered him. Tucker managed 17 points on 4-for-11 shooting, scoring just six points (on 2-for-8 shooting) in the second half and hitting a lone free throw in the final 12:39.
“It was tough all game,” Tucker acknowledged.
Taylor, his most accomplished accomplice, used the lanes abandoned by the Rebels attending Tucker to score 24. But just as it had earlier in this game, UNLV used its speed to slice and dice Wisconsin’s defense. With 29.7 seconds left, Curtis Terry beat the Badgers’ Bohannon one on one for the 10-foot floater that was the dagger.
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This was just the fourth time all season Wisconsin had surrendered more than 70 points, the first time in his career that Ryan had lost to a lower-ranked team in the NCAA tournament. And when it was done, Tucker walked to the end of his team’s bench, leaned over, put his hands on his knees and remained motionless for long seconds.
He had talked openly of his high expectations and aspirations of a national title. Now they were over, finished, as unfulfilled as any other unrequited dream.
“As seniors,” he said afterward, “you have a level of frustration and disappointment. . . . It feels bad now because you can’t come back. After a game like this, it’s only right to be frustrated. You don’t get to strap it up again.”
Said Taylor: “I’m very frustrated. This is not how I wanted to go out, in the second round of the tournament. Right now it stings.”
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