Wisconsin Basketball: Greg Gard’s Badgers – What’s New?
By Josh Blakely
How has Wisconsin basketball changed under Greg Gard?
When Greg Gard took over for Bo Ryan, we all wondered: “What changes will Gard make?” Now that we are 7 games into the Greg Gard era, let’s try to answer that question.
Related Story: 3 Coaching Differences Between Greg Gard and Bo Ryan
A head coach has many impacts on a team, but one of the easiest ones to analyze is the rotation. Gard has made a big move in the rotation.
I’ve also included the Offensive and Defensive Ratings for each player from RealGM. The Offensive Rating for the average NCAA team is about 103.1, so an Offensive Rating over that amount is above average and a Defensive Rating above that is below average.
So far, the Jordan Hill experiment has been a failure, with below average offense and defense. On the other hand, Illikainen has helped the team juice its offense. The biggest drops in minutes are Thomas, Iverson, and Brown, who are defensive specialists, at least at this point in their careers.
However, Hill is the worst offensive and defensive player on the team this season, so giving him minutes is hurting the Badgers. His minutes may help Bronson Koenig and Zak Showalter be more rested and productive, but he’s been so bad, that I think the net effect is pretty negative.
If you look at the bottom of the chart, you can see how much the rotation changes should be expected to alter how many points the Badgers score and prevent in each 100 possessions. Here, Hill’s impact seems to drown everything else out, as the Badgers should score 16.8 fewer points/100 possessions and allow 13.9 more. Let’s see if that’s come to fruition.
If you look at the offensive efficiency for each game under Gard, there appears to be a gentle, upward trend.
But, as you can see, in the upper right corner, the R-squared for the best-fit line isn’t very high, so more games under Gard don’t appear to mean better offense. In fact, only two of the seven games have been better than the offense, this year, under Bo Ryan. The conclusion, so far, is that the offense under Gard isn’t noticeably better than the offense under Ryan.
Moving on to the defense, there is also an upward trend, but it is more dramatic, and an upward move in defensive efficiency means the team is allowing more points.
The R-squared for defensive efficiency over time is .58, which would be significant if the sample size were large enough, so it might be that the defense is getting worse as we move forward under Gard. However, if the last two games turn out to be outliers, there would not be much difference between the defense under Gard and Ryan (the red line).
As I mentioned, above, the sample size is small, so we’ll need to revisit this later in the year to get a better sense, but the early returns are that Gard’s rotation changes, specifically giving us more Jordan Hill, has had little effect on the offense but has created some issues on defense. However, the effects, up through today, appear to be less than the calculation in the first chart, above, meaning Gard may have found some synergies that don’t show up in the numbers through his lineups or his use of the Swing offense.
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