Key Wisconsin player already drops major hint he won’t transfer after this season

Earlier this season, Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard was being candid about the NIL process and how recruiting works in the transfer era. He casually mentioned that he and his staff's main priority is to retain both Nolan Winter and John Blackwell. He was on The Swing podcast and happened to drop this quote:

""Quite frankly this job has changed so much with all the moving parts. You are more of a CEO than you are a coach. I watch a lot of film and spend time [on that] but there's so much more that goes into now that wasn't part of it 10 years ago... You spend a lot of time future casting on how your roster needs to be. We used to do it in three to four year snapshots...now you're looking at one year snapshots. What does next year need to be? ... Retaining Blackwell and Winter are our top priority. ""

Greg Gard

This was a big deal to Wisconsin fans at the time, and many of us closely monitored what Blackwell and Winter had to say about next year. Nolan Winter, in a social media post earlier today, happened to say something that caught many Wisconsin fans' attention.

Nolan Winter is already thinking about Wisconsin's next season with him still being a Badger

The Wisconsin basketball social media team asked players and coaches a simple question, "At 200k Instagram followers, what should we giveaway?" And players responded with all sorts of different things, but that's not the point of this post. It's what Nolan Winter said that had heads popping up. He could have gone very simply, like "a signed basketball" or a "signed jersey," as many of the others did, but he said, "You could throw a PS5, but that's pretty generic. I think we should give away some tickets to travel with us next year."

Fans were quick to point out how Winter used the "we" and the "us" language. This is a good sign that he's already visualizing himself as a Badger for another season and maybe the plan that Greg Gard had to retain him is working.