Huskers Show Promise, Search Consistency

Nebraska once again showed how good of a basketball team it can be during the first 20 minutes of Saturday's game against Wisconsin.
 
Take the Huskers' first possession of the game, for instance. Sophomore guard Cam Mack zipped a backdoor pass to a sharp-cutting Thorir Thorbjarnarson for an easy layup. That set the tone for a first half in which Nebraska moved and shared the ball and earned solid looks at the basket.
 
Crisp. Sharp. Focused.
 
Time and time again, Nebraska's guards boasted their athleticism and bested Wisconsin's defenders en route to the hoop. From the perimeter, the Huskers sank five 3-pointers, on 15 attempts. Nothing earth-scorching, by any means, but serviceable.
 
"We came out with great energy and urgency in the first half," first-year Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg said. "I thought the ball was moving exceptionally well in that first half, and we were getting kind of what we wanted against a team that is one of the top defensive teams in the country.
 
"Even the possessions where we missed shots, they were great looks, either right at the rim, or open threes."
 
Defensively, Nebraska mustered one of its better efforts of the season on the boards, limiting the Badgers to very few second-chance shots. (They finished with six offensive rebounds.) Only because pesky guard Brad Davison nailed a couple of contested perimeter shots in the final minute – one a 3-pointer, the other just inside the line that beat the shot clock buzzer – did Wisconsin manage a 39-38 halftime lead after trailing by as many as seven.
 
Eerily, that's the same halftime score of these teams' previous meeting this season in Madison. In that game, the Badgers blitzed Nebraska with a 20-2 run to open the second half on their way to an 82-68 victory.
 
That history repeated itself in the rematch – Wisconsin used a 21-2 run after halftime and won 81-64 at Pinnacle Bank Arena – is symbolic of a Nebraska season that's been a maddening combination of encouraging and frustrating.
 
Currently, more of the latter.
 
"Yeah, I don't know what it is right now, but this been be a problem all season, the second half situation," said senior guard Haanif Cheatham, who paced Nebraska with 17 points. "It has been up and down. We come out good one game with a good second half, next game we'll come out horrible."
 
To wit: The Huskers looked brilliant out of halftime earlier in the week, when they erased a 13-point deficit and eventually had a game-winning shot attempt swatted away in the final seconds of a 72-70 loss at No. 9 Maryland. That would be a Maryland team that's in first place in the Big Ten with an 11-3 record after winning Saturday at Michigan State.
 
Wisconsin coach Greg Gard referenced Nebraska's game at Maryland to illustrate his level of concern playing a road game against a team mired in a losing streak. He also mentioned Nebraska's 75-72 loss at Rutgers, a game in which the Huskers rallied from a 14-point deficit in the second half to lead by as many as six points.
 
"Look at how they've played," Gard said. "They've been competitive in most of their games, so we knew exactly what we had to do today to come out of here on top."
 
Nebraska, meanwhile, fell out of sorts on offense after halftime, and that frustration spilled over to defense, where the Huskers lost focus and rotated off the wrong players too many times. That, in part, explains how Davison tied a school record with eight 3-pointers, as Wisconsin nailed 15 as a team.

Gard noted the irony of Davison's inability to make 3-pointers in the Badgers' previous two practices. Not only that, the junior guard entered the day 2-of-16 on 3-pointers in the Badgers' previous four games.

Wisconsin's 15 made 3-pointers set a school record for most in a road game. The Badgers had made their overall school record with 18 in the teams' previous meeting this season. They entered Saturday shooting 26.6 percent on 3-pointers in road games; they were at 48.4 percent Saturday.
 
"In the second half, especially when they started making those to extend the lead, I think we kind of got a little frustrated and kind of went away from what we were supposed to be doing, and that's on us," Thorbjarnarson said. "I think they got some looks, but they also made some ridiculous shots, so I think we've got to give credit to them."


 
Hoiberg said he didn't see the same urgency after halftime that he saw in the first half. He called two timeouts early in the second half to try to stem the Badgers, but to no avail.
 
"A lot of that was due to, again, our inability to finish at the rim," Hoiberg said. "We were 1-for-11 at the rim between the second and third media timeouts, and what that does, it really hurts your floor balance, it hurts your defensive transition. That's where a lot of those threes were made.
 
"Then we missed a couple rotations. The concentration level has got to be stronger, it has to be more urgent when things aren't going well."
 
Effort, meanwhile, has seldom been an issue with this team. In fact, sometimes players may be trying too hard to account for a bad spell, only to add more snow to the ball as it rolls away uncontrollably.
 
"I think once we struggle a little bit on defense, we try to get a 14-point play in one shot," Cheatham said. "We tried to do a little too much on back-to-back possessions, and it kind of messes us up, kind of messes up the flow of the defense and offense. I think we've got to find a way to sustain the hit that we get and be a tougher team."
 
Nebraska (7-18, 2-12 Big Ten Conference) battled Wisconsin (15-10, 8-6) with two players fighting through illness. Mack came tantalizing close to his second triple-double (eight points, nine rebounds, eight assists) despite receiving IV fluids Saturday morning after he'd been vomiting throughout the night. Dachon Burke Jr. (10 points, two rebounds) returned to action after missing the Maryland game with a different type of flu virus. He hadn't been back to practice until Friday.
 
"I'm proud of those guys for going out and trying to grind it out," Hoiberg said.
 
Grinding is exactly what these Huskers continue to do as they search for their first victory since Jan. 7. That's something Hoiberg has never been concerned about for a team that continues to focus and prepare hard – with a Michigan State team that's lost four of its last five games making a trip to Lincoln on Thursday.
 
"We just got to keep grinding, man. We have got to keep coming out," Hoiberg said. "The first half was really good basketball for us; again the broken record is sounding the same every game of the consistency of our team. We got to play 40 minutes. If we have any chance at all, we have to play a consistent 40 minutes of basketball." 
 
Reach Brian at brosenthal@huskers.com or follow him on Twitter @GBRosenthal.