The revolution started with an impromptu visit. It was August of 2023 and Kirk Penney, a former All Big Ten guard who played for Wisconsin from 1999 to 2003 and was visiting Madison with his family, stopped by the basketball office to say hello. Greg Gard, the Badgers’ coach, was eager to pick his brain. Penney had recently wrapped up a 14-year professional career, mostly overseas, and unbeknownst to him Gard had been marinating on ideas to modernize Wisconsin’s famously glacial offense. He wanted to know what Penney thought.

“I don’t know,” Penney replied. “I’d have to see the players.”

A few days later, Penney returned to watch Gard and his staff conduct a workout. When it was over, Penney told him, “I think we can do better.” That led to more conversations, which led to Penney joining Gard’s staff as Special Assistant to the Head Coach and de facto offensive coordinator. And that has led to stodgy old Wisconsin morphing at warp speed into an unrecognizable, futuristic, modern-day offensive juggernaut.

And all without sacrificing winning. Since beginning the season unranked, the Badgers have climbed to No. 24 in this week’s AP poll. They are tied for fourth place in the Big Ten with a 5-3 record (15-4 overall). And lest anyone think a quicker pace means sloppier play, the Badgers are ranked No. 11 on KenPom in adjusted offensive efficiency, which would be the highest of Gard’s tenure and the fourth-highest for the school in the KenPom era. “It’s exciting,” says 7-foot fifth-year senior forward Steven Crowl, who is one of five Badgers averaging double-figure scoring (10.4) while also putting up 5.5 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game. “Everyone is shocked by it. We’re Wisconsin, we’re known for our slower pace, kind of making a grind-it-up game. But if we weren’t willing to adapt, we could be stuck in the past.”

Just how different is this version of Wisconsin? Heading into Tuesday’s game at UCLA, the Badgers were:

  • Averaging 82.4 points per game. That ranked 28th in the country and was the most at the school since the 1970-’71 season. That season is also the last time Wisconsin finished in the top 50 nationally in scoring.
  • Ranked 155th nationally in tempo, the highest the Badgers have been since KenPom began tracking that category in 1997. In Gard’s previous nine seasons as head coach, Wisconsin’s average tempo rank was 321.3, including No. 304 last season. Only once before under Gard were the Badgers even in the top 300.
  • Making 9.3 three-pointers on 26.8 attempts. Both would the highest at the school since the inception of the three-point line in 1986-87.

Wisconsin has reached the 80-point mark in 12 of its 19 games, including a Kohl Center record 116 (on 21 made threes) in a win over Iowa on Jan. 3. The Badgers also scored 103 in a Nov. 15 win over Arizona, making this the first season since 1995-’96 they have hit the century mark multiple times.

What makes this turnabout especially remarkable is that it was undertaken by a 54-year-old head coach who has been at the school for 24 years, including 14 as an assistant under the previous head coach, Bo Ryan. The fact that Gard was willing to make such radical changes at this stage of his career is as unusual as it is admirable. The players have bought in completely.

“I knew we needed to evolve,” Gard says. “As good as the past has been to us, that’s not where the game is now and where it’s going. With the (transfer) portal and NIL, you have to be really intentional with how you put a team together. The analytics are such a big part of it. We’ve taken a bigger step into that world, the utilization of the three, the spacing. It’s been about a three-year evolution.”

Greg Gard is 54 years old and has been at Wisconsin for 24 years, but that did not stop him from totally revamping the Badgers’ offense.
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Gard had already started down this path by the time Penney visited two summers ago. “I had an idea of where I wanted to take this. I just didn’t know how to quite get it there,” he says. Penney owned the map, having bounced as a player from his native New Zealand to the NBA G League to Germany, Spain, Australia and various points in between. Penney also spent one season in Israel playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv, whose former coach, David Blatt, is a basketball savant whose innovative concepts (many borrowed from his days playing for Pete Carril in the Princeton offense) enabled him to become one of the most successful international coaches of all time. Penney didn’t play for Blatt, but he did play in his offense at Tel Aviv. When he left that team to play for the New Zealand Breakers, Penney convinced his new squad to implement Blatt’s system.

Following his retirement, Penney spent the 2019-20 season as consultant and player personnel director under Tony Bennett at Virginia. He spent the next two-and-a-half years in New Zealand under lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic. By the time Gard offered him a chance to come back to his alma mater, Penney was ready, eager and available.

The results were immediate. Last season, the Badgers scored 74.7 points per game, their highest average in 30 years. There are two main differences between Ryan’s Swing offense and the David Blatt clone that Penney has implemented. First, instead of focusing on off-ball cuts and screens and swinging the ball from side to side (hence the name “Swing”), Wisconsin now utilizes an NBA-style, ball screen-heavy attack that empowers the players to react to the defense instead of hewing to scripted patterns. “It’s like a read offense in football,” Crowl says. “There’s a flow to it. You don’t really have to think too much, which is the best part. You can just play basketball.”

The other difference is that the offense allows – and even encourages – field goal attempts early in the shot clock. “Our points per possession have been really good when we’re shooting early, because we’re shooting the good ones,” Penney says. “It really helps to have big guys who pass well. When you shoot well within the system, you can score a lot of points.”

There’s another means by which this team scores a lot of points, and that’s free throws. Wisconsin currently leads the nation in free throw percentage at 85.5 percent, which is on pace to set a new NCAA record. Thanks to the new spacing and aggressive driving, the Badgers also get to the line often, averaging 18.3 attempts per game. If that holds up, it will be the most at the school since that 1970-71 season. When 6-foot-5 senior guard John Tonje, a transfer from Missouri, scored 41 points (two shy of the school record set by Frank Kaminsky in 2013) in that win over Arizona, he shot 21 of 22 from the foul line.

Gard is reluctant to take credit for this particular upgrade. “When people ask what’s your secret to shooting free throws so well, my answer is, recruit good shooters,” he says. “We’re doing the same drills we did when we shot 68 percent from the line three years ago.”

That may be true, but the team’s gameday routine has also undergone an extreme makeover thanks to the addition of another former Badger with professional experience, Greg Stiemsma. After playing for Wisconsin from 2004-08, Stiemsma embarked on a seven-year career as a journeyman pro, including one-year stints with four different NBA teams. He went on to spend two years as a Player Development Associate with the Minnesota Timberwolves and one year as a Video Assistant with the San Antonio Spurs. Like Penney, Stiemsma jumped at the chance to return to his alma mater (and native home state) last summer. He has brought an NBA-style approach to the Badgers’ game day routine. Instead of conducting a full group shootarounds like most college teams, Wisconsin breaks up its workouts into smaller groups, which provides for more shots (including lots of free throws) in a shorter amount of time. The team calls those drills “vitamins,” which is the same term the Spurs used.

Just as he has done with Penney, Gard has given Stiemsma great latitude to implement procedures that will both prepare this team to win games and the players to succeed as pros. “The amount of change that he has embraced here in a short amount of time has been pretty incredible,” Stiemsma says. “It’s a pretty exciting time right now for Wisconsin basketball.”

Gard laughs at the suggestion that he had to break the news of this shift to Ryan gently. “We’re a decade beyond him coaching. I think we’re out of that shadow,” he says. There’s nothing wrong with the way Ryan played – his way of doing things got him into the Hall of Fame, after all – but given how quickly things have changed in college basketball, Gard was smart to realize he was at risk if his program didn’t adapt to the times. The success this team is having makes you wonder what other changes might be on the horizon in Madison.

“Coach Gard has been a little bit shy about taking the credit, but this is happening because he put the right people in place,” Stiemsma says. “He’s not fighting the change, he’s embracing it and he’s gassing it up as much as he can. It’s going to be exciting to see where all this goes.”