Why Greg Gard compares Wisconsin basketball’s roster construction to a triangle
Greg Gard discusses Wisconsin basketball’s rebuilt roster, offseason priorities, retention, and expectations entering next season.
For as much roster turnover as Greg Gard and the Wisconsin men’s basketball program faced this offseason, the staff never viewed the situation they were building for 2026-27 as starting from scratch.
Not after retaining Nolan Winter and Austin Rapp. And not after watching how heavily those two factored into Wisconsin’s portal recruiting efforts.
As the Badgers worked through another offseason shaped by roster movement, NIL realities, and the transfer portal, Gard’s staff prioritized building around a returning frontcourt that they believed could anchor the next version of Wisconsin basketball. The result was a portal class centered around experience, shooting, athleticism, and defensive upside.
Now that much of the offseason dust has settled, Gard believes Wisconsin has assembled a roster that fits what the staff envisioned, and that optimism begins with the players the Badgers managed to keep.
Winter and Rapp returning gave the Badgers both continuity and flexibility as they reconstructed the roster around them after losing their entire starting backcourt. Leading scorer Nick Boyd exhausted his eligibility, while John Blackwell ultimately transferred to Duke after entering both the NBA Draft and portal process to gauge his value on the open market.
But internally, Wisconsin believed it still had something worth selling.
Gard and Joe Krabbenhoft have noted that multiple portal additions specifically asked about Winter and Rapp during the recruiting process because they wanted to play alongside them. The hope is that they can form one of the best shooting frontcourts in the country, which reflects how much value skilled big men now carry in modern roster construction.
And Wisconsin built outward from there.
That process has become far more complicated in today’s college basketball landscape, where a program’s roster construction is just as much about allocation strategy as it is talent evaluation. Wisconsin’s staff has openly acknowledged that building a complete team now requires balancing experience, retention, portal additions, and overall roster depth without tying too much of the budget into one or two players.
“You can’t allocate too large a percentage to one individual or even two individuals,” Gard said on Butchie’s Den. “Because then what you have left to build a team around them becomes very minimal. I think the simplest way to look at this is to view it as a triangle. So we’re building from the top down.
“We’re not building from the bottom up. We want to make sure our primary players — our studs, so to speak — are focused on first, and then you build from your best players down. As you retain players and get a good idea of who’s coming back, then you start building around them.
“Do you want to have a really highly paid player or two and have average pieces around them, or do you want to build the best team possible? Quite frankly, my job is to win games. How do you win games? You get the best team possible on the court. And how that comes together changes from year to year.”
