Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard calls Yaxel Lendeborg a ‘complete player’

The Michigan Wolverines and Wisconsin Badgers went toe-to-toe in a heavyweight fight on Saturday afternoon in the semifinal round of the Big Ten Tournament. When the smoke cleared, it was Michigan that came away victorious by a final score of 68-65.

Big Ten Player of the Year Yaxel Lendeborg hit the game-winning three-pointer with 0.4 seconds remaining to send Michigan to the Big Ten Tournament Championship Game for the second straight year.

It was a slow start for Lendeborg overall, as he only scored three points in the 20 minutes of play — a three-pointer right before the end of the half. But he picked it up in the second half and ended with a solid overall stat line of 12 points, five rebounds, three assists, two steals and one block.

One of Lendeborg’s five rebounds was on the offensive end, when he corralled a missed shot by Elliot Cadeau. He flipped it back to Cadeau, who then proceeded to hit the ensuing three-point shot to put the Wolverines up 65-62 with less than a minute remaining.

Lendeborg saved a couple of his best plays for when the lights were shining brightest. Following the game, Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard had nothing but good things to say about Lendeborg and how challenging it is to play against someone like him.

“He’s a complete player at 6-9,” Gard told the media. “So you’ve got a guy that can put the ball on the floor. They can try to post him, he can shoot the three, they move him around, put him in some gap driving at times, he can ball screen, they can ball screen for him.

“Like I said, the skillset is one thing, but when you combine that with his size, it obviously makes it a very unique matchup. I thought for the most part our guys — we didn’t give anything easy. The three he got at the end of the first half that we over extended out top and got caught too high and allowed the top to corner pass to become too easy, and it slowed our rotation where we couldn’t rotate fast enough. But he’s a really good player obviously, but that’s not the only guy they have. They have a lot of really good players. Yeah, he’s a unique matchup because of the size and his versatility.”

Gard has always been one of the more classy head coaches in the Big Ten when it comes to giving praise and respect to opposing coaches and players. And he certainly isn’t wrong about Michigan having multiple good players. Aday Mara led the Wolverines with 16 points, eight rebounds and five blocks. Cadeau also tallied 15 points, while Trey McKenney provided 10 points off the bench.

The Badgers gave the Wolverines all they could, making 16 three-pointers on Saturday. They also drained 15 shots from beyond the arc in the first matchup against Michigan back in January. The Badgers should be proud of how they played to end the season, and I’m sure they will be a hot pick to advance past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament in many people’s brackets.

But at the end of the day, Lendeborg and company were able to overcome Wisconsin’s barrage of three-point shooting and mental perseverance to advance to the Big Ten Tournament Championship Game.

Speaking of the conference title game, Michigan will take on Purdue — who took down UCLA in their semifinal matchup — on Sunday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. on CBS.