Marquette struggled at both ends of court in the second half against Wisconsin

MADISON - Justin Lewis drove into the paint, planted his foot and executed a nice spin move into a vicious dunk that gave the Marquette men's basketball team a 38-36 lead early in the second half against Wisconsin.

That fired up MU's bench and it looked like the play could spark a run.

Instead, little went right for the Golden Eagles after that in an 89-76 loss to their state rival on Saturday at the Kohl Center.

The offense bogged down in the halfcourt for MU (7-2) while UW (7-1) seemingly could score at will.

RELATED: Badgers have too much firepower for MU

BOX SCORE: Wisconsin 89, Marquette 76

The frustration appeared to bleed from one end of the court to the other for the Golden Eagles.

"First if all, you have to make offense tough for teams like that," MU head coach Shaka Smart said. "There's different ways to do that. I actually thought in the first half we were able to kind of get the game going the way we wanted it to go in terms of just the style of it.

"We didn't necessarily shoot the ball great. They didn't necessarily shoot the ball great in the first half. But in the second half, we just didn't impose ourselves on the defensive end and I think that was demoralizing for our guys on offense."

UW's second-half shooting was eye-popping: 19 for 27 (70.4%).

Just over seven minutes after Lewis' dunk, the Badgers had a 15-point lead. The Golden Eagles had a brief spurt to get within 61-53 with 8:34 remaining, but UW guard Brad Davison hit a back-breaking three after an offensive rebound.

Davison had 14 points in the second half and finished with 20. The fifth-year guard delivered several critical shots, including during a spurt late in the first half that foreshadowed MU's issues in the second.

"We just weren't locked in defensively," MU guard Tyler Kolek said. "The first half we were up (29-25 at the three-minute mark) and they went on a 5-0 run on me personally.

"Davison curled around the baseline and hit a three in the corner. And then their point guard (Chucky Hepburn) got in the lane and had the shot-clock floater. That puts them up at the half (34-31) and that really turned the game right there."

Smart kept freshman guard Kam Jones in the starting lineup and played all 11 scholarship players again as the head coach tries to find the right lineup combinations. MU got 40 points from bench players, including 11 from Oso Ighodaro.

"Some of these guys are still learning each other," Smart said. "I'll tell you the challenge we have right now is we've got to figure out what our best defensive lineup is.

"And we got figure out, OK, these are the five guys we can depend on to stop the other team from scoring. And we did not find that today."

MU's offense had 13 turnovers, with eight of them coming from Lewis and Kolek trying to make something happen off the dribble.

"We weren't really flowing into offense," Kolek said. "We were kind of getting stagnant at points. We just were just looking around for the next guy to score. That's not us. We don't have that guy that can go out and give us 25 (points). We got to play together. Play team basketball."

The loss to UW started a tough six-game stretch for MU. The Golden Eagles play at Kansas State on Wednesday before finishing the non-conference slate against UCLA, which is ranked No. 5 in both polls, next Saturday at Fiserv Forum. Then the Golden Eagles begin Big East competition with three tough games: at Xavier, vs. Connecticut and at St. John's.

"We got to win the ones that we can win," Kolek said. "Obviously this was a winnable game. It's hard to win a college basketball game.

"We just got to stick to what goes into winning and hopefully we come out winners."

THANK YOU: Subscribers' support makes this work possible. Help us share the knowledge by buying a gift subscription.

DOWNLOAD THE APP: Get the latest news, sports and more

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Marquette Golden Eagles struggle on defense against Wisconsin