At the moment, Greg Gard is known as the coach who made Juwan Howard very angry.

But in little over a week, Gard will receive attention for another reason. Because he’s going to be named Big Ten coach of the year for the second time in the past 3 seasons.

Wisconsin’s 66-61 win at Rutgers Saturday night was perhaps the crowning achievement.

The Badgers were able to do what no other ranked team in the Big Ten has done this season — beat the Scarlet Knights at Jersey Mike’s Arena. Where Purdue, Illinois, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Iowa all failed, Wisconsin succeeded.

Granted, winning in Piscataway is not an award-winning feat on its own merit, or more of us would be raving about Lafayette coach Fran O’Hanlon. In this case, it’s just one piece of Gard’s impressive body of work.

The big picture: with a week left on the Big Ten schedule, Wisconsin is alone in first place.

The Badgers were picked 10th in the preseason poll.

The Johnny Davis factor

One point likely to be raised against Gard earning coach of the year is the fact he has Johnny Davis on his team.

How hard can it be to coach the conference player of the year? Or so the thought process sometimes goes.

But even though Davis enters the final week of the regular season as the favorite for that award, it doesn’t feel like he’s locked it down yet.

Keegan Murray, Kofi Cockburn or Jaden Ivey could still finish with a flourish. Or with 3 games left on his schedule compared to 2 for the others, even Ohio State’s EJ Liddell could sway the electorate.

If Davis does go on to win Big Ten player of the year — or perhaps national player of the year — it is  impossible to ignore the role Gard has played in his development. Davis was not among the 11 players named to the preseason all-Big Ten team.

And for good reason. Davis, so relatively anonymous that he went by “Jonathan” last year, was sixth on Wisconsin’s roster in scoring. He’s now 13th in the country in that category.

Davis clearly put in plenty of offseason work to reach that level, but Gard was quick to recognize he had a different player this year. He wasted no time making Davis Wisconsin’s centerpiece.

That’s good coaching.

The tempo change

Wisconsin’s offensive identity has been identical for the past 25 years.

Slow and boring.

Or as others prefer to call it, methodical.

Either way, you could set a watch to the Badgers running sets that took the air out of the ball and waiting until the final 10 seconds of the shot clock to make a play.

Prior to this season, the quickest Gard team ranked 328th nationally in adjusted tempo. The Badgers are a downright spicy 195th in tempo this year. According to the database at KenPom.com, that’s only the second time since 1997 that Wisconsin has been in the top-200 of tempo.

Despite picking it up a notch, Wisconsin’s offense still looks like a product of German engineering. The Badgers are turning the ball over at their lowest rate since 2015, when they were a No. 1 NCAA tournament seed in Bo Ryan’s final season.

The roster upheaval

Of Wisconsin’s top 6 scorers a year ago, Davis and Brad Davison are the only players still on the roster. And Davison is the team’s lone senior other than reserve center Chris Vogt, who transferred from Cincinnati.

This Wisconsin team ranks 283rd nationally in experience and 226th in minutes continuity from a year ago.

Purdue, as a point of comparison, is 13th in minutes continuity. Illinois, another B1G title contender, is 78th in experience.

Ohio State’s Chris Holtmann is also in the coach of the year conversation, but even he has a slightly more seasoned roster. The Buckeyes are 189th in experience and 205th in minutes continuity.

Metrics hate Wisconsin

Maybe the strongest thing in Gard’s favor is how little computer metrics like his team. The Badgers are outperforming the numbers by a mile.

According to KenPom, Wisconsin is 25th nationally and fifth in the Big Ten. T-Rank, a metric created by Wisconsin graduate Bart Torvik, has the Badgers at 23rd nationally and sixth in the Big Ten.

When you break it down further, Wisconsin is 11th in the B1G in effective field goal percentage and sixth in defensive field goal percentage.

None of those numbers add up to a team leading the Big Ten with just 2 games left to play. Yet that’s exactly where the Badgers find themselves.

And it’s because Greg Gard has done the best coaching job in the Big Ten this season.