For the first 6 minutes Thursday night, the Wisconsin Badgers women's basketball team played some of its best offense of the season.

But when it mattered most, the Badgers showed that defense is becoming their trademark this season.

The Badgers held Virginia Tech without a field goal for 9 ½ minutes in the second half, a stretch that compensated for their own inadequacies on offense and led to a 61-52 victory in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge before an announced audience of 4,434 at the Kohl Center.

UW outscored the Hokies 13-2 in that critical stretch, making just four of its own 13 shots. But when the other team isn't scoring, a deficient offense doesn't seem so deficient. The Hokies missed six of their own shots in that stretch and committed seven turnovers, six of them a direct result of the tenacious UW defense.

"From the first day of practice, we've focused on defense and that's what we plan on doing for the rest of the season," junior guard Teah Gant said.

Gant was in the thick of the defensive mix. She spent most of the second half hounding Tech guard Lindsay Biggs, who lit up the Badgers for 15 points in the first half, including the final 12 that helped the Hokies (5-2) close a 27-9 deficit to 36-27 at the break.

Biggs, who finished with a career-high 22 points, scored just one field goal in the first 15 minutes of the second half as Gant and freshman Ashley Thomas didn't let her out of their sight.

"I just wanted to lock her up and stay in her shorts," Gant said. "I wanted her to put the ball on the floor because I knew my teammates were there to help."

The philosophy of the UW defense is to keep opponents away from the basket and chase the outside shooters. While chasing Biggs may not have been as effective in the first half, the Hokies scored just two points in the lane.

"When we play defense like that, it puts us in position to win every game, and the players are starting to believe that," UW coach Lisa Stone said.

The victory was UW's (7-1) seventh straight, their longest winning streak since a program-record 15 in the 2001-02 season.

The one thing the Badgers didn't do well in the first half was shoot free throws, missing seven of 18 attempts that allowed Virginia Tech to stay around.

Otherwise, the Badgers squared off against a variety of Tech defenses and handled them well until the final 3:50 seconds when they went cold, missing five of their last six shots.

Tech tried a man-to-man, a 1-3-1 and 1-2-2 trapping zones and a more traditional 2-3 zone with little effect in the first 16 minutes of the half. Eight Badgers hit the scorebook in that stretch, with Alyssa Karel scoring nine of her team-high 14. UW hit seven of its first 12 shots en route to a 19-7 lead in the first 7 ½ minutes.

That offense chilled in the final 3 minutes of the first half and second half, leading to an 18-for-53 game from the field, a not-so-attractive 34 percent. That percentage was even worse in the second half -- seven-for-26, or 26.9 percent.

But the Badgers' magic Thursday night was keeping the Hokies from scoring. Virginia Tech came in averaging 66 points and shooting 44 percent. Both figures took a hit.