Cal shows off a new cast of characters in Win Over Bakersfield

Coach Mark Madsen rebuilt his Cal basketball roster this season with 10 newcomers and promised a more balanced team in his second season.

He got all 10 on the floor within the first seven-plus minutes at Haas Pavilion and by halftime of Monday’s season-opening 86-73 win over Cal State Bakersfield, nine of them had scored, proving his point.

This won’t be a team that relies on an NBA star, as the Bears did at times last season with Jaylon Tyson, now a rookie with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Instead, there seem to be several options in this squad.

“We played against ten players tonight,” Madsen said, “and every one of the ten players went in and contributed to the win. This was a great team effort tonight.”

Oakland native Jovan Blacksher Jr., a point guard transfer from Grand Canyon University, posted 17 points and four assists. Stanford transfer and sophomore guard Andrej Stojakovic added 16 points and six rebounds.

BJ Omot, a resilient 6-foot-1 junior from the University of North Dakota, made a pair of 3s on his way to scoring 13 points and flew high for a spectacular blocked shot.

Tag team centers Mady Sissoko (Michigan State) and Lee Dort (Vanderbilt) combined for 14 points and 12 rebounds and each had an impressive assist. Junior guard DJ Campbell, a transfer from Western Carolina, had 12 points and three steals.

Rytis Petraitis, a 6-7 junior forward from Air Force, seems eager to stick his nose into the opponent’s business. He drew two charges in the first half and made several clearances to keep alive an offensive rebound that one of his teammates stopped.

“When I went there, I think we were excited to finally play someone else,” Blacksher said. “It was fun.”

“We’re just going to build on it and get better,” Omot said. “I think we played pretty well, but in the second half we let it slide a bit. We stayed calm and finished the game.”

The Bears are still rough around the edges and it remains to be seen how any of what we saw Monday night translates when the competition heats up. For example, during the Atlantic Coast Conference with bluebloods Duke and North Carolina, among others.

The Bears were 13-19 in Madsen’s debut season, a vast improvement over the club’s 3-29 record the season before. To survive the challenges ahead, this team will have to be better than it was a year ago.

In an opening game full of mistakes – the teams combined for 48 personal fouls – Cal had an 18 lead at halftime but couldn’t run away from the visitors. Yet Bakersfield did not get closer than 11 points until the final 71 seconds of the game.

“Some areas of growth: I thought Bakersfield did a great job changing the tempo late in the game,” Madsen said, referring to the Bears’ nine turnovers in the second half. “We have to be able to deal with that better. We made our free throws when we needed to and we got a decisive victory.”

The Bears trailed by one point for 17 seconds only once in the first half on their way to a 46-28 halftime lead.

Cal outscored the Roadrunners 14-2 in the final 3:19 of the half, including a 9-0 final run made possible by 3-pointers from Blacksher and Omot.

Cal struggled to contain Jemel Jones, a 6-4 shotmaker from Chicago who averaged 33.6 points last year at South Suburban JC in Illinois, with back-to-back games of 56 and 51 points.

Jones didn’t get there, but he scored 22 points, many of them on high-difficulty jump shots.