Cal Shows Off a New Cast of Characters in Win Over Bakersfield

The Bears mostly had control in an 86-73 season-opening victory at Haas Pavilion

Cal point guard Jovan Blacksher Jr. / Photo by Jayden Yenjai, Cal Athletics

Coach Mark Madsen rebuilt his Cal basketball roster with 10 newcomers this offseason, promising a more balanced squad in his second season.

He got all 10 of them 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 will not be a team that relies on an NBA-bound star, as the Bears sometimes did last season with Jaylon Tyson, now a rookie with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Instead, there appear to be a variety of options on this squad. 

“We played 10 players tonight,” Madsen said, “and every one of the 10 went in there and contributed to winning. This was a tremendous team effort tonight.”

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

BJ Omot, a springy 6-foot-8 junior from the University of North Dakota, made a couple 3s on the way to scoring 13 points and soared 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 poke his nose in the opponent’s business. He drew two charges in the first half and several times scrapped to keep alive an offensive rebound one of his teammates corraled.

“Going out there I think we were excited to finally play against somebody else,” Blacksher said. “It was fun.”

“We’re just going to keep building on it and get better,” Omot said. “I think we played pretty well but we let up a little bit in the second half. We stayed composed and finished out 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 gets stiffer. For instance, in the Atlantic Coast Conference with the likes of blue bloods Duke and North Carolina. 

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

In a foul-filled opening game — the teams combined for 48 personal fouls — Cal led by 18 at halftime but could not dash away from the visitors. Still, Bakersfield got no closer than 11 points until the final 71 seconds of the game.

“Some areas of growth: I thought Bakersfield did a tremendous job of changing the tempo late in the game,” Madsen said, referencing the Bears' nine second-half turnovers. “We’ve got to be able to handle that better. We made our free throws when we needed to and we got a decisive win.”

The Bears trailed just once by a single point for 17 seconds in the first half on the way to a 46-28 lead at the break.

Cal outscored the Roadrunners 14-2 over the final 3:19 of the half, including a 9-0 finishing 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 scored 22 points, many of them on high degree-of-difficulty jump shots.