The UW men’s basketball team returns to action Sunday when it hosts Edgewood College in the first of two season-opening exhibition games. When it welcomes neighboring Edgewood — the Eagle’s campus is less than two miles away from the UW’s campus — to the Kohl Center, Wisconsin will finally get a chance to compete against players other than its own. The exhibition game will also allow the Badgers to gauge where they stand as the start of the regular season nears.
“It’s always nice to play against different players,” sophomore Jason Bohannon said. “We’ve been playing each other through the fall.”
Though the Badgers held an annual red-white scrimmage this season, the impact isn’t the same as playing against a completely different group of players.
“It’ll be nice to see some different faces and some different-colored jerseys on the other side of the floor,” senior Greg Stiemsma said.
Edgewood, a Divison III program, finished 18-8 last season. While the team might not feature a roster with the same talent level as Wisconsin’s, the contest should be a productive learning experience for the Badgers nonetheless.
Playing against another college program, whose ultimate goal is also to get better and who has their own style of play, the Badgers expect to get more out of the game than if they were to host one of the traveling all-star teams that schools often play preseason exhibitions against.
“It’s definitely a lot more productive for us to play against a team that has a system, that has an offense,” Stiemsma said. “They’ll give us a lot of the same looks we’re going to see later on in the season.”
“I don’t care (about the) final score one way or the other,” Badgers head coach Bo Ryan added. “You are definitely getting more out of a team running a pattern on offense.”
Whether or not the final score is a blowout, which typically happens in games like these, is secondary to the experience the game will provide, especially for the freshmen playing their first game as a Badger.
“Any game you go into you can learn from,” Bohannon said. “No matter what team we’re playing we can better from it.”
With the exhibition games, Wisconsin will also get the chance to distribute playing time more evenly among the roster. The coaching staff will also be able to get a look at players who wouldn’t otherwise receive as many minutes.
“This is a proving ground for everybody to make a statement,” junior forward Mo Cain said.
Cain is one of several players the Badgers will look to this season to fill the holes left by the school’s all-time leading scorer Alando Tucker and last season’s second-leading scorer Kammron Taylor.
“We’ll try different combinations to see how different teammates play with each other,” Cain said. “But we’re sticking to the same game plan. Same coach, same offense, same team.”
Coming off of a season in which the Badgers went 30-6 (13-3 Big Ten) and were at one point the nation’s top-ranked team, the roster may look a little different, but expectations will once again be high.
“We set our goals higher than anyone else will set them,” Stiemsma said. “We’re still trying to do all the little things right even though the ranks might not be the same.”
