MADISON — Last season, Wisconsin wasn’t exactly known as an elite scoring team.

The most points the 2022-2023 Badgers scored was 85 in their season opener against South Dakota. On Monday night, to tip off the new season, they dropped 105, a new record in the Kohl Center.

Did anyone see this offensive explosion coming?

“To be honest yeah,” Arkansas State head coach Bryan Hodgson said. “But not to the tune of 105 points.”

“A little surprised by the 105, but not surprised by it happening,” guard Max Klesmit said. “Through working in the offseason and the summer, you could feel it. It was just a different sense of urgency this year, a sense that we have to go get it.”

The Badgers piled on the points relentlessly, never taking their foot off the gas despite 10 players logging at least 10 minutes. When head coach Greg Gard went to his bench, there was very little drop-off.

“We thought that depth would help us,” the skipper said. “Here we are, game one, it already showed…That’s the mark of the start of a good team. When you have that many guys who are willing to help us out.”

Wisconsin was able to go deep into its stash of bench players and continue to operate smoothly on offense. A deeper team is one of the reasons why the Badgers figure to be much more dangerous offensively this year.

True freshman forward Nolan Winter played 15 minutes and shot 3-for-3 from the floor while collecting seven rebounds, tops on the team. Another true freshman, John Blackwell, added 12 points in 15 minutes and didn’t miss a shot from the field.

“Just let the game come to me, didn’t force anything,” Blackwell said of his performance. “In high school, I was mostly ball dominant. But coming here, I learned you can score without the ball really well.”

The Badgers’ bench poured on the scoring, tallying 39 points. Last season, the most the bench scored was 24 points against Davidson. Again: depth, depth and more depth.

Last year’s Badgers were highly susceptible to extended lulls on the offensive end. No such issue presented itself in the opener. Wisconsin’s longest stretch of offensive impotence was three straight missed shots. The rest of the game, it never missed more than two in a row.

Too often in the season prior, the Badgers would rely heavily on the three-pointer. When it wasn’t falling, the offense likely wasn’t humming. That wasn’t the case against Arkansas State.

In the first half, Wisconsin shot 0-for-3 from deep. It still had a 15-point lead, and the offense looked extremely fluid. That doesn’t mean this team can’t light it up from downtown — in the second half, the Badgers shot a blistering 6-for-9 from three point land to finish with an even 50 percent clip on the evening.

“I think we’ve got guys that are very unselfish and have a good feel for how to find perimeter shooters open,” Gard mused.

The lack of three-point attempts in the first half, Klesmit explained, was partially situational.

“We had matchups at the four, five, three positions where we could pound the ball inside and get to the rim. That’s where you wanna start is get to the paint, get stuff to the rim. It opens up the perimeter on that.”

It certainly did, and it also opened up scoring from elsewhere on the floor. A big reason why this offense didn’t get stagnant was its ability to score from all over the court.

Whether it was isolating Tyler Wahl or Steven Crowl in the low post, AJ Storr slashing to the rim or Chucky Hepburn’s ability to score at all three levels, this team can hurt you in plenty of ways. And yet, it was the little things, such as guards making great cuts to the paint all night, that opened up the true potential of this offense.

“They had to go through a lot of one-through-five switching,” Klesmit said. “Caused a lot of chaos with them in the first half, just in terms of our guards being able to cut hard and get to the block and be able to score inside, which is gonna open stuff up for our fives.”

Last year, nothing felt easy with this Badgers team. Especially on offense, scoring and scoring consistently routinely felt like a laborious task. Monday night at the Kohl Center, however, was a clinic in complementary basketball. This team has the pieces and experience to be a problem for defenses all season long.

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