MINNEAPOLIS — Wisconsin got its conference tournament run started with an extremely convincing boat-racing of Maryland. The Badgers lead by as many as 42 and were in total control by the time the first-half clock read 15 minutes.

Wisconsin played one of its most complete games of the year from top to bottom, from offense to defense to every other facet imaginable.

Here are my takeaways from the Target Center:

Maryland brought a knife to a gunfight. Wisconsin came out guns blazing from deep and didn't relent — the Badgers hit their first six three point attempts and finished the afternoon with a 64 percent clip from long range.

After going just 5-for-24 from three in the regular season finale against Purdue, Wisconsin bounced back in a big way. In West Lafayette, the Badgers needed just a handful of their threes to fall to have a serious chance at knocking off the Boilermakers. Thursday in Minneapolis, Wisconsin didn't leave anything up to chance.

The Badgers' torrent of threes cooled off slightly in the second half, but after taking a 21-point lead and 10 made threes into halftime, it hardly mattered. Wisconsin buried the Terps with deadly accuracy from long range.

"I think it really started on the defensive end, our intensity, getting out in transition," Steven Crowl said. "I think the threes were just a matter of doing that. Luckily we knocked them down tonight. Hopefully, like I said earlier, we can go tomorrow too."

Overall, Wisconsin has struggled to shoot the three as a team this season — their 33.9 percent is 178th in the nation, according to KenPom. But sometimes, all it takes is to see a few go in. John Blackwell hit his first four from the perimeter and finished 4-for-6 on the day. Crowl hit his first three three-pointers and was content to let his teammates shoot the rest. Connor Essegian checked in with Wisconsin up 37, and he drained a deep three to swell the lead to an even 40, just for good measure.

"I see these guys every day, in every drill, in every workout, so I know we've got good shooters," Greg Gard said. "That's a credit to defenses that have been able to do different things to us."

This kind of production from three clearly isn't sustainable, and it's not how Wisconsin has operated even when it sat atop the Big Ten. But for a team that's struggled to consistently hit shots from downtown all season, this was a cathartic performance.

One of the main reasons Wisconsin was able to run away with this one is there was no drop-off when Greg Gard turned to his bench. The Badgers' bench finished with 37 points, and was just as electric, if not even more so, then the starting five. Surgical performances from Blackwell and Essegian, garnished with good minutes from Nolan Winter and Kamari McGee, were too much for the Terps to handle.

Amidst the Badgers' late-season tailspin, Gard struggled to find any sort of traction with his bench. The depth and versatility that made Wisconsin's reserves so dangerous in the first half of the season had all but faded. Several factors played into that, including injuries to Blackwell and McGee. But with their full compliment of options, the Badgers bench reminded the conference just how dangerous they can be.

"I feel like us coming off the bench, me, Kamari, Markus, we've got to bring the spark plug thing to the starters. I feel like we do that well. We've got to keep it going," Blackwell said. "That motivates them when they come back into the game and play well."

Maryland's bench, meanwhile, struggled mightily to impact the game. It finished with just 5 points, and couldn't keep up with Wisconsin's dazzling flurry of buckets. At one point, the Terps missed 10 straight shots between the end of the first half and the start of the second.

If it wasn't scoring at a breakneck pace, Wisconsin's bench simply provided energy to the team and large contingent of Badger fans present. At the 3:22 mark in the second half, with the game well out of reach, seldom-used forward Chris Hodges missed two shots in the paint, but gobbled up both offensive rebounds and was fouled on his third shot attempt. Wisconsin's reserves could do no wrong.

In the Terps' convincing first-round victory over Rutgers on Wednesday night, they negated the Scarlet Knights' impressive defense by running the floor — Maryland collected 19 fast-break points. The Terps scored just five points in transition against Wisconsin, two of which came in garbage time with the Badgers' bench emptied.

"That's always one of our goals. We wanna keep teams out of transition because those are easy buckets," Tyler Wahl said. "So taking care of the ball, taking good shots, that's always a pretty recipe for keeping teams out of transition. I thought we did a pretty good job, even when we did turn it over, our transition defense was really good. We were able to get some guys to the rim and kind of wall off Jahmir Young and a couple of those other guys that were pushing it."

The Badgers turned it over 13 times, but managed to limit the live ball giveaways. They notched a whopping 1.3 points-per-possession, and ultimately didn't let the Terps capitalize on sudden-change plays.

It wasn't a taste-of their-own medicine situation — Wisconsin scored just 6 fast-break points of its own. AJ Storr had a fantastic spin move in a full court transition scenario, running the floor and pirouetting to the rim. Other than that, the Badgers ensured that the game was played mostly in the half-court.

"We know what it is. We know (from the scouting report) that they were starting to push it better. Kinda get their offense going through transition. So if we were able to stop that, we'd be just fine," Essegian said.

10 - Wisconsin hit 10 three-pointers in the first half.

1.318 - The Badgers' points-per-possession, demonstrating their lethal efficiency.

37 - Wisconsin's bench scored a whopping 37 points.

39:16 - Time the Badgers spent leading in the game.

42 - Wisconsin gobbled up 42 total rebounds to Maryland's 25.

23 - The minutes played by Storr and Blackwell, tied for a team high. Wisconsin had the luxury of spreading out its minutes and resting its starters.

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