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

He put all 10 on the court within the first seven minutes at Haas Pavilion and by halftime of Monday’s season-opening 86-73 win over Cal State Bakersfield, nine of them had scored, showing their spot.

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

Instead, there appears to be a variety of options on this team.

“We played 10 players tonight,” Madsen said, “and every single one of the 10 came in and contributed to the win. “Tonight was a tremendous team effort.”

Oakland native Jovan Blacksher Jr., a point guard transfer from Grand Canyon University, had 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, hit a pair of 3-pointers en route to scoring 13 points and rose high for a spectacular blocked shot.

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 received two charges in the first half and several times discarded to keep alive an offensive rebound that one of his teammates corralled.

“Coming out, I think we were excited to finally be able to play against someone else,” Blacksher said. “It was fun.”

“We’re going to continue to build on this and improve,” Omot said. “I think we played pretty well, but we gave up a little bit in the second half. “We kept our composure and finished the game.”

The Bears are still tough and it remains to be seen how what we saw Monday night translates when the competition gets tougher. For example, in the Atlantic Coast Conference with the likes of Duke and North Carolina.

The Bears went 13-19 in Madsen’s debut season, a huge improvement over the club’s 3-29 record the previous season. 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 couldn’t pull away from the visitors. Still, Bakersfield didn’t get 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, referring to the Bears’ nine turnovers in the second half. “We have to be able to handle that better. “We made the free throws when we needed to and got a decisive victory.”

The Bears trailed just once by one point for 17 seconds in the first half en route to a 46-28 halftime lead.

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

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

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