Wisconsin Badgers basketball will regroup for a new season without several key players who graduated this 2025. Four of them are part of the starting unit.
Guards Max Klesmit and Kamari McGee, big man Steven Crowl, and top scorer and 2025 First-team All-Big Ten member John Tonje will no longer wear the red and white jersey after using up all their college eligibility.
Who’s going to fill the spots they will vacate? One does not need to go that far as head coach Greg Gard already has two names he thought will be part of the squad’s core for the 2025-2026 season.
They are John Blackwell and Nolan Winter.
Badgers Extra reported that Greg Gard started negotiating with them halfway in to the 2024-2025 season to ensure that they will continue wearing the Wisconsin hoops jersey.
“Badgers coach Greg Gard made it clear that Blackwell and Winter are core pieces in what comes next for this program,” the publication wrote.
“Those two players are so important to Wisconsin’s future that Gard admitted discussions — read: negotiations — began midway through the season to ensure that Blackwell and Winter would be back with the team in 2025-26.”
John Blackwell reflects on Wisconsin Badgers start to 2024
Gard negotiating this early with their main players is probably a response to what happened to them before the start of the 2024-2025 season.
The team lost Chucky Hepburn and AJ Storr to the transfer portal. The former is now with the Louisville Cardinals and averaged 16.9ppg, a massive improvement from his 9.2ppg as a Badger in 2023-2024.
Storr, meanwhile, transferred to Kansas Jayhawks but unlike Hepburn, his career went a different way numbers-wise. His productions went down as he only averaged 6.1ppg in 15 minutes per outing. He averaged 16.8 ppg in Wisconsin and played at least 28 minutes each game.
Blackwell said UW-Madison learned their lesson from it.
“You try to lock down your core players early,” he said.
“Last year, we lost some players because of unfortunate situations. It is what it is. I think it’s very smart to try to do it. Me personally, I like how they do it. They take care of their core guys and then they figure out the rest. And they recruit the right guys.”
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