The Kansas Jayhawks’ summer trip to Italy: 5 takeaways

Foreign trips aren’t definitive, but we learned a few things from the Kansas Jayhawks’ four game stint in Italy

Summer trips often offer college basketball players an opportunity to bond with their teammates and get in some extra practice time, but they also give fans and analysts a chance to see the team before they suit up for the start of the regular season.

The Kansas Jayhawks’ recent trip to Italy gave us our first look at a preseason top five squad featuring Devonte’ Graham at the helm, transfer Malik Newman in uniform and sophomore Udoka Azubuike returning from injury.

These four-game stints are far from definitive — remember Lonzo Ball didn’t play well during the UCLA Bruins’ trip to Australia last summer — but it did provide some interesting insight into what to expect from Kansas this season. Here’s a look at the five biggest takeaways.

1. Kansas will once again have one of the nation’s top backcourts

Last season, Frank Mason III and Devonte’ Graham formed one of the top guard duos in the nation. The Jayhawks’ one-two punch in the backcourt helped deliver a 31-5 record and a trip to the Elite Eight, but now Graham will look to take Kansas to new heights in his senior season. The 6-foot-3 guard will have a lot to live up to after Mason’s National Player of the Year run in 2016-17, but he won’t have to go it alone.

Mississippi State transfer and former top 10 recruit Malik Newman will join Graham in the backcourt this season after sitting out due to transfer rules last year. Newman struggled during his lone season with the Bulldogs in 2015-16, shooting worse than 40.0 percent from the field as he shouldered a massive scoring burden. If the Italy trip shed light on what’s to come, though, the redshirt sophomore figures to benefit immensely from playing alongside the talent on this Kansas roster.

In four games, Newman averaged 32.5 points per 40 minutes while shooting 59.2 percent from the field, 50.0 percent from behind the arc and 87.5 percent at the free throw line. Those numbers clearly won’t sustain over the course of a full season, but as long as Newman is knocking down jumpers off the dribble like this one, the Jayhawks will be just fine:

Graham, meanwhile, was no slouch in Rome and Milan either. He did struggle to shoot it, particularly inside the arc, but the rising senior dished out 13.6 assists per 40 minutes while posting a 6-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio in the four contests. It looks like Graham will be relied upon heavily as the set up man on this roster and with passes like this one, he looks up to the task:

Graham and Newman are very different players, yet their strengths seem likely to compliment one another. It’s hard to imagine the pairing being better than what Kansas put on the floor last season given Mason’s ridiculous run, but with Graham expected to take a leap forward and Newman finding his old form, they could get pretty darn close.