What does new-look Kentucky need to show on this summer basketball trip to Canada?

So much for an offseason.

John Calipari has had his 2023-24 roster set for only a couple of weeks, but these Wildcats will be thrown into competition immediately, taking part in the GLOBL JAM, a four-team international tournament scheduled to officially begin Wednesday afternoon in Canada.

The Cats will play in a closed-door scrimmage Tuesday against one of the other GLOBL JAM teams — age-23-and-under squads from Africa, Canada and Germany will be in Toronto for the event — before playing pool games on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, with a medal game closing out the tournament Sunday.

The competition Kentucky will face this week should be clearly better than what the Wildcats saw on their exhibition trip to the Bahamas last summer, and the personnel on UK’s side will be much different this time around, too.

Only three Kentucky players are back — Antonio Reeves, Adou Thiero and Ugonna Onyenso (who was not yet with the program during last year’s Bahamas trip) — and the rest of UK’s roster will consist of newcomers: six healthy freshmen and one veteran transfer. It’s a group with little collective experience at the college level, and even less playing for Calipari.

A bit of a bumpy ride should be expected.

Calipari is already setting expectations low, pointing out that Baylor played in the GLOBL JAM last summer and came away with a 1-4 record.

“There’s a chance we go 0-4,” Calipari said. “Did we learn? Did we get better? Do we all walk away and say, ‘I’m loving this, we’re all gonna be fine’? Because we’re playing against those older teams.”

That Baylor squad ultimately finished the 2022-23 season as a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament, ranked No. 11 in the final Associated Press poll. So, the wins and losses won’t hold any importance, and the Cats’ record in Canada probably won’t even say much about what the Wildcats will be a few months from now. Or, more importantly, what they’ll be capable of next March.

There should still be plenty to learn from this trip north, however, especially with another No. 1-ranked recruiting class that features quite a bit of mystery.

What should fans be looking for over these next few days? Here are five things to watch.

Three-point shooting

Like with much of this trip, you can throw out the final stats. Whether the Cats shoot 15 percent or 50 percent from deep, numbers from such a limited sample size — four months removed from the real basketball season, no less — won’t mean a whole lot.

But this trip should give everyone a glimpse of who’s capable of what on the court, and three-point shooting will probably be a major question mark for this Kentucky team.

Antonio Reeves is back, and that’s big for the Wildcats. He was, by far, the team’s top outside shooter last season, leading UK in made three-pointers by a wide margin and also finishing first in overall percentage from long range. Before the season-ending dud against Kansas State, he was shooting better than 40 percent from deep. His 80 made threes were almost double the next-best Cat (Cason Wallace with 44), and he’ll be relied upon as the outside threat again this season.

But, as last season showed, he’ll need some help. With Reeves struggling (1-for-10 on threes), Wallace playing hurt (and running the point), and CJ Fredrick also dealing with injuries, the Cats went 4-for-20 from deep in the NCAA Tournament loss to Kansas State, and no UK player made more than one three in that 75-69 defeat.

Further postseason advancement will almost certainly require a greater ability to shoot the three. Who will step up?

Adding West Virginia transfer Tre Mitchell — a 6-foot-9 forward, but 36-for-99 from deep (36.4 percent) last season — should help, and the way Calipari has used his “4s” in the past might lead to even better looks for Mitchell this season. But the Cats probably will need more than that.

Whether it’s consistency from Rob Dillingham, additional playing time for Reed Sheppard, or projected NBA lottery picks D.J. Wagner and/or Justin Edwards stepping up to show they need to be respected at all times on the perimeter, someone will need to rise to the occasion.

All of those freshmen should get a chance to show what they can do this week. And be sure to look beyond those small-sample-size final stats to get a feel for who might join Reeves as a flamethrower in the Cats’ backcourt.

Who has the confidence to attempt those shots, especially the open ones that Calipari often implores his guards to take? And who’s taking the right shots at the right times, playing within the offense instead of simply forcing looks that aren’t there?

It’ll be worth watching.

Kentucky defense

There will be growing pains. That much is inevitable.

You can’t throw a group of (mostly) freshmen into high-level college basketball, especially in these times of veteran-driven success, and expect to play superior defense right out of the gate.

But for this Kentucky team to make a run, the Cats probably need to be pretty darn good on the defensive end. All of Calipari’s best UK teams have been.

Can this bunch do it?

It’ll be a tough ask, as super recruit D.J. Wagner acknowledged last week.

“It’s a lot to learn, and we’re young,” he said when asked about a bunch of freshmen acclimating to defense at the college level. “But we’re definitely here to learn. We’re here to listen to whatever Coach — or any other coach — has got to say. And, like I said, we’re all competitors. So, regardless, we’re gonna want to play defense; and want to figure out how to get stops. But I think we’re definitely going to be a good defensive team, because we’re all learners.”

That’s the right attitude. And if that’s truly the approach that guys like Wagner and Justin Edwards — two players with NBA talent and enough length and athleticism to be defensive difference-makers — bring to the court, these Cats could be OK by the end of the season.

Ugonna Onyenso could be a big-time rim-protector (more on that next). Adou Thiero could be ready to play that do-whatever-it-takes role. Tre Mitchell could use his vast college experience to be of defensive help, and Antonio Reeves could continue to make much-needed strides.

But that’s a bunch of coulds, and no player on this Kentucky team has proven himself to be a defensive stopper at the college level … yet.

That won’t get established this week either, but if these Cats can at least show sustained effort and an overall connectivity on the defensive end, it would go a long way toward building a confidence that the rest of the pieces might fall into place over the course of the season.

All eyes on Ugonna

In his first offseason press conference late last month, Calipari said it over and over, his voice changing pitch on each delivery so as to drive home the point.

“My best teams have blocked shots. My worst teams have not blocked shots,” the UK coach declared. “My best teams have blocked shots. My worst teams haven’t blocked shots. My best teams have blocked shots. Block shots!”

It’s clear that Calipari wants this 2023-24 team to block shots. And he thinks these Cats are capable of doing that at a high level.

“We’re a little different now that you got a couple 7-footers,” he said to begin that rant. “Now you can block shots.”

One of those 7-footers is star recruit Aaron Bradshaw, and he won’t play in the GLOBL JAM due to a foot injury that will keep him sidelined for a still-to-be-determined amount of time.

That leaves sophomore Ugonna Onyenso, and he should get plenty of attention this week.

Onyenso is the only true big on the roster for this trip, with Tre Mitchell (6-9, 225 pounds) next and Adou Thiero and Justin Edwards (both about 6-7, but more wings than true frontcourt players) after that.

That makes this a major opportunity for Onyenso, who was a late addition to last season’s roster, flashing lots of shot-blocking upside in the early going — while Oscar Tshiebwe returned from injury — before ultimately fading to the background of the bench down the stretch.

During his meeting with reporters last week, Onyenso conveyed supreme confidence that he would be ready to make a sizable impact on Kentucky’s 2023-24 season, noting that he’d learned the ropes from Tshiebwe and the Cats’ other bigs over the course of the past year and was fully ready to go as the team’s primary center this time around.

This trip should allow Onyenso to show how far he’s come in that year, as well as give folks on the outside a more full picture of his overall game. (He played only 110 minutes last season, after all.)

Onyenso will need to block shots, and do so without fouling. He says he’s been working hard on his offensive game, and — while the Cats should have plenty of scoring potential elsewhere — a center capable of getting buckets would surely help.

He’ll also need to show he has the quickness and instincts to hit the boards at a fairly high level. Surely no one on this team will come close to matching the rebounding numbers of Tshiebwe, but Onyenso needs to be proficient in that area. Mitchell can help, but that hasn’t been his forte. Bradshaw, when he returns, can pitch in, but he’ll need to gain weight and strength. Edwards and Thiero will likely be counted on to crash the boards, as will some of Kentucky’s guards, but if Onyenso shows he can mix it up and come away with rebounds at a high rate, it should be a ticket to even more playing time.

This week will mark Onyenso’s biggest opportunity yet to show what he can do.

Body language

It’s difficult to get young, uber-talented basketball players on the same page.

It’s also one of John Calipari’s greatest traits as a coach.

The Hall of Famer has excelled time and again at getting five-star recruits to buy into whatever vision he’s selling when they’re college freshmen, and that formula has more often than not led to plenty of team success.

Whether it’s Anthony Davis taking the fourth-most shots for an NCAA title team, Devin Booker averaging only 10.0 points per game for an almost 40-0 squad or any of the other examples that Calipari loves to trot out to prove his point on this subject, the evidence supports the notion that Kentucky’s coach is a master motivator who typically gets his guys, especially the young ones, to accept his talking points and turn them into “we, not me” basketball.

This group might pose his biggest challenge yet.

Three top-10 national recruits (all of them projected as NBA lottery picks). Two experienced transfers playing their final college seasons (both surely hoping the individual results lead to pro careers). Plus a few others who have realistic dreams of playing in the NBA sooner rather than later.

There will be personal frustrations. That’s true of any team in any season, but especially so when it comes to a roster filled with guys having to make major sacrifices for the good of the whole — some for the first time in their careers — whether they agree with their roles or not.

How this group of players deals with that could be on display this week.

It’s OK to make mistakes in July, and miscues will surely happen on this Canada trip, but whether or not this team has a culture of camaraderie — or, at least, the early signs of one — will be important to see. A lot of that will begin with D.J. Wagner, arguably the biggest name on the roster and, as the presumptive starting point guard, Calipari’s so-called “coach on the floor.”

Asked last week if it would be difficult to not be the most dominant player on his team at times, Wagner once again came up with the right answer.

“We all could be dominant players,” he said. “Even in high school, I wasn’t always the dominant player on the court. A team is a team. So everybody is a factor. And that’s how it’s going to be here.”

What happens after a mistake or a miscommunication will be worth paying attention to. Will guys be picking each other up in such cases? Will there be constructive talk in huddles? Or will fingers be pointed and frustration on display for all to see?

This team is a long way from November, and an even longer way from March, but the seeds of this team will be planted this week, and it’ll be important to set a positive tone in the early going, before these young Cats get hit with what is likely to be a difficult season filled with high-quality opponents and potential pitfalls.

If there are issues here, there’s certainly plenty of time for Calipari and company to fix them. But it goes without saying that the UK coach would rather be able to concentrate on other things as he gets this team ready for the 2023-24 campaign.

Will there be stars?

An incomplete sampling of the high-impact freshmen on Calipari’s three best teams at Kentucky: John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Eric Bledsoe, Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Karl-Anthony Towns and Devin Booker.

That group alone has earned about $2 billion in NBA contracts over the past decade or so. The correlation between clear NBA talent and great team success in that one year of college is there. So, might the names of D.J. Wagner, Justin Edwards, Aaron Bradshaw and Rob Dillingham (or possibly others) be on such a list a few years from now? The Cats’ chances next March would improve if that turns out to be the case.

Once again, throw out the stats on this one. The eyeballs will tell more of the story on what these young Wildcats can possibly become several months down the line.

In constructing this 2023-24 roster, Calipari has chosen to veer from the currently accepted college basketball path of going all in on seasoned vets, not five-star newcomers. For that strategy to pay off, he’ll need a couple (or more) of these guys to be full-fledged phenoms. We’re talking dynamic, NBA lottery pick kind of players, not just in potential but in actual play.

Will Calipari’s gamble pay off?

The college basketball world won’t know by Sunday night whether or not Kentucky’s most highly touted freshmen will indeed be stars of the sport, but everyone should at least get a little better idea of how they stack up against older and stronger competition.

Is Wagner as dynamic of a playmaker as he’s been billed to be for the past few years? Can Edwards be that impact-the-game-in-every-way wing that can change an entire team’s trajectory? Could someone like Dillingham or Ugonna Onyenso (basically a freshman, in terms or game experience) exceed expectations that are already pretty high?

NBA mock drafts are unlikely to change based on a handful of exhibition games in July, but if one or two of these guys can show signs of potentially ascending to that elite tier of player that has driven Calipari’s best teams in the past, the coach (and UK fans) will be left with plenty to look forward to come November.

GLOBL JAM

The schedule for men’s games in the GLOBL JAM, an international basketball showcase in Toronto featuring Kentucky as the USA representative:

Wednesday

1:30 p.m.: United States vs. Germany (CBS Sports Network live)

8 p.m.: Canada vs. Africa

Thursday

1:30 p.m.: Africa vs. Germany

8 p.m.: Canada vs. United States (CBS Sports Network at midnight)

Saturday

1:30 p.m.: Africa vs. United States (CBS Sports Network live)

8 p.m.: Germany vs. Canada

Sunday

1:30 p.m.: Bronze medal game

8 p.m.: Gold medal game (CBS Sports Network live, if UK is playing)

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