LAWRENCE — Basketball Australia announced Wednesday that Johnny Furphy will be a part of its initial 22-player squad, which will be narrowed down to 12 for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Furphy spent the 2023-24 college season in the United States playing for Kansas basketball. Listed at 6-foot-9 and 202 pounds, the guard emerged as a key talent for the Jayhawks as the campaign progressed. And now he’ll have the opportunity to showcase his skillset on an international stage.

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“The FIBA Basketball World Cup in 2023 marked a new beginning for the Boomers,” Australia head coach Brian Goorjian said in a release. “We were able to introduce some new faces and identify areas that we needed to advance and improve.”

Goorjian added: “We’ve been actively monitoring the Aussie players across international leagues in USA, Europe and Asia as well as domestically in the NBL and we’re confident in the potential chemistry of this list. The complexity of international tournaments like the Olympics is that you have a relatively short window to train and prepare — so you have to identify and implement a style works fast and amplifies the collective skill set.”

Furphy will have the opportunity to compete alongside names basketball fans know such as Joe Ingles, Patty Mills and more, who were on the Australia team that won bronze back in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Whether Furphy returns to college for another year or heads to the professional ranks, potentially the NBA, that’ll certainly help improve his game. His length, athleticism and shot-making ability should also allow him to have an opportunity to earn a role.

At KU this past season, as Furphy competed in the challenging Big 12 Conference, he started 19 of his 33 appearances and averaged 24.1 minutes per game. He averaged 9.0 points and 4.9 rebounds per game, too. He also shot 35.2% from behind the arc and took more 3s than any other Kansas player during a season in which the Jayhawks reached the round of 32 of the NCAA tournament.

“There’s always a correlation made of our offensive play with European styles, which is interesting considering there isn’t a whole lot of exposure to the Euro system with our players,” Goorjian said in the release. “What we have experienced, is the emergence of Australians at the top level overseas and the evolution of the NBL as a world class league with high powered scoring offenses, so we want to drive a game that is familiar but unique to our group.”

Jordan Guskey covers University of Kansas Athletics at The Topeka Capital-Journal. He is the National Sports Media Association’s sportswriter of the year for the state of Kansas for 2022. Contact him at jmguskey@gannett.com or on Twitter at @JordanGuskey.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Could Kansas basketball's Johnny Furphy play in 2024 Paris Olympics?