As the Cal men’s basketball team travels through Australia, it is learning an important lesson: Everything’s different in the land down under. The toilets flush a different way, the seasons are different, and most importantly for the Bears, there was a team from Cal with bona fide stars on the court.

Arguably, the Bears’ biggest names were the highly touted incoming freshmen Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb, who were playing for the team for the first time outside practices. Cal is playing in four games while taking a trip through Australia. The Bears played their second of these games Tuesday, when they beat the Frankston Blues, 84-76, to stay undefeated after a 100-63 demolition of Victoria Select on Sunday (Australian time).

In the first game, the Bears put forth a strong, balanced scoring effort — six players scored at least 10 points — led by Brown’s 17 points. For many Cal faithful, the game presented the first chance to see Brown in action, and he did not disappoint, also chipping in six rebounds and two steals in just under 18 minutes of game action. Rabb also played well, with 11 points and 10 rebounds in nearly 21 minutes on the court.

Outside the opportunity to see Rabb and Brown playing for the first time, the game was most important to see what Cal head coach Cuonzo Martin planned on doing with the team’s lineups. The Bears started with a traditional lineup, featuring Tyrone Wallace at the point, Brown and Jordan Mathews at the wings, and Rabb and Kingsley Okoroh in the front court.

What was more interesting was when the team put smaller lineups on the court. Those lineups featured two point guards, two wings and a traditional center in lieu of using Rabb at the position. These lineups didn’t really take advantage of Cal’s depth at the wing position.

In the second game of the tour, Martin did use the centerless lineup for a short three-minute span during which Cal outscored the Blues, 6-0. While this is undoubtedly too small of a sample size to say anything for sure, it is still widely expected that the Bears will push out a lineup with Rabb manning the middle to close games.

That 6-0 span proved crucial for the Bears, who struggled much more against the Blues than they had in the first game. Frankston is a team stocked with older, professional players, so it was natural that Cal would struggle a bit more in this game. The Blues led, 61-51, with 3:35 left in the third quarter.

Cal held Frankston to 12 points in the fourth quarter and that, along with another consistent scoring effort from the Bears, was enough to come back and win the game. Brown had 19 points in only 22 minutes, while Rabb had 14, and Wallace chipped in 18 points of his own.

One area where Cal will certainly need to improve is its passing — much of the Bears’ scoring came unassisted — as the team recorded only 11 assists on 35 made field goals to go with 14 turnovers. The lack of passes leading to good shots will be a problem for Cal when it takes on some of the stronger opponents it will play when the games start to count in November.

“I thought we played more as individuals than we did as a team at the start,” Martin said to Cal Athletics. “This was a physical opponent — a veteran opponent with older guys — but it was a great experience for our guys to be down by 10 points against a team like this and have to fight their way back and find a way to win the game.

Hooman Yazdanian is the sports editor. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @hoomanyazdanian.