By: Scott the Statissassin
What exactly IS the NBA summer league? These summertime games have been around for decades with multiple leagues often being held at various locations with overlapping schedules. It wasn’t until 2004 that the NBA actually organized and ran it's own league (though there are still multiple), and this year the NBA-run league finally included all 30 teams. Rosters are made up of young players and games are 40 minutes as opposed to 48. Starting in 2013, the NBA began declaring both league champions and individual MVP’s for the tournament. Now that most teams have been part of a fairly regulated environment for over a decade, what have we learned? And what can we predict based on this year’s results?
First takeaway -- the Summer League championship is meaningless, and the MVP is, at best, hit-and-miss. The inaugural co-MVPs in 2013? Damian Lillard (Rookie of the Year and 3-time All-Star) and Josh Selby (2-time Israeli League All-Star). Since then the winners have been:
Jonas Valanciunas (All-Rookie 2nd Team and a 5-year starter for a playoff team)
Glen Rice Jr. (Israeli Cup MVP)
Kyle Anderson (became a starter for the Spurs in his 4th season)
Tyus Jones (started 11 games in 3 years and averages 4 points)
Lonzo Ball (All-Rookie 2nd Team; averaged 10 points, 7 assists, 7 rebounds as a rookie starter)
Did your team’s high draft pick win that MVP? You may want to pump the brakes on building a team around that player.
Awards aside, does it do any good to peruse box scores for players of interest? Let’s be real, most people ain’t watching these games, so box scores and highlights make up 95%+ of most fans' exposure to summer league. Well, the answer here is...maybe? If you are looking at non-rookie players and they produce at a lower or similar rate to their previous summer league play, that’s a red flag. So when Dragan Bender plays 2 summers and 2 full NBA seasons and then drops 6.6 points and 5.2 rebounds per game in his 3rd summer league...yeah, that’s a problem for a 2016 #4 overall pick. He might make some major changes to how he approaches the game and turns things around, but if a very high pick with multiple years of NBA experience can’t dominate younger guys with less experience then he is extremely unlikely to be a dominant NBA player.
So what do you want (and really expect) from a non-rookie player? You want increased output AND some new/improved skill. If a guy shows up and looks too good for Summer League while showing off improved shooting touch (Ex: John Collins) -- that’s a good sign that said player is taking what they’ve learned from NBA experience and working on their craft to improve their game.
Returning Summer League players have a baseline of professional play to show improvement or regression. That’s not the case for rookies, so what kind of baseline should one expect for a big-time high draft pick? The answer is...not all that much. You won’t see guys in Summer League averaging 30 points a game, and you won’t see many (if any) even getting to 20 ppg. If you look at the average Summer League box score of top-five picks from 2007 to 2017 you get an average stat line 14 points/6 rebounds/3 assists/1 steal/1 block/ 3 turnovers. You would obviously expect that to vary positionally, with point guards getting more assists and less rebounds and bigs being the opposite.
But this is the average, which includes both Anthony Davis AND Thomas Robinson, James Harden AND Dante Exum. So how much better will a future All-NBA player compare to a complete bust?
There’s definitely some separation in production when you look at the 11 Summer League participants that have made an All-NBA team vs the 10 players who never made meaningful contributions at the NBA level. The results show some clear difference (about a third less production overall for the players that struggled in the NBA). All-NBA types were generally better shooters from the field, 3-point line, and free throw line, and they scored nearly five more points per game with roughly 1.5 more assists. There’s a slight decrease for
rebounds and steals when you look at the complete bums. Blocks, fouls and turnovers are, interestingly, the same across the board. However, with such small sample sizes for both players and games, there is a lot of variability. Derrick Rose, Demarcus Cousins, and Karl-Anthony Towns all had stat lines that would fit in perfectly with the likes of Hasheem Thabeet and Mario Hezonja. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Cody Zeller both had Summer League statistical profiles that match up with Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant.
If you move past traditional box score stats, you more or less see a bump across the board for the All-NBA players -- higher TS%, eFG%, higher usage rate, etc. Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is essentially a one stop shop for box score stats, and this overall advantage shows up with All-NBA guys averaging a PER of 21.0 and busts averaging 13.3. And the best PER of the whole group, you ask? Kidd-Gilchrist has a significantly higher PER rating than any top pick in this time frame with a whopping 38.6! Kevin Love is 2nd (30.47) with John Wall and Kris Dunn tying for 3rd (30.26).
And the floor? There are multiple guys in both outcome categories with single digit PER's and atrocious stat lines. Who could have predicted from Summer League performance that Derrick Rose would turn 9 ppg on 29% shooting into an MVP award only two years later? And to really top off the story, Michael Beasley stole the show scoring 28 points on future Defensive Player of the Year Joakim Noah as he and Rose faced off in the Summer League opener.
Now, what if you actually DO watch? This is possibly the most meaningful information you can gather, though even in this case most of what you pick up in Summer League you probably could have picked up prior to the draft. Some players are used oddly or out of
position in college, so seeing how they fit a team with better spacing while playing the
“correct” position is worth finding out (Kevin Knox and DeAndre Ayton for example). Other players are promised to have the offense run through them in college only to show up to campus and find out their coach lied to secure that signature. So getting to see a player like this (*cough* Wendell Carter Jr. *cough*) actually be a focal point on offense is where Summer League provides some early insight that can’t be gained elsewhere.
And the guys on the other end of the spectrum -- who were required to do everything, all the time, with teammates who went pro in something other than sports? You get an early look at how these guys move without the ball or how their defensive intensity changes when 100% of the offensive load is no longer required of them (guys like Trae Young and Collin Sexton come to mind here). Even the things you can’t pick up prior to these quasi-NBA games are often heavily speculated upon or projected when teams/media go through the scouting/drafting process. But hey, seeing is believing and sometimes we don’t want to wait until the end of October to yell about our team.
What Summer League performance do YOU want to over-react to? Share your thoughts below!
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