The Beauty of Summer (League)
As I lay writing this with my newborn sitting and squirming a couple of feet over, I have to admit I’ve enjoyed watching the earliest forms of summer league basketball. I watch WNBA games in the summer time, I tend to find ways to be up and watching olympic basketball every four years, but man… for the last 6 years or so, I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the summer league. I had a (pair of) COVID wedding(s) in 2020 (and again in 2021), and so we didn’t do the whole “bachelor party” thing… but had I done one, in like 2018, I think the only Las Vegas type of experience* I would have enjoyed would have been surrounding the Las Vegas Summer League and entire days of NBA basketball.
Summer League basketball has to be the most unorganized version of basketball the top basketball players in the world ever play. The rosters are formed in the two weeks between the NBA Draft and the first tip off. The coaches are assistants plucked from the staff and thrown into the first chair. But that’s the fun of it- it’s so simple.
Offensive sets aren’t complicated. 1/5 slot pick and roll here, maybe lift the flipside shooter with a pin down. Defenses are good man-to-man, simple drop / play at the level rules and triggers.**
Instead of the complexity? We get to see some of the world’s best athletes, predominately between the ages of 19 and 24, play out a job interview on hardwood. And it’s freaking fantastic.
But what is the goal of Summer League basketball?
As a fan of the Houston Rockets, while much of my life the Rockets have been in the playoffs, with the “lean years” being the years they finished 9th in the Western Conference… the last 3 seasons have been, well… Since James Harden demanded a trade in January 2021 the Houston Rockets have been closer to 9 wins a year than 9th place. And even with the added play-in round… 9th place isn’t necessarily in the Playoffs.
That means the entire roster is getting overhauled in Houston. They’ve had nine first round picks in the 2021, 2022, and 2023 NBA Drafts combined. They’ve had a top four pick in each of those drafts***. Of they guys who have seen an NBA floor, the Rockets appear to have “hit” on a later pick in each draft****. But winning something meaningful is a future tense proposition for the Houston Rockets. Hopefully in the near future… but the future nonetheless.
But these unorganized, pure, summer games? That’s the fun for fans of the Houston Rockets. The Las Vegas Summer League is full of new faces, fresh stories, and hope. Over a couple of weeks in Las Vegas, fan bases get fresh highlights to fall in love with. They get new sound clips from teenagers and college-aged kids giddy with excitement after a big win. And the fans get to see a glimpse of what could be. It’s not that the Houston Rockets have won the Las Vegas Summer League, or even a large number of their Summer League games for that matter.
It’s that, since the games are such low stakes, we value qualitative information about the basketball games as much as we value the quantitative.
The last three years of being a Rockets fan have made me realize that, while I saw years like 2009 or 2018 as painfully cut short because of injury, and dwelled on that… Really I might have been spoiled. There are fans that watch losing like those three years of the Rockets for their entire lives. The Kings won their first playoff game in nearly 20 years this season. Since drafting Hakeem Olajuwon in 1984, Houstons had just six losing seasons, with three others at exactly .500. Three of those losing seasons have been the last three seasons.
In an era of bad basketball, the qualitative becomes everything. You know your team won’t win many games, if any worth noting. But you also know that there may be something big in the future.
But in the summer, all analysis becomes qualitative. Guys play predetermined rotations, as it is a job interview. Guys aren’t having complex plays run for them, either. There aren’t detailed scouting reports, so it’s hard to “blow an assignment.”
It’s pure. It’s pretty. And it makes anyone who watched pay attention to more than stats and scores.
So why do we just do this in the summer?
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*I’ve been to Las Vegas a few times, had some wild experiences, fun times… and could leave that chapter behind and be happy about it
** I am 100% expecting anyone within the industry that reads this to tell me I’m way underselling it.
*** Jalen Green, Jabari Smith, and Amen Thompson
****Alperen Sengun and Tari Eason appear to be much better than most players drafted 16th and 17th, respectively, and they hope Cam Whitmore at 20th in 2023 ends up being similarly impactful
-P.Ains