NBA Summer League 2016: Previewing Biggest Games on Las Vegas Schedule
With the dust still settling from an unpredictable draft, the NBA turns its attention toward Las Vegas for this year's summer league to see what some of 2016's top rookies can do on the court in a professional setting.
The schedule begins July 8 and runs for 10 days, with 24 teams sending first-year players and veterans who hope to showcase their skills. Last year's event turned into a showcase for Karl-Anthony Towns, who played in the league before winning Rookie of the Year.
The entire 67-game schedule is available at NBA.com, but for the purposes of this particular discussion, these are the matchups that fans must go out of their way to catch.
There was a time when a matchup between the 76ers and Lakers would have been must-see television, as they were two of the best franchises in the NBA and would play a key role in figuring out the championship picture.
The mighty have fallen hard, especially in recent years, but the additions of Ben Simmons in Philadelphia and Brandon Ingram in Los Angeles have brought hope back to two of the league's most storied teams.
Simmons and Ingram's first head-to-head matchup also presents an opportunity for fans and analysts to see if the Sixers made the correct choice with the No. 1 overall pick.
While Simmons was regarded as the consensus top talent in the 2016 class, it was far from unanimous. ESPN's Jay Bilas believes Ingram possesses a lot of skills to become one of the NBA's best players.
“It’s ridiculous how talented [Ingram] is,” Bilas said during an appearance on CBS Sports Radio's Tiki and Tierney show. “He reminds you a little of Kevin Durant. He doesn’t score quite like that, but he can score.”
ESPN Stats & Info noted that analytics point to Ingram being the better player than Simmons over the first five yeNo one is going to accuse the 76ers of making a mistake on the basis of one summer-league game—or at least they shouldn't, but ridiculous in-the-moment hot takes happen all the time—but Simmons does feel like a No. 1 pick who is under a more intense microscope because LSU didn't make the NCAA tournament last year.
That's not Simmons' fault so much as the team around him wasn't good enough, but the world we live in requires one player to do anything and everything if he is to be regarded as one of the most talented in the world.
Ingram isn't without flaws either, though he faces less pressure by virtue of being the No. 2 pick. Playing in Los Angeles with the burden of being Kobe Bryant's heir apparent is another type of pressure, though.
One summer-league game will not define the career of Simmons or Ingram, but it is a nice showcase for the NBA's top two draft picks in their first meeting. ars of their respective careers:
The first game of the 2016 summer-league slate features the reigning NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, but the real interest in this game comes from the Milwaukee Bucks.
The Cavaliers largely punted the draft, which is understandable since they are a veteran-laden team with a full roster and are trying to compete for championships right now, though they did obtain the rights to Kay Felder with the 54th pick.
The Bucks, on the other hand, have an incoming rookie class that left a lot of people scratching their heads. Thon Maker, who was taken with the 10th overall pick, is one of the great unknowns in this class because he didn't play major college basketball last year.
Instead, after graduating high school in 2015, Maker opted to play a postgraduate year at the Athlete Institute of Ontario.
Some analysts destroyed the Bucks for their entire draft, with Andrew Sharp of Sports Illustrated giving them a grade of F:
There's a way to see Maker as a case of the Bucks doubling down on the weirdness of their roster and putting together the most science–fiction lineup possible, and maybe that's how it'll play out, but I don't see it. Maker should have been a second rounder, not a top 10 pick. He has raw tools, but not many skills, and this week there were allegations that he's three years older than he claims.
For the record, Jake Fischer of Sports Illustrated reported multiple teams left Maker out of the first-round mix and cited multiple sources as saying his actual age is somewhere between 21 and 23, not the listed 19 years old.
Maker's scouting reports tended to be all over the place. Ben Golliver of Sports Illustrated summed up the major negatives around him:
Even though he usually plays hard, the game often goes on around him due to his lack of awareness and limited polish. He’s the polar opposite of someone like Kristaps Porzingis from a feel standpoint. The list goes on from there: his lack of strength will be a serious issue for at least the next few years, and his weak handle, shaky shot and somewhat clumsy mobility make it hard for him to work as a stretch big in the short term. He’s also not exactly menacing in the paint or defending the rim at this point.
One anonymous NBA scout in the same Sports Illustrated piece said if his team were to draft Maker, "[We'd tell him to] go spend two or three years in Europe or in the D-League. In my opinion, I don't even think he's a roster guy next year. At some point, I feel like it's just been a hype machine."
Maker became a household name two years ago as a sophomore in high school thanks to a mixtape and Stephen Douglas of the Big Lead labeling him a "cross between [Durant] and Kevin Garnett."
Those are unfair and unrealistic expectations for any player, especially since the only traits Maker seems to share with Durant and Garnett is that he's a long and lanky basketball player who once showed some aptitude for hitting shots away from the basket.
Maker can quiet some of the noise about himself and Milwaukee's selection of him by performing well when he gets on the court. He will get a chance in the summer league's first game.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did want to find another intriguing matchup not involving the Lakers since I already discussed Ingram and what the team will be hoping for during summer league.
Yet as I was going through the schedule, Buddy Hield was one player who I wanted to highlight because he turned into one of college basketball's biggest stars last year.
I would have picked a matchup between the Pelicans and Chicago Bulls if it were on the schedule, since Hield and Denzel Valentine accrued most of the major National Player of the Year awards in college last season.
Unfortunately, if Hield and Valentine do square off, it will have to come when the playoffs begin on July 13. A matchup of Hield vs. Ingram on the opening day of this year's summer league isn't a bad alternative, since they represent two ends of the college basketball spectrum.
Ingram was the freshman sensation who led one of college basketball's pre-eminent programs to the Sweet 16 before losing to Oregon.
Hield was an unheralded high school player who was rated as a 3-star prospect by 247Sports coming out of Sunrise Christian Academy and improved his game in each of his four years at Oklahoma. His college career ended in miserable fashion, as Oklahoma lost to Villanova 95-51 in the Final Four.
Hield had some erratic performances last year, including that Final Four loss when he scored nine points on 4-of-12 shooting in 36 minutes, but the good far outweighed the bad.
Matt Borcas of The Ringer pinpointed the things that got lost in Hield's game by scouts and analysts throughout this draft process:
The read on Buddy is that, at 22, he’ll be hard-pressed to develop into anything beyond the pure scorer that he was on campus. It’s always hard for hero-ball artists in college to conform to being role players in the NBA, and Buddy has become just another name expected to be called toward the middle of the lottery. In the whirlwind of technical analysis that precedes the draft, the jaw-dropping incredibleness of his senior campaign has been lost. And that’s a damn shame.
Success at the college level does not automatically guarantee success in the NBA. Yet Hield was getting knocked in some circles because he played all four years at college, which made him older than a typical top-10 pick, but it ignores the fact he took time to hone his craft before becoming a professional.
Every scout in the world loves youth and upside, but there's something to be said for a player who took the time to develop physically and emotionally before carrying the burden of being a high draft pick.
Hield isn't going to turn into Stephen Curry; however, he is going to be a good NBA player for a long time, and the Pelicans will benefit from his outside shooting.
