Best and Worst NBA Rookies in Summer League: Week 1
A look at the NBA rookies from the 2021 NBA Draft who are shining or struggling in Week 1 of the Vegas Summer League
The NBA summer league is underway, which means my three inevitable truths for summer league are now in full effect.
Inevitable Truth No. 1: We are going to overreact.
The sample size is small and statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, you and I are going to have strong feelings about players after just one or two games.
Jalen Green drops 23 points in his opening game? Future Hall of Famer!!!!
Cade Cunningham shoots 5 for 17 in his opening game? He’s a bust!!!!
It’s tough to not read too much into summer league. We’ve been waiting for months to see these prospects and how their talents translate from college (or the G League or international leagues) to the NBA. This is our first hard evidence. We react emotionally to great or poor performances.
We shouldn’t. One game (or five) just isn’t enough to tell us much. The history of the summer league telling us anything about the career of a player is very spotty.
Just look back at summer league history to see this.
Randy Foye, Adam Morrison, Kyle Kuzma, Aaron Brooks and CJ McCollum have the highest scoring averages of any rookies playing at least five games in the Vegas Summer League.
Amile Jefferson, Dwight Howard, Blake Griffin, Caleb Swanigan and Mitchell Robinson are the all-time leading rookie rebounders who played five or more games.
Lonzo Ball, Brandon Jennings, Marcus Williams, Jonny Flynn and Elfrid Payton are the all-time rookie assist leaders who played five games.
Chris Clemons, Carsen Edwards, Kyle Kuzma, Gary Neal and Tyler Harvey are the all-time leading rookie 3-point shooters who played five games.
You can pick out a few really good players from those lists and a lot of players who struggled in the NBA.
The 2012 summer league MVP award was split between Damian Lillard and Josh Selby. Their careers couldn’t have gone more differently.
Bad summers don’t mean too much either. Players that struggled badly include Trae Young, Gary Harris, Eric Bledsoe, Joe Ingles and Jerami Grant, who have gone on to have really good NBA careers.
While a summer can certainly be a harbinger of things to come, it’s usually just noisy data that can’t take into account a bunch of factors which are different for each player: his teammates, his role, his skillset, his conditioning and his game readiness (some trainers forbid 5-on-5 to minimize the chance of injury).
In short, how a prospect looks in summer league should be taken with — at least — a grain of salt.
Inevitable Truth No. 2: Our cognitive biases are going to get in the way of good analysis.
Psychological research around cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance have taught us that we see what we want to see.
If we hold a strong belief that Scottie Barnes will be great, for example, we search for confirmatory evidence that it’s true and tend to ignore evidence that points in the other direction.
John Hollinger was both joking and not joking when he posted this tweet:
Hollinger has been high on Neemias Queta all year. Any evidence that he’s good is going to get a retweet from John.
Look, John is goofing around. He’s having fun with this. He understands cognitive bias and has written about it in the past.
Others, however, are more serious. And we all wrestle with balancing our own biases and the new evidence in front of us.
If you supported Cade Cunningham as the No. 1 pick, when he struggled in his first game, the natural impulse is to explain why:
If you thought Cade shouldn’t have been the No. 1 pick, you post a tweet like this:
I’m not picking on these folks or anyone else. We all do this.
I was glowing after Barnes’ debut and was tempted to tweet something about Barnes looking exactly like the two-way potential star I expect him to become.
I resisted, thankfully (at least until this column; see below).
Knowing that our personal draft biases can color how we see these players is really helpful in taking a step back from being too definitive on anything that happens.
Inevitable Truth No. 3: I’m going to ignore Inevitable Truths 1 and 2 and give my opinions anyway.
Here are the rookies I have been most impressed by and most disappointed by this week in the summer league.
Before I get started, my biggest takeaway is that I am even more bullish on this draft class than I was before the draft. What we’ve seen so far supports the view that this class has the potential to be one of the greatest draft classes ever, and not just at the top. It’s hard to know where to begin with the impressive play of so many rookie prospects, but we’ll start with the first two picks:
Cade Cunningham vs. Jalen Green
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of my Best and Worst NBA Rookies in Summer League provided to free subscribers. To get my take on Cade Cunningham, Jalen Green, Evan Mobley, Scottie Barnes, Jalen Suggs and many more… you need to be a paid subscriber. Click button below to read the full version.)
Paid subscribers will also get access to full Mock Drafts, Big Boards, scouting reports on all of the top players in the draft as well as the ability to comment on articles and special discussion boards, Zoom calls and more interaction with me in the coming weeks.)