None of the Cavs players made Hollinger's best or the worst of summer league 2022
Some of the stuff that happened in Las Vegas did actually matters, or at least seems to. And a few random stories caught our eye too.
theathletic.com
Often, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Not just our brief dalliances with Zavier Simpson’s hook shots or Luke Travers’ mullet or the Knicks playing for a championship either. I’m talking about entire takes about that year’s draft ecosystem.
Seeing results like that, it’s fair to ask if there’s anything from the two weeks in Vegas that we can carry over into the season beyond an ill-chosen tattoo? But that mindset might be leaning too far the other way. Vegas may not have a massive predictive value given the small sample of games. But despite some odd recent results, it does have some — we’re still playing basketball here.
This is particularly true once you look past a certain archetype of player who thrives in summer league — the shot-happy, shoot-first, undersized guard. Cam Thomas winning back-to-back summer-league scoring titles is certainly notable, but we’ve been burned by too many similar players before. It will be hard to say how much it translates until autumn.
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Since nobody talked about him, though, can we chat about Mathurin? The Pacers wing was the sixth pick in the draft, and he was awesome in his three games in Vegas before being shut down with a sore toe. Mathurin averaged nearly a point per minute (19.4 per game in 22.4 minutes), only had two turnovers in three games, scored comfortably at all three levels and padded his résumé with a couple of emphatic poster dunks. His 31.8 PER was the best of any summer leaguer who played at least 60 minutes, and it wasn’t driven by crazy outlier shooting percentages either.