Nate Robinson has translated some of the best summer league performances in history to completely average regular season play! Can this year's crop of young guns measure up?

It’s a slow time in the sporting world.  The NBA, NHL, and NFL are all in the dog days of the offseason, meaning we are left with a bunch of second rate sports to write about (seriously, there are multiple tennis stories on the front page right now.  Multiple.)  Sure, I could write about baseball, but baseball season is just so god damned boring.  I follow the Jays pretty closely, and I keep decent tabs on the league as a whole, but am I really going to write about baseball games?  One game comprises 0.617284% of the season.  How am I supposed to care about that?  What was the most exciting thing that happened in a baseball game last night?  The Phillies scored 10 runs in the first inning?  Big fuckin’ deal.  The team I played against in softball last night scored 15 runs in the first inning!  Do you want me to write about that?  (Seriously, do you?)

So, all that’s left for me to do is cling to the scraps that the NBA, NFL, and NHL occasionally feed us.  Free agency, the draft, trade rumours…those are what gets me through the day.  But now we finally get some actual court time to talk about.  That’s right ladies and gents, the NBA summer league has kicked off.

Now, if you’re a Raptors Rapture reader, you already know my feelings about summer league.  It’s basketball, it features NBA players, and therefore, I care about it.  However, I’m not going to make the claim that there are a lot of legitimate conclusions to be drawn from summer league, especially if, like me, you can’t watch the games.  For example, Donte Greene ran the show in summer league last year.  Donte Greene then proceeded to average 3.8 points per game on 33% shooting during the regular season.  Nate Robinson has his summer league jersey retired, yet, come the regular season, he remains Nate Robinson, and is no threat to see his jersey actually raised to the rafters at any point in his career.  So, while it can serve as grounds for legitimate analysis of particular players (I will be paying close attention to DeMar DeRozan), not too much can be read into a player’s statistical performances in the summer league.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to run through the first day box scores and jump to some very premature conclusions!  I haven’t watched the games, am unfamiliar with some of the players, and won’t even go through the trouble of reading the written recaps.  I’m going strictly off of box score numbers and prior knowledge, and I think that’s just the kind of uninformed, pointless analysis that we can all get behind!  Join me, won’t you?

Game 1 – Nets/Sixers vs. Pacers

• An overtime thriller!  Well, an overtime, anyway.
• Nets first rounder Terrence Williams shot 1-8 from the field, but contributed 9 rebounds, 3 blocks, 2 assists, and 2 steals.  I’m thinking Devin Harris is going to be taking a lot of shots next season with this revamped roster.
• The Nets/Sixers teams features a gentleman named Dionte Christmas.  They should sign this man if only to promote games and/or special deals during the holiday season.  That’s what’s known in the marketing world as synergy.
• Mareese Speights took 26 shots in 36 minutes, which makes his 28 points look significantly less impressive.  I’m into percentages today, so I worked it out, and Mareese accounts for 9% of the team, and 37% of the team’s shots.  That’s quite a discrepancy.
• He also took a technical foul in OT.  Volume shooting and bad attitude?  Philadelphia has been down this road before, no?
• The Great White Hope, Tyler Hansbrough, played in this game.  With the help of absolutely zero research, I can tell you with 100% certainty that he played with a great motor, his energy level was through the roof, and he displayed a fantastic basketball IQ out there.
• Fuck this Pacers lineup is boring.  Roy Hibbert had a good game…there’s your analysis of the Pacers.
• Also, how do New Jersey and Philadelphia handle splitting minutes and such?  Is the team that has Jeff Adrien frustrated that Rob Kerz saw nine times as many minutes?  Are they on the same team?  It’s all quite confusing.

Game 2 – Thunder vs. Magic

• Shaun Livingston is back!  6 assists! 0 turnovers! 1 functioning leg!
• James Harden, DJ White, and Serge Ibaka  were all excellent for OKC.
• Russel Westbrook scored 22 points on 3-11 shooting.  In a related story, 5 Orlando players had 4 fouls or more.  Westbrook also dished out 9 assists.
• Who does Moses Ehambe have to kill to get some minutes around here?
• Lance Allred got in there for 7 minutes.  His stat line: 0 points, 0 assists, 1 rebound, and 5 wives waiting for him outside the locker room.
• I was going to say something like, “Hey, Jeremy Richardson, let’s save some of those shots for a legitimate NBA prospect”, which would have obviously resulted in uproarious laughter from the crowd.  Then I googled the guy and found out he was actually on Orlando’s roster this year.  Like, if they had won in the Finals, he would’ve got a ring.  And he’s a Fort Wayne Mad Ants alum.  My apologies for doubting you, sir.
• Orlando has six DNP-CDs.  Six!  Like, what’s the point?  You’ve got guys on the roster named Milosevic and Rakovic, who presumably had to save up a few air miles to even get over here, and you’re having them sit on the bench so they can watch every member of your starting lineup shoot below 50%?  The DNP-CDs on Orlando could pick up Moses Ehambe and start a nice little team themselves.

Game 3 – Celtics vs. Jazz

• OK, Boston’s team is just awesome.  If you’ve followed college ball/the draft over the past 5 years or so, this team could not be more entertaining.
• Robert Swift, at different points in his career, has apparently been cool with waking up in the morning, looking into the mirror, and seeing this, this, this, or this staring back at him.  Can you actually step foot in an NBA dressing room with painted nails?  Like, if he were to make the Celtics (which he won’t), would KG let that fly?  Regardless, he’s 7 feet tall, and could only grab 3 defensive boards in 20 minutes of summer league action, so the NBA’s Robert Swift experiement appears to be over.  For his sake, hopefully looking like a 7 foot tall Shaun White on the back end of a year long heroin binge isn’t considered as weird in Europe as it is here.
• Coby Karl was unable to find minutes on the 07/08 Lakers squad.  Makes sense…they were an excellent team, and he was an unheralded rookie.  Now his quest for more minutes has led him to…Boston?  Really?  The team that beat the team that he wasn’t good enough to play for?  What was his line yesterday, you ask?  DNP-CD.  Predictable.
• When he was in high school, Darius Washington made headlines by saying on many occassions that he was better than Sebastian Telfair, the other top ranked point guard in the nation that year.  At the time, people questioned him, saying no one was better than Sebastian Telfair.  These days, saying that you are better than Sebastian Telfair is essentially saying that you have an NBA contract.  Darius Washington is still not better than Sebastian Telfair.
• Only one player on the Jazz scored in double figures.  Jazz fans, it apperas as though Goran Suton may not, in fact, be the missing piece in a Jazz title run.  Adjust your jersey purchase plans accordingly.

So that’s one day of summer league down, many, many more to go.  I’ll be keeping you updated as best I can on the lighter side of summer league over here.  If you want some even semi-serious analysis, head over to Raptors Rapture, where we’ll be doing our best to cover the Raps summer league squad starting Friday.

By the way, a quick update for the millions of RM Franks fans out there Mrs. Franks:  We have caved to the contract demands of RM Franks in order to get him back on the staff, providing content on a regular basis.  The Bowflex and the salad bar are being delievered to the BWB offices today, and we’ve already plastered the walls of his office with pictures from that Tom Brady GQ shoot where he’s holding the goat.  If there’s two things that get Franks going, it’s Tom Brady and goats, so we expect the creative juices to be flowing one he gets set up.  Hopefully it’ll be only the creative juices that are flowing, but we put a lock on his door just in case.