Some Questions About The NBA’s Secret Summer League
The NBA’s annual Summer League recently wrapped up its third leg in Las Vegas. This year’s event saw a huge boost in popularity over previous seasons, due to a high level of intrigue around a stacked 2017 draft class. But there’s another set of games that are played each summer that would draw much higher attendance if opened to the public.
It’s no secret that NBA players work out together over the summer to expand their repertoires. Many players spend their off-seasons in Los Angeles, making it easy to connect with their colleagues. However, the interest surrounding these games can rise to incredible proportions when they include the most talented, successful, famous, and competitive players the sport has to offer, as these LA games do.
The reason I and many other basketball fans find the concept of NBA pick-up interesting goes back to the greatest game ever of the kind. Back in the summer of 1992, the famous Dream Team Olympic basketball squad played a closed scrimmage in Monaco. The tales of the game are legendary, as the team was comprised solely of Hall-of-Famers, and the competitiveness of Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, each on opposing teams, served as the catalyst for an amazing contest.
Not only is it entertaining to imagine the level of play in games such as these, with each team consisting of All-Stars and champions, but the contests tell us a lot about the state of the league. That scrimmage was the first time Jordan truly asserted himself as the league’s alpha dog, wresting the title from the recently retired Johnson.
Star wing Jimmy Butler, recently traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves, discussed these games on an episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. Butler made some interesting comments, and his statements compelled me to ask a few questions about these games.
Who Plays?
From Simmons and Butler’s comments, it was made clear that Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Kyrie Irving, DeMar Derozan and Butler himself play in these games regularly. With Paul and Anthony on board, fellow Banana Boat sailors LeBron James and Dwyane Wade seem like locks to be in the mix as well.
From there, nothing can be assumed. Butler implied that the games are open to just about anybody, like fellow Marquette alum Vander Blue, and that was proven when Celtics youngster Jaylen Brown posted pictures of himself playing Butler on Instagram. But I’m sure there are certain games that are more prestigious.
What does it take to get an invite? Do you need to do more to play with LeBron than, say, Butler? Can the more influential guys veto an invite if they don’t like that player?
Would the Banana Boat crew allow any Warriors to play? Butler said that Draymond Green is often around LA in the summer and takes part in the games. But it’s hard to believe that Chris Paul and LeBron would voluntarily play with Stephen Curry, or Green for that matter.
It’s necessary to understand that players have to be in LA to play. So, as Butler said, Damian Lillard might not play, but only because he spends the off-season in Oakland.
Who Organizes These Games?
The person who organizes these games must be one of the best and most influential players in the game. For example, it’s been rumored that Chris Paul, a top talent and player union president, was the one who set up the group chats, dates, times and locations for these games in the past.
In the beginning of their discussion, Butler showed Simmons a text that clearly related to the pick-up games. Simmons pointed out that it wasn’t from Chris Paul, saying there was a “new generation”. And Butler said the two had “talked about the individual earlier.”
Some of the players the two had discussed at length earlier in the podcast: Carmelo, Wade, Irving, Curry, LeBron, Kevin Durant, Karl-Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins and Derrick Rose.
Does Simmons’ new generation comment mean that the new leader of the games is a younger star? Towns, Wiggins, and Irving are the only ones on that list that could be considered young, but Irving and Wiggins seem too passive to be the ones setting up these games, and Towns probably lacks the clout to tell older stars where to be and when.
I doubt Simmons would make the “new generation” comment if he was talking about Melo or Wade. Both of those guys are older than Paul, and are probably at the point in their careers where they let other guys organize the games.
Like I said, I kind of doubt Curry even plays in these games. There’s real contentiousness between him and LeBron, as well as Chris Paul. Anyways, he’s too busy in the off-season playing in golf events and being a family man.
Nobody should want anything to do with Rose anymore. I feel like he’s too low key to be the organizer anyway.
It could be KD. His performance in earning his first championship might have given him a more outspoken confidence, and nobody loves playing basketball more than him. Durant feels like the kind of guy that needs to be playing ball all the time, and I feel like he would take joy from playing such high-level games.
That being said, my best bet would be LeBron. He’s the best player in the league and acts like it. He’s social among his fellow players, but also very competitive. And he’s newer to the player organization realm than CP3, explaining Simmons’ comment.
What Do The Jersey Numbers Mean?
On the podcast, Simmons made a joke about how he would do playing in the games. Butler, playing along, asked Simmons what number he would wear. This threw Simmons, as well as me, for a loop, as numbers are rare in pick-up.
It got stranger. Simmons said he would take #33, in homage to Larry Bird, to which Butler responded that the number was already taken.
I looked up the players who currently wear 33. This is the list (big thanks to Basketball Reference):
Gasol, Turner, and Covington seem like the only ones on that list good enough to be invited to play in these games. I’m pretty sure Gasol goes back to Spain during the off-season, but it doesn’t like he’s a part of that inner circle of players mentioned earlier anyway. Turner and Covington are good young talents, but in that picture from Jaylen Brown’s Instagram, neither he, Butler, nor Tony Snell is wearing a number. Something tells me the numbers are reserved for the big time games with the best players, and that they have some sort of special meaning or inside joke behind them.
But what is that special meaning? Perhaps players wear the number of their favorite player growing up. Maybe one of these NBA stars is a big fan of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird or Magic Johnson from college.
But I hope it’s something more fun and competitive than that. I want the numbers to simultaneously represent the respect a player deserves as well as possible pettiness towards another competitor.
Maybe players wear the highest score they’ve ever had in one of the pick-up games, or their career high against another player in attendance. Imagine someone starts talking trash and another player simply points to their jersey number and says “Remember when I dropped this on your head?”
Here’s a fun one: Maybe the number is a combination of the number of awards a player has received in his NCAA, NBA and international careers. Check out LeBron’s list:
Including his two Olympic gold metals (and excluding his bronzes), LeBron has a total of 48 awards. And that’s before we consider the possibility that different awards are worth more.
Here’s Dwyane Wade’s list:
If you exclude the third-team All-America and two skills challenge championships (NBA players would take those with a grain of salt) and include his 2008 gold metal, guess what number he’s at? 33. Whoa.
Some other cool number explanations: It’s the number of times the player has lost a one-on-one game (so the lower the better)… A player’s per game points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks averages from the previous season added together (Butler averaged 23.9 points, 6.2 rebounds, 5.5 assists, 1.9 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game last season, bringing his total to 37.9, so his number would be 38)… A player’s career winning percentage rounded to hundredths (Anthony has a career .567 win percentage, so his number would be 57)… The number of these big-time pick-up games a player has a) played in, b) won, or c) been the high scorer.
What Are The Coolest, Craziest Things That Have Happened At One Of These Games?
Cool: Has anyone gone a whole game without missing a shot? Has anyone had a quintuple-double? What’s the craziest two-player duel that ever happened, and who were the two players? When Kobe Bryant played, what was the highest number of consecutive possessions that he took a shot (my guess would be around 15)? If Isaiah Thomas has played, has he dunked on anyone? Or even dunked at all? Has anyone made fun of Chris Paul for never making a conference final?
Crazy: Has trash talk ever become so intense that players come to blows? Has there ever been a real-life teammate pairing that didn’t want to play on the same pick-up team (KD and Russell Westbrook)? Has anyone made fun of LeBron’s hairline? Has anyone called KD a cupcake or a snake? Has anyone ever gotten injured in the game and had to come up with a bad excuse? Has a fan ever snuck into the gym and interrupted a game? Has anyone joked about a player’s wife or girlfriend like Kevin Garnett did to Melo? Has a player ever been traded mid-game, heard about it, and proceeded to destroy everyone?
Some Other Assorted Questions
When a team has the chance to win, who’s most likely to get the ball? Do they play music during these games? If so, who’s in charge of the aux chord? How many different locations do they play in? If they sold tickets to these games, how much money would they make? What would they do with that money? Do they just run fives, or are there substitutions? If there are subs, how do they decide who sits when? Are there just two teams or is there a system of many teams where winners stay?
These are the questions one asks himself when he can’t watch real basketball. The NBA season can’t get here soon enough.
