2013 Summer League: Demystifying the Oddities of the LVSL

Posted on Tue 16 July 2013 in 2013 Summer League by Aaron McGuire

summer league coverage

Hey, everyone! We've been taking a bit of a break for the start of summer, but we're back. Our three main writers -- Aaron McGuire, Alex Dewey, and Alex Arnon -- are all slumming it in Vegas to cover the haps and antics of this year's Las Vegas Summer League action. Arnon and McGuire have been in town all weekend, putting together a cornucopia of miniature stories and notes for later digestion. This post represents a throughout-the-day effort by Aaron McGuire to de-mystify the strange and unreasonable tournament structure that the powers that be imposed on the Summer Day's concluding proceedings.

• • •

BRACKETOLOGY, SUMMER LEAGUE EDITION

After years of inconsequential Summer Leagues, the NBA has decided it's time to stop messing around. It's time to get serious, folks. This year, they're attempting to institute an NCAA-style tournament for Summer League competition, leading to an actual Las Vegas Summer League "champeen" (as our lame-duck commissioner might well intone). In it, Summer League's 22 teams will face off for the most illustrious of basketball honors. Summer League Champion. Which team has the heart of a champion, dear readers? Which of these world-beaters will be named the greatest of all the death machines? Who, at the end of the day, will be able to count their rings?!?

... alright, I'll stop. I tried. I'm a statistician, not a hype-man.

Barring some end-state where the summer league tournament is a practice run for a future implementation of the Sports Guy's "entertaining as hell" tournament, just about everyone collected was mystified upon hearing of the hastily-constructed tournament restructuring. This widespread mystification became all the more apparent when the media and fans congregated at Summer League, sat themselves down, and started to look at the schedule to plan out their week's coverage.

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"Wait, what?"

Cue widespread confusion. "Who's going to be playing on Wednesday?" ... "When do our beat writers need to go home, exactly?" ... "How bad do you need to be to become the #22 seed at the NBA's Summer League?" Lots of questions, few answers. But have no fear, my friends and neighbors -- we've got you covered. As Tuesday's game action rolls forward, Gothic Ginobili will be solving the NBA's seeding crisis and giving you the juicy details on who's playing who. By the time the day's over, we'll know exactly who is seeded where and the final schedule for Wednesday and Thursday's action.

And we'll look good doing it, too.

• WHAT'S THE BRACKET? •

The bracket can be found here. For your sake, here's a repost of the bracket image.

LV-bracket

• HOW'S THE BRACKET SEEDED? •

The seeding system -- while rather annoying to calculate -- is reasonably easy to explain.

  • The__ first criteria__ teams are seeded on is overall win-loss record.

    • Given that each team will have 3 games, it's quite likely there are ties in overall record.
  • Assuming a tie in overall record, the second tiebreaker is a point system related to the number of quarters that individual team has won. The system gives teams one point for a quarter they won, half a point for a quarter they tied, and zero points for a quarter they lost.

  • If there is a tie between both overall W/L record and their "quarter points", the third tiebreaker is the team's head-to-head record -- if the tied teams had previously played each other in summer league, the winner of that game gets the higher seed.
  • The fourth tiebreaker is point differential.
  • And the final tiebreaker, in the unlikely event that EVERY SINGLE ONE of these criteria is tied, is a coin -- seeding would be determined by coin flip.

Piece of cake, right? (Jokes aside, it's a reasonably well designed system given the constraints. Good job, NBA.)

• WHAT DO THE STANDINGS LOOK LIKE? •

Here's the most relevant part of this post for those still reading. What do the standings look like? Who's going to be playing who?

SUMMER LEAGUE STANDINGS 1

What do these standings tell us? A few things. On Wednesday, seeds 12 through 22 will see action -- that means none of the top 11 teams will be playing Wednesday. (Related: Wednesday may end up being the worst day of basketball in the history of the human race.) Due to that, any team that's locked into the bottom 12 will be playing on Wednesday no matter what. There are a few teams that are locked-in to be playing on Wednesday. They are:

  • MIA, LAC, NYK, ATL. Even if every team below these four teams loses, they don't have enough quarter points to win a tiebreaker with any of the other teams that have clinched 1-2. Since 10 teams have already registered two wins, only one spot in the top 11 is available for a possible 1-2 team to snag it. Minnesota, Toronto, Dallas, or Sacramento would be the team to grab it -- not any of these four. The WAS/MEM/POR/DEN quartet is also in the mix for that spot, but they'd need to dominate their games today, which looks unlikely for Memphis (Phoenix is fielding a good summer league squad) and unlikely for Portland (as Chicago currently rates out as one of the "elite" summer league teams, insofar as a summer league team can be categorized as such.)

Conversely, there are a handful of teams that have clinched a bye on Wednesday. These are teams that you definitely won't be able to see on Wednesday. These teams are:

  • CHA, CLE, LAL. The Spurs and are also unlikely to be playing on Wednesday, but there's a fringe possibility they slide into the #11 seed if Toronto and Dallas both win their games today (and win 3 or more quarters) and the D-League manages to win at least two quarters in today's matchup. This is also contingent on Phoenix and Golden State both winning a quarter in their games.

Seeding-wise, things will clear up significantly as the day goes on. Obviously. To that end, I'll be updating these standings to reflect new data. Don't worry, guys. We've got this. We're going to know the schedule before anyone else does. It's going to be a secret between you and I, dear reader. You and I.

UPDATE: Well, I've been updating my lucky Twitter followers of all this thick and juicy breaking news all day. Make sure to follow me on Twitter, as I am clearly the only journalist courageous enough to tackle the real tough questions on Las Vegas Summer League Tournament Seeding. Here's the scoop with three of today's games in the book:

  • The Warriors have clinched a seed of three or better.

  • The following teams will be guaranteed to be playing on Wednesday: MIN, ATL, NYK, LAC, MIA, SAC, WAS, MEM, POR, DEN.

  • The following teams are guaranteed a bye day and will not be playing on Wednesday: GSW, CHI, CHA, TOR, CLE, LAL, MIL.

  • The following teams are still up in the air: PHX, D-League, NOP, SAS, DAL.

LIFE IS SO CRAZY.

SUMMER LEAGUE STANDINGS 6

Here are the updated standings as of the end of Q1 of MEM/PHO and CHI/POR.

-- Aaron McGuire

• • •

authenticity

FINDING AUTHENTICITY IN THE MOJAVE WASTELAND

There's a sort of paradox that lies at the root of all team sports. Consider the underlying juxtaposition: the dynamism and entertainment of team sports alongside the dismal grind of the athlete's preparation. "He's an exciting, dynamic player" must be said, regurgitated, challenged, and deconstructed at its core before a team decides to take a chance on the player through waivers or trade or draft. The player's excitement and dynamism only emerged because of an enormous sacrifice of hours a day in training. Relentless decades in the video room, relentless self-analysis, relentless self-betterment.

I look at my endless, sprawling drafts and songs and -- alas! -- drawings. They're scattered. Various hard drives, scratch paper distracted from original function, Christmas albums published and unpublished, blogs with two entries that I really got enthused about and forgot the next morning, and all the sordid rest. And there are still days I wake up and can't seem to compose a sentence that anyone else on Earth can understand, at least to the extent that I want them to. It's dispiriting. And there are days I wake up and all the experiences, even those I'd previously classified as useless, are consummated together within my soul. And my prose flows freely. Comprehensible, understandable, stark. And most days are in the middle. If I'd worked at it less, I'd have more days like the former; if I'd more, I'd have more days like the latter. That's what I tell myself. And at the core of competition with the self, that's what we all have to tell ourselves. It's a conversation with ourselves that can be fraught with delusion, but it's a conversation about substance, and there's some sort of empirical measure to answer for.

"This isn't brilliant, but it's publishable."

"This isn't publishable, but it's fluent."

"This isn't fluent, but I kept the rhythm and the intonation. I can feel proud of this, given...".

Some of these players get paid millions of dollars to play a game, and in our culture we tend to get all righteous about this when teachers and firefighters and so on do so much more for our society and all that. With good reason. And then the counter: should we REALLY be determining what people can earn based on what others can't? Is there not room in a perfect society for a million-dollar athlete and a properly-valued million-dollar teacher? And the elephant in the room, the baseline here, might be that we tend to see sports as fun, above all else. But it's also a sort of strange evidence one can put forth of our incompleteness as a society, an unaccountable waste of time and resources, or at the very least a tasty side dish to the main course of life.

Sort of like... Las Vegas.

See what I did there? Confession: being in Vegas makes me feel authentic by juxtaposition. I can resist the casinos with placid frugality. I can resist the nostalgia of the nebulously blended together "Fifteen to Thirty-Five Years Ago aka When Those Of You That Can Run a Tab Were Young" with naught but vigorous activity. I can resist the desire to make myself worse, to forget, to spend, to be false. I can resist. I can resist. I can resist. I can feel superior and get drunk on my own apparent superiority and it's actually cheaper than literally getting drunk. But I know it's a lie and I know it's a fictional narrative designed to increase perception of my own value and character. I didn't become a better person because I surrounded myself with more vice. What's more, I know dismissing it all as vice is its own form of inauthentic rabble.

It's a way for me to have a confident, judgmental stride that I haven't deserved, an easy conversational shorthand to find common ground with fellow travelers. It's awful. Sometimes I think we watch sports in its spectacle to get to this form of paradoxical blend of miring ourselves in the drama and the simultaneous feeling ourselves above the drama. Rooting interests keep us grounded, aesthetics, sportsmanship, but sometimes I just want something interesting to happen. And, put it this way: My moral sense isn't always the first one to respond to an interesting happening.

Summer League is pretty neat because there is no such pretense of anything else. The league is too meaningless to be a determining factor in anyone's career, it's a Bayesian flyswatter of slight probabilistic meaning. And the competitiveness of the product on the court is nil and arbitrary. Lance Thomas isn't exactly competing with Deshaun Thomas, even if they may both be going for the board. Sure, it would be nice for each player to snag it. It'd be worse if they don't. But they're mostly competing against their team's established rosters, which has so little to do with the direct, symmetric competition before us that they might as well just repeat the tautological mantra: "do more, do better." And thus there's a strange blend of incentives. It's an overdose of a 35-year-old-on-a-28-win-in-a-contract-year team vigor. And that blend of incentives writ large determines the game. The fans know it, the writers know it, the front office people, the coaches, the players know it.

For all the occasional on-court absurdity, it's not wearing any alibis: In the end, Summer League is exhibition, it's learning, it's competition against the self that reigns here, for every single participant. Even for the fans, who are mostly in it for a good time and maybe some free T-shirts, there's not necessarily any sort of rooting interest so much as pursuit of entertainment. They have to find out what to watch for and enjoy it. It's authentic, even when the back-and-forth sequences of turnovers can make you grimace. Summer League is a nice bridge between the dismal "how athletes are made" (which takes decades) and the fascinating "what athletes can do" (which may take a tenth of a second). It helps us understand what must go on first, and gives us a taste of what symphonies this overture of decades is building to. And best of all, it doesn't pretend to be anything different.

Except for this tournament thing. What's up with that?

-- Alex Dewey


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2013 Summer League: Weekend Reflections

Posted on Sun 14 July 2013 in 2013 Summer League by Aaron McGuire

summer league coverage

Hey, everyone! We've been taking a bit of a break for the start of summer, but we're back. Our three main writers -- Aaron McGuire, Alex Dewey, and Alex Arnon -- are all slumming it in Vegas to cover the haps and antics of this year's Las Vegas Summer League action. Arnon and McGuire have been in town all weekend, putting together a cornucopia of miniature stories and notes for later digestion. This post represents our weekend reflections, to be updated throughout the weekend's action.

• • •

REFLECTION #1: OUR PLAYER OF THE MOMENT, MarQuez Haynes

Alright, alright. You may wonder why this isn't CJ McCollum. Or any of the myriad other players who played more minutes, produced more baskets, or just have names you recognize. You know what? Names you recognize aren't what Summer League is about. Summer League is about the journeymen who look stunningly good for a short stretch and captivate your imagination. MarQuez Haynes is one such player, at least for me. Haynes is a journeyman with a remarkably well designed website. He attended Boston College and UT Arlington, and has spent the last three years overseas with Gran Canaria and Elan Chalon. He wanted to be an astronaut growing up and considers Floyd Mayweather his favorite athlete. (On a totally unrelated aside, Floyd Mayweather stepped on Alex Arnon's feet yesterday while randomly traipsing through press row. If MarQuez wants to meet his favorite athlete, he should obviously become a Gothic Ginobili writer.)

Ahem. Back to the actual basketball. Haynes is here for the same reason most players are -- he wants a shot at playing in the big leagues. I don't really know if his performance this weekend is going to get him that, but I found it impressive as a statistical curiosity. On Saturday, he was the Washington backup for Sundiata Gaines. He registered 6 assists in 20 minutes of play, along with two made shots. Now, he missed five shots, so that's not the most impressive thing in the world, but take a step back for a moment. The Wizards made 19 baskets in yesterday's game. Haynes either assisted or scored on eight of those nineteen. That's hilarious. He also blocked the first shot that was taken after he came into the game. For the sake of my curisoity, I decided to calculate Haynes' exact assist percentage in that dreary Wizards game. In order to do this, I had to figure out every single shot his teammates took with Haynes on the court. The results?

  • Otto Porter jumper
  • Otto Porter jumper (miss)
  • Glen Rice 3PT jumper, assisted by Haynes
  • Frank Hassell three (miss)
  • Jan Vesely dunk, assisted by Haynes
  • Chris Singleton jumper, assisted by Haynes
  • Glen Rice jumper (miss)
  • Andrew Lawrence 3PT jumper, assisted by Haynes
  • Glen Rice jumper, assisted by Haynes
  • Andrew Lawrence layup (miss)
  • Andrew Horner layup (miss)
  • Glen Rice jumper (miss)
  • Frank Hassell layup (miss)
  • Ryan Thompson jump shot, assisted by Glen Rice
  • Glen Rice dunk
  • Otto Porter layup, assisted by Haynes
  • Otto Porter layup (miss)
  • Otto Porter floater (miss)
  • Chris Singleton fadeaway jump shot (miss)
  • Otto Porter jumper (miss)
  • Chris Singleton jump shot (miss)
  • Glen Rice jumper (miss)

So, when Haynes was on the floor, his teammates made nine shots. (His teammates missed 14, and he missed 5 as well, but shush.) He assisted on six of those, for an assist percentage of 66%. You hear me, NBA? Marquez Haynes assisted on 66% of his team's shots in an NBA summer league game. Perfect backup guard, right? ... of course, he followed up the 66% assist percentage game with a game of one assist, but Haynes made 4 of his 6 shots, which means he managed to shoot 66% from the floor in the game. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Immediately after I wrote this -- with 50.8 seconds remaining in the game -- Haynes made a three pointer. So, I suppose he actually shot 5 of 7. Let's pretend that last shot never happened.)

It stands to reason that MarQuez Haynes has a spiritual connection with the number 66. He may assist on 66% of the shots his teammates make. He may shoot 66%. He may snag 66 rebounds. He may play 66 seconds. He may drive to the game on Route 66. Who knows? All that's clear is that Haynes will always -- ALWAYS -- be repping his 66 roots in the box score.

Godspeed, MarQuez Haynes. May the NBA accept your 66 revolution with strong hearts and open minds.

-- Aaron McGuire

• • •

STORY IN A TWEET #1: AMARE'S MORTAL ENEMY, REVISITED

story in a tweet #1

• • •

DEWEY'S CORNER: Gal Mekel Overdrive

Trying to assess the leap from basketball's lower leagues (your NCAA, your Euroleagues, your CBAs) to the NBA presents quite the challenge for the objective analyst. How do you even project that? Summer League, even more than these lower echelon semi-pro leagues, presents different incentives that really tend to warp the frame of any analysis th -- ... Okay, let me cut this line of thought short: Gal Mekel is the next Bill Russell. Okay, hold that thought, it's really not as absurd is it may seem. After all, both of them were born on Planet Earth and have some connection to the city of Dallas. This puts Russell and Mekel in rare company; they are the exact same player, but the other is the next of the one. [Editor's Note: Dewey, where are you going with this?!?]

Holding that thought a bit more, would Bill Russell honestly dominate the Summer League of his time? Yeah, yeah, I know, "of course he would, he was a college star. All he'd done up to that point is win." But didn't we also say that about Adam Morrison? I don't know. Yes? I was really young then. But what if Bill Russell wasn't dominant in a proto-Summer League precisely because of the things that made him great today? Would Russell -- disdainful of individual glory -- have had overawing statistics that would send us into flurries of pre-pre-season hype in 1955? Would Russell's reportedly photographic recall of every play in his career be expressed in 25 minutes of four games against gunners hoping to stand out with their jump shot and bigs trying to show off a prokaryotic back-to-the-basket game? Would Russell's mastery of the transition game and outlet passes -- a mastery that helped propel his teams to greater heights than had ever been achieved before or since -- show up in a mix-tape set to, uh... "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" by the Platters? Was that popular in the 50s? [Editor's Note: Yes, it was. 1958, to be exact. Good work.]

All of this to say nothing of the leadership abilities, rendered useless or meaningless or "a nice intangible". Sure, I'm not saying he'd fail Summer League. He's Bill Russell. The winner to end all winners. The original Trill Barton. But what if, my friends? What if the special form of incentives in Summer League didn't project Russell out as more than an average starter? Maybe his athleticism is the dominant theme. Limited offensive game, some individual talent on defense, lengthy, good timing, good feel for the game... Possibly the best player in the draft...

And yeah, that's where the comparisons with Gal Mekel begin to break down somewhat. Just a little bit. Very few people outset call Gal Mekel the best player available. [Editor's Note: Nobody has ever called him this, Alex.] It's an irrational Summer League fascination to pass the time. But maybe the next-level skills that actually translate to the NBA, the skills that transcend the limiting factors of an offense, the skills that increase in value with the skills of one's teammates, the skills that increase with time spent in the league? The skills for which teams end up paying a couple million a year extra, anyway? Maybe those skills are impossible to simulate. And maybe that's Gal Mekel's future.

Either way, Mekel was fun to watch in summer league. Great command of the floor. Good ball control, excellent floater, some very nice passes. He looks like he has a future. And yeah, maybe he's not the next Bill Russell. [Editor's Note: He isn't.] Maybe he's not the best player in his draft. [Editor's Note: He isn't.] But he's fun, he's got talent, and he's a passable backup point guard. [Editor's Note: He is.]_ _Perhaps that's enough, readers. Not the hero summer league deserves, but the hero it needs right now.

Gal Mekel for president, 2013!

-- Alex Dewey

• • •

Cory is 5, Devoe is 13. Picture actually taken by Aaron McGuire. What? What.

FINISHING UP WITH THE BROTHERS JOSEPH

Going into the day-concluding matchup between the Toronto Raptors and the Summer Spurs, there was a single subplot I was excited for. The Spurs were starting Cory Joseph, a rotation guard during the regular season and one of Tim Varner's very favorite Spurs players. I'd gotten wind of a rumor before the game that the Raptors were going to be starting Devoe Joseph, Cory Joseph's journeyman older brother. The Elder Joe played one season with the Minnesota Wolverines and one season with the Oregon Ducks before falling out of the draft and ending up in Ukraine at BC Khimik. Both are point guards. Both are good. And both, according to someone I talked to, would be starting for their respective squads on Sunday night.

The brother-versus-brother matchup is one of my favorites in all of sports, no matter the level of competition. Neither my brother or I played much in the way of organized sports when we were young, but there was always a certain meta-game present in any sort of competition where we'd face off. Playing H.O.R.S.E., squaring off at Scrabble, exploding each other repeatedly in Team Fortress 2. Always a sort of latent energy you don't always get in a casual game. The younger brother is always hungry, trying to one-up the one who came before. Prove their place and show that they're as good as their elder.

On the other hand, there's this sort of desperate energy from the older soul. It's motivated by a lot of things -- the rigid application of familial narratives chief among them. Above all, though? It's a valiant effort to evade a brutal embarrassment. "Dude, your little brother beat you. Duuude." No older brother wants to deal with decades of reminders about that one time their little brother schooled them. Nobody's ever up for that. As a proud older brother, believe me -- every single one of us wants to avoid this.

Unfortunately for my narrative thirst, the rumor turned out to be bunk. Joseph's elder brother certainly didn't start, and in fact, he didn't even get into the game until the second quarter. He played about four minutes of first half action before subbing out, which was hardly enough time to get full coverage of the family feud. Alas.

All that noted, it was a fun few minutes. There wasn't any of my hopeful drama-laden faceoff, but there was one notable possession where Devoe and Cory matched up directly onto the other. I was close enough to the court to hear trash talk (a fun experience, but that's a story for another day), but neither of them mussed the other to any large degree. No big trash talking, just stony faces. Both of them seemed to be trying to treat the other as they would any other opponent. Let the game do the talking, game recognize game, all that fun stuff. This one possession, though -- Joseph missed a jumper and got the ball back with Devoe matched on him. Devoe challenged him, and Joseph ended up dribbling out of the shot and passing the ball inside. Missed shot by Baynes. The elder flashed a fleeting smile before he took the ball up the court, and Cory tried not to look at him. Not exactly "one shining moment", but a fun distraction in a marginally interesting day-ender.

There wasn't a huge one-on-one matchup, and I suppose that wasn't a fair expectation. But they both had good games, in the end -- Cory had a 16-6-6 line on 13 shots, and Devoe had 7 points on 5 shots. Cory won the matchup (insofar as it existed at all), and Devoe's team won the night. The younger brother, fresh off spot minutes in the NBA Finals, played a markedly better game and looked the part of a Summer League Superstar. And the elder brother, fresh off a season in Ukraine, had himself a nice little game as a roleplaying second guard. The Raptors allowed Devoe to stay in the game for most of the 4th quarter after a 4 minute first half. Perhaps they'll show some faith in him and throw him a bone on the roster. And for one night, Devoe's team got the all-important W against his little brother's NBA finalists. Both winners, both losers.

(Just like writers who make their bread watching these ridiculous games, oddly enough!)

-- Aaron McGuire


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