Let's start with the obvious: summer league is not the be-all and end-all of player development. If we look at the Indiana Pacers in a vacuum, success in Vegas has very rarely translated to success in the NBA, and – amazingly – failure out in the desert has not impeded growth at all.
From Ivica Zubac to Pascal Siakam, excellent players have had bad summers and still grown into All-Stars. Pacers fans surely remember Chris Duarte tearing it up just to become a bust who was dumped in Sacramento just two-and-a-half years into his rookie contract.
With all that understood, with that important and pertinent disclaimer in place, it is with great displeasure that we report: The Pacers' summer league team has been a near-abject failure, with minimal silver linings.
Pacers' good start turned sour
The Pacers won their first game in Las Vegas behind an impressive effort from Rienk Mast, the Dutch big man with great touch and rebounding ability. With a final score of 99-93, Indiana buried the Cleveland Cavaliers with real promise in their young players.
Indiana's team was built to showcase two players in particular, with Mast being a surprise development.
There was third-year wing Jalen Slawson, who had quietly earned a spot during a miserable Pacers gap year, and Braden Smith, the second-round guard who had fallen to the second round due to size concerns.
While Slawson succeeded in the box score, his efficiency left much to be desired. The 20.5 points per game is belied by the dreadful 43/26/77 shooting that doesn't speak to his ability to scale down his game alongside the returning offensive fulcrums in Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam.
Without the ability to transform himself into a low-usage bench piece, Slawson will find himself in the G-League, fighting for the call-up he so clearly covets.
Braden Smith is just clearly not an NBA player. His size becomes overwhelmingly apparent when he is expected to contribute defensively, and he cannot shoot the ball from anywhere on the court.
Small guards are usually defined either by their downhill burst and ability to finish below the rim, or by their shooting to pull defenses out and create space in the paint to maximize their playmaking. Smith does neither.
While the assist numbers (6.5 per game) are exciting, they come in a context of dreadful play in which Braden looked unplayable.
The standard for summer league is usually that the shots can miss, but the process of getting them shouldn't look too difficult. Everything has looked hard for this Indiana team. That's why they lost three straight games in sad fashion ahead of Saturday's closeout game against New Orleans.
If the only silver lining of this year's summer league is a wing that can produce gaudy numbers when given massive usage and a slow-footed center outperforming his undrafted status, that's not a great sign for the fringes of the roster.
It's true that summer league means very little.
That doesn't mean it wouldn't have been nice to see more.
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