Post NBA Playoffs: Utah Jazz Showing Promise In The Summer League

NBA Summer League is always an interesting time for fans and analysts hoping to gain an insight into a team’s near future.

On the one hand, the games are a blast. It’s fun to see teams made up of mostly young players clawing for roster spots and competing in an environment more like a pick-up game than an NBA contest. On the other hand, these same factors make it difficult to tell whether or not the players will have any actual effect on the teams!

With all that said, the Jazz still had a pretty fascinating NBA Summer League campaign. This team has quietly gone about its rebuild by compiling some of the most interesting young talent in the league. And a lot of those talents were on display in early July. Here’s a look at who stood out the most.

Let’s start with Trey Lyles, because he may have been one of the most overlooked players in the 2015 draft. There’s a growing perception that Kentucky players can be difficult to evaluate because there are just so many of them. John Calipari’s system – resembling a platoon for some of the past few years – naturally caters to total production over individual performance, and thus a lot of players who are top-10 in their high school classes and future lottery picks have modest numbers at UK. Lyles may wind up being the best example yet, if he’s as good as expected.

The NBA Summer League only backed up that opinion. Lyles shot poor percentages, but he’ll never be a guy who will rely on shooting accuracy so much as the ability to do pretty much everything else at a high level. In only 24.8 minutes per game (over five games), he showed how well-rounded he is, posting 11.6 points and 6.6 rebounds (not to mention 1.4 steals) per game. That’s pretty good for your first taste of professional competition, and the versatility in his game should keep him on the court.

Next up is a guard whose name a lot of casual NBA fans may still not know: Bryce Cotton. A tiny point guard from Providence University, Cotton appeared as a marginal contributor for Utah in 2014-15, but he’s known as a dynamite scoring threat, and he showed it in a big way during Summer League. Expect him to sell some Jazz tickets as the season gets into swing.

When asked if there is something fans should really know about him, he stated the following.

“I think if anyone want to know anything about me, they should know I’m very humble and I’m just a hard worker and I don’t take no for an answer.”

Cotton led the Jazz summer roster with 16.8 points per game in only 26 minutes a night. His three point shooting could have been better, but for a guard his size, it’s actually encouraging to see him putting up points without solely relying on the three. For example, he made a very impressive 30 of 31 free throw attempts, which not only showed accuracy, but the aggression it takes to get to the line just over six times a game.

To round things out, Cotton also averaged four rebounds and four assists (to only 2.2 turnovers). Don’t expect any Jazz All-Star appearances just yet, but given that Trey Burke seems to have already hit his ceiling and Dante Exum remains a huge question mark, Cotton deserves a shot – and appearances in the starting lineup might not be out of the question.

Unfortunately, there were three players that the NBA Summer League didn’t serve particularly well, namely Exum, Rodney Hood, and Olivier Hanlan, a second round draft pick out of Boston College. The Jazz have a logjam at the guard positions, and these three are part of the battle.

Hood and Exum didn’t play in any Summer League games in the end, and Hanlan – who has good size for a combo guard and was an insanely natural scorer throughout his college career – underwhelmed. He managed just 27 points in five games, and while that’s a very small sample size, Hanlan won’t be very useful if he can’t put the ball in the basket. Summer League was not encouraging for his outlook with the Jazz.

But for the most part, Summer League was more positive than negative for Utah. Cotton looks like an asset, and Lyles may end up snagging a starting role within two years. With a young core of Burke, Exum, Hood, Lyles, Gordon Hayward, and Rudy Gobert in place, the Jazz are only a few moves away from contention.

[Image via good4utah.com]