Why I Love the NBA Summer League

I think I may be more interested in the NBA Summer League than any person not employed by the league or one of its teams. I love it. I didn't even understand why I felt this way until I stopped and thought about it. Here are the reasons I came up with:

1.The NBA Summer League breaks up the baseball summer monopoly. Seriously, who needs to watch that much baseball? Once the NBA regular season ends I just look forward to NFL training camps. The summer league fills that gap nicely.

2. There's always something to get excited about. Either you're a crappy team with decent young players that also play on the summer league team (i.e. the OK City squad) or you're a good team that is forced to fill their roster with legit players (i.e. the Pistons).

3. Its easy to convince yourself that games either matter or don't matter, depending on whether or not your team won. If your team beats the Spurs, that's great! The Spurs are good, right? You will undoubtedly forget that Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu don't play for this version of the Spurs. If your team doesn't win, it doesn't matter because its just the summer league and our young prospect dropped 20 and 10. Its win-win.

4. The league is filled with big time prospects and guys that virtually dissapeared after college. Let me just throw out a few names to prove my point. You have OJ Mayo, Kevin Love, Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose. Then you have Nick Caner-Medley, Will Bynum, Pat Carroll and Pops Mensah-Bonsu. Throw in some older guys like Robert "Tractor" Traylor and Dahntay Jones and you've got a pretty decent cast of characters. Seriously, take a gander through the rosters and you'll find at least 5 players you thought were dead. I refuse to believe that no one has Shawn Kemp on their roster.

5. There are a handful of players that have no business being in this league. Lucky for Philly fans Thad is one of them. This guy started a majority of the games for a playoff team last year, does it really help him to be hitting shots over a guy named Sonny Weems? Check out some of the Sixers highlights so far during the Vegas League, Thad looks like that kid that hit puberty at 10 and dominated the intramural leagues.

6. You get false confidence in your young players. This must be how Dave Spadaro feels watching Eagles camp: everyone is AWESOME! Just look at the Sixers, Lou Williams did it last year and Speights is doing it this year. Lou made us think that he was going to be the next Iverson, Speights looks like Dwight Howard. Playing well in a summer league game in no way guarantees a great regular season. Sure Lou did well last year, but he made me think he'd dominate.

7. You're guaranteed to see some sick highlights. This league is filled with guys who have potential. Most of these "potential" guys are freak athletes that haven't figured everything else out yet. You know what that means: big time blocks, exciting fast breaks and extreme facials. Its like an AND 1 game without all the yelling and towel waving and illegal dribbling.

Summer League, I think you're just great. Thanks for filling my sports gap. I only need you for another week or so because the NFL is going to take over. You did good though, kid.