LAS VEGAS \u2014 By the time the second half started, fans had apparently seen enough.<\/p>\n
No Ace Bailey. No Walter Clayton Jr. No crowd.<\/p>\n
The Golden State Warriors and Utah Jazz finished up their Las Vegas Summer League game \u2014 a 103-93 Golden State win \u2014 in front of a mostly empty Thomas & Mack Center Sunday night.<\/p>\n
That’s what happens when a game starts an hour late and lacks a marquee prospect. Oh, and the poor basketball didn’t help, either.<\/p>\n
Bailey missed the game due to right hip flexor soreness, and Clayton remained sidelined with the hamstring injury he suffered in Utah’s first game in Vegas.<\/p>\n
Will the two play again this summer? It wouldn’t make much sense for the Jazz to risk Clayton’s hamstring for exhibition play. And really, the same goes for Bailey.<\/p>\n
Sometimes the idea of summer league \u2014 all the young prospects coming together for some July basketball \u2014 is better than the actual product.<\/p>\n
This year is proving that in bunches.<\/p>\n
Cooper Flagg was shut down after two games, Dylan Harper missed the Spurs’ opener, VJ Edgecombe hasn’t suited up in Vegas (and only played once in Utah), and the same goes for Bailey.<\/p>\n
It’s like teams (or at least agents) want to see one good performance from a player, then call it a summer.<\/p>\n
To be clear, the Jazz aren’t doing that. Bailey and Clayton are both actually hurt, but their absences add to the poor optics.<\/p>\n
So instead of a showcase of the league’s newest stars, the 2025 summer league has mostly been about second- and third-year players and fringe NBA guys getting reps.<\/p>\n
That’s certainly beneficial for them \u2014 just look at Cody Williams’ second half on Sunday \u2014 but it doesn’t exactly generate buzz. Watching a rookie hang 30 in Vegas is simply more exciting than seeing a former first-rounder find his rhythm.<\/p>\n
Tickets to Victor Wembanyama’s debut two summers ago were going for hundreds on resale markets. Flagg’s first game last week was sold out. Meanwhile, Kyle Filipowski dropping 30-plus barely earned a shrug.<\/p>\n
Vegas Summer League \u2014 like the city itself \u2014 craves the new and the shiny.<\/p>\n
Even with the missing rookies, the NBA isn’t likely to change anything; summer league has become an unofficial league-wide summit. But while the games and individual performances are already filled with disclaimers, this year’s event feels even more disposable than usual.<\/p>\n
Just not for the ones actually playing, like Williams.<\/p>\n
Williams had one of the worst NBA rookie campaigns in recent memory, and he’s trying to use summer league to help kickstart his sophomore year. And for the second straight game, Williams came alive in the second half.<\/p>\n
In Friday’s loss to the Hornets, the second-year wing scored 11 of his 21 points late, taking advantage of Charlotte putting bigger defenders on him and daring him to make plays.<\/p>\n
“My conversation with him was, ‘It doesn’t matter who they put on you, you’ve done all this work in the summer. This is the place to test it out and try it,'” Jazz summer league coach Chris Jones said. “He stayed confident and took the shots that he has been working on.”<\/p>\n
That confidence didn’t seem to follow him into Sunday’s game \u2014 or at least, it didn’t look like it would.<\/p>\n
Williams had just 3 points on 1-of-6 shooting in the first half against the Warriors. He lost the ball on multiple drives, and his shot wasn’t falling (Former Utah Utes guard Gabe Madsen, on the other hand, didn’t have those same issues \u2014 he poured in 18 first-half points for Golden State, to briefly energize the sparse crowd).<\/p>\n
But, again, Williams turned it around after halftime, where he scored 19 of his 22 points in the second half. So what’s been different after halftime?<\/p>\n
“I honestly have no idea,” Williams said. “Everything in the first half feels great. So I think for me, it’s kind of just sticking with it.”<\/p>\n
And for him, that’s what summer league is about: working through rough patches, trying new things, and getting better.<\/p>\n
“That’s eight games I have ahead of people who are sitting down,” he said. “So for me, just anything I can do to help my development.”<\/p>\n
And that’s why he wants to keep playing \u2014 even while some lottery picks sit.<\/p>\n
“I want to play,” he said. “I mean, I flew all the way out here to Vegas? I don’t want to fly all the way out here just to sit on a bench.”<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAS VEGAS \u2014 By the time the second half started, fans had apparently seen enough. No Ace Bailey.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":64739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1339,419,418,171,421,420,425,1260,50,422,1371,423,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-64738","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-cars","10":"tag-classifieds","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-local","15":"tag-nba","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-radio","18":"tag-recreation","19":"tag-salt-lake","20":"tag-sports","21":"tag-television","22":"tag-traffic","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-utah","27":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114851378955938677","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}