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Sports Former Jayhawks looking to stand out in this year’s NBA Summer League

Utah Jazz guard Ochai Agbaji (30) during the second half of an NBA basketball game Saturday, April 8, 2023, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The NBA Summer League is one of the most thorough preseason evaluative periods afforded by any American sport.

It’s essentially like if the former Week 4 of the NFL preseason, in which teams were composed of almost exclusively rookies and last-chance veteran backups seeking the spotlight, were extended into an 11-day, five-game Las Vegas basketball extravaganza, complete with a tournament, championship and most valuable player. Not to mention that the early-July competition has grown to include a pair of offshoots in Sacramento, California, and Salt Lake City providing even more opportunities for unheralded players to shine. (And this is all before teams play their true preseason games in October.)

Last year, the Denver Nuggets’ Christian Braun, fresh out of Kansas as a late-first-round pick, led the team with 18 points in his Summer League debut. Braun went on to average 12 points and six rebounds during his stint in Vegas and the rest is history: The rookie played 76 regular-season games for the Nuggets, carving out a role off the bench, then helped Denver to its first NBA Championship.

Along the way, he secured his status on the roster, in effect earning the right to skip this summer’s proceedings.

His fellow KU product and rookie Ochai Agbaji was not so lucky.

After an odd and uneven start to his career that saw him get drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers with the final pick in the 2022 lottery but traded to Utah in the Donovan Mitchell deal just three months later, he rose through the Jazz’s pecking order over the course of the season. A year that began by including nine games in the NBA G League ended with Agbaji averaging 30-plus minutes and nearly 14 points per game while scoring a career-high 28 in a late-season win against Braun’s Nuggets.

Agbaji, though, is already back on the grind this summer in Utah’s own Summer League, which included a clash with the Thunder on Monday, and figures to see extensive time in Vegas as well. Despite the somewhat surprising assignment, Agbaji told the Salt Lake City media he had known about his coaching staff’s intentions since “even before the season was over,” as quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune Monday, and that he plans to be aggressive during the summer.

Utah Jazz’s Udoka Azubuike (20) dunks against the Memphis Grizzlies during the first half of an NBA summer league basketball game Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021, in Salt Lake City.

Two-time teammate Udoka Azubuike will join Agbaji in the Summer League, though it won’t be with the Jazz this time around. Azubuike, the one-time Big 12 Conference player of the year in KU’s pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season, spent three years in Utah and showed his bread-and-butter inside scoring and rebounding ability in scarce minutes — when he was on the court and not rehabbing his injured right ankle. The Nigeria native will have a fresh chance to make an impact, as the Boston Celtics officially added him to their Summer League roster Monday. Azubuike will have to share time with fellow centers Olek Balcerowski and Reggie Kissoonlal but should make his debut this Saturday against Miami.

Toronto Raptors NBA basketball team first round draft pick Gradey Dick poses with a jersey after being introduced to the media in Toronto, Monday, June 26, 2023. (Andrew Lahodynskyj/The Canadian Press via AP)

Gradey Dick, the 13th overall pick who just signed his rookie-scale contract with Toronto (officially announced by the team Monday morning), figures to see his first-ever action in a Raptors jersey on Day 1 in Las Vegas on Friday against Chicago. Toronto is one of just five teams at the time of writing, along with Houston, New Orleans, New York and Washington, that has yet to unveil an official Summer League roster. Dick will be expected to shoulder a pretty heavy responsibility in terms of outside scoring right away when the regular season comes, especially with Fred VanVleet’s departure in free agency, and Las Vegas will give him a chance to prepare for that while getting acclimated to new coach Darko Rajaković’s system.

It’ll also unite him with a former Jayhawk with whom he didn’t cross paths in his one season at KU.

Kansas forward David McCormack celebrates after scoring against Villanova during the first half of a college basketball game in the semifinal round of the Men’s Final Four NCAA tournament, Saturday, April 2, 2022, in New Orleans.

After four seasons in Lawrence that culminated in late heroics to help win Kansas the 2022 national championship, David McCormack went undrafted, couldn’t catch on in the NBA and spent a season playing overseas in Turkey. He’s back stateside, and Bleacher Report’s Chris Haynes reported last Thursday that he will also join the Raptors for the summer. Last year, on an Exhibit 10 contract with the Minnesota Timberwolves, he averaged 7 points and six rebounds in 19 minutes of action across four games in the Summer League.

Jalen Wilson, left, Noah Clowney, center, and Dariq Whitehead, pose for photographers after a news conference to introduce the Brooklyn Nets new NBA basketball draft picks at the HSS Training Center, Friday, June 23, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Jalen Wilson, who went 38 picks after Dick last month to Brooklyn in the draft, will get his first chance to prove his value to the Nets’ front office as one of seven rookies on the roster released Saturday. Despite a massive leap forward as a senior at Kansas that saw him named the nation’s best small forward, the 22-year-old Wilson never quite made it into first-round consideration, didn’t wow teams at the NBA Draft Combine and even slipped a few picks further down than expected.

The number of former Jayhawks playing this July could still swell even further beyond those five known Summer League participants, with the aforementioned five teams’ rosters pending. Former Kansas freshman and eventual Houston standout Quentin Grimes has probably graduated from consideration after two professional years with the New York Knicks. Charlie Moore, who spent one year at KU as part of a four-school college career, was with the Pistons in the Summer League last season and finished this past year playing in Serbia. Devon Dotson and Marcus Garrett were also playing this time last year, and have been in the G League since, but may have aged out of consideration (although the Summer League sometimes includes players as old as 30).

The action got going in Sacramento and Salt Lake City Monday, and tips off in Las Vegas on Friday. Games are split between NBA TV and the ESPN family of networks.