To start what should be a pretty obvious point to get across, if you seriously have concerns about a player because of Summer League, you should do the following:
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Use your free will to turn the game off
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Do something else (read a book, watch the World Cup, go outside)
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Watch a YouTube video of the Finals run
The greatest prospect of all time could go 1-for-45 in a Summer League game, and it wouldn’t matter at all. The only use of Summer League is extra reps for young guys, and so that fans can get a quick look at the shiny new toys they got in that year’s draft.
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As someone who is very opposed to Shiny New Toy syndrome, I too have fallen for our latest toy, ol’ Double (K)Nickel’s
But while Nickel has looked outstanding as a spot-up shooter, pretty much everyone else sucks. Pacôme Dadiet has done some good things, and Jack Kayil looked solid in the second half on Saturday, but other than that? Yeesh. The one center they have is doing this.
Frankly, watching them is a chore. They’ve scored a pitiful 65 and 49 points in their two games. The latter total is the first time in 10 years that someone scored less than 50 in a Vegas Summer League game. The 2016 Kings, led by Skal Labissiere, are not ones to emulate.
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It’s fair to have been extremely disappointed in just how feeble they’ve looked, even if we’re literally just over four weeks removed from an NBA championship and this roster has as little projectable talent as humanly possible.
Over the next three games, the four guys we’ve been looking forward to seeing will continue to be showcased, but you really have to hope we can at least get something out of Mo Diawara, who’s been… bad, to say the least.
But here’s the neat part. It doesn’t matter.
Hell, this isn’t even the “well, it’s only Summer League” excuse. For a player specifically like Diawara, this setting is literal hell for him.
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I worried in my pre-summer storylines piece from earlier this week that Diawara would be tasked with handling the ball too much. While he’s not completely running point guard, he’s getting pretty much all of his touches 30+ feet from the basket as an initiator.
He is not an initiator.
Summer League is for testing boundaries and challenging guys with roles they aren’t comfortable with. For Diawara, the Knicks are giving him some truly unreasonable challenges.
A guy with a very limited offensive bag at the moment is being tasked with initiating an offense with negative firepower (except for Nickel). Pretty much every shot he’s taken is either a grenade, contested, or not in rhythm. I didn’t watch much of Saturday’s game with other things on TV, but Friday’s looked like the team was intentionally trying to make things harder for him.
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Diawara is a sponge. His play quality reflects that of his teammates.
We saw him have some extremely impactful minutes in the regular season when he had real NBA rotation players around him. This is the same guy who fearlessly rained threes on the Western Conference champions and locked up Jaylen Brown.
The ugliest minutes for Diawara have come when his teammates around him are at his level. Starting when he was permanently booted from the rotation in late March to all the garbage time minutes he received in the playoffs, he looked clunky. His shots were way off, his touches were in awkward spots, and he was asked to do too much.
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Now in Summer League, he is the best player out there. When a 20-year-old who was picked No. 51 overall less than 13 months ago is the best player on the floor, that’s a problem. It’s even more of a problem when there’s no point guard to run the show.
Ultimately, that’s what makes this look so ugly. The entire offense is disjointed because there’s no floor general to stabilize it. It’s five headless chickens running around trying to put a ball in the basket. Their shot quality is disgustingly bad.
I was disappointed when I saw Tyler Kolek wasn’t doing Summer League because I feared this. I truly believe that you’d be seeing a lot more quality looks and Diawara being able to really do what made him so effective last year off the ball if he had a maestro like Kolek out there.
Does Kolek have anything to prove out here? Probably not, but for a guy who received zero seconds of meaningful playoff action, he isn’t totally above this.
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Ultimately, if you decided not to watch a second of the next three games, I wouldn’t blame you. We’ve watched too much good basketball of late to see our logo associated with whatever this is. Hopefully, things get better with Kayil seemingly fully integrated into the plans now.
At the end of the day, we’re still champs until we ain’t.
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