With the NBA Draft receding into the rear view mirror, it’s time to find out who is going to get Summer League and training camp invitations. As you might expect with the California and Salt Lake City minor summer league events coming up about a week from now, the teams involved with those might be a little bit quicker on the uptake on that issue, and so:
According to DraftExpress, the Los Angeles Lakers have agreed to Exhibit 10 contract terms with former Marquette guard Chase Ross.
This is not a real NBA contract for Ross. This is a training camp invite with an option for the team to assign Ross to the Coachella Valley Lakers, their G-League affiliate, after camp is over. Sure, it’s possible that he really impresses someone in the Lakers’ front office or head coach JJ Redick or whatever, and finds his way onto the Los Angeles roster when the season starts, but that’s not the point of what the Lakers are doing here. This is more along the lines of the old-timey college football/basketball “preferred walk-on” recruiting. They definitely want him in Summer League and camp, but maybe that’s about it, and expecting more is probably expecting too much.
Chase Ross was not good for Marquette as a senior in the 2025-26 season. Yes, he finished the year at 14.3 points, 4.2 rebounds, 3.4 assists, and 2.3 steals, all of which were career highs while increasing his minutes per game by less than three per night. However, he shot a career worst 29.5% from behind the three-point line, and in an eight game stretch in the middle of the year, he averaged just 10.1 points per game and shot 17.6% from behind the arc. In Big East play, he shot just 38% from the field.
The most optimistic view of Ross relative to a professional future is that he excelled in a secondary or tertiary role behind Tyler Kolek and Kam Jones in the backcourt. No one is going to be asking Chase Ross to lead the way for the Los Angeles Lakers as long as Luka Doncic is alive and well, so I will carve out space to say that because all he has to do is prove he can be A Cog In The Machine, there’s a chance he could find a way to latch on in the league.
With that said, when he was asked to step up his game as a senior leader — much like he would have to step up his game in order to hang with NBA players — Ross failed to answer the call. I’m not optimistic here, but it’ll be nice to have at least one guy to pay attention to during Summer League across the next couple of weeks at the bare minimum.
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