Yaxel Lendeborg was clearly the impactful player when the Golden State Warriors defeated the Memphis Grizzlies to win a Summer League title, and deservedly won Championship Game MVP. Tuesday, he was awarded MVP for Summer League as a whole.
He’s the first player ever to
take home both MVP trophies, making him the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of Summer League, but without the flopping. Look, Steph Curry had to wait until his fourth title to get that honor, so Lendeborg should have a big weight off his shoulders. For the record, Draymond Green was the best player on the 2013 Summer League champs, but he wasn’t going to take home the trophy after Ian Clark made seven threes in the title game. Yaxel, please do not lord this over your new teammate!
Lendeborg beat out a talented field of Summer Leaguers that included No. 3 pick Cameron Boozer and No. 4 pick Caleb Wilson, both of whom made the All-Summer League first team. Boozer averaged 18.5 points, eight rebounds, 3.7 assists and 1.8 steals, while finishing second in points and third in rebounds. He’d likely have been Summer League MVP had the Grizzlies managed to close out the Warriors, but the Dubs’ Yaxel-driven rally — he scored seven straight points to take the lead — relegated the Duke forward to the lesser honor. Boozer was quite good, but the elite defense from Lendeborg and his team’s success seemed to be the tiebreaker.
Wilson was awesome, scoring 35 points in his debut and averaging 24 points, seven rebounds, 2.5 blocks, and 1.3 steals in his four games. Even though his Chicago Bulls went 1-3, it was an impressive performance from the athletic forward who didn’t turn 20 until two days ago. Wilson made 13 three-pointers in Summer League, which is six more than he made during his entire freshman season at North Carolina.
The other first-teamers were Milwaukee Bucks guard Brandon Burries (23.5 PPG, 50% shooting), taken one pick ahead of Lendeborg at No. 10, and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Meleek Thomas, who was the No. 34 pick this year out of Arkansas. Thomas was the Summer League scoring leader, putting up 27.3 points per game along with 3.8 assists, 3.5 rebounds and two steals.
In an interesting twist, the first team was all rookies and the second team was all second- and third-year players, who are normally the better Summer Leaguers — though also more likely to get shut down early.
Khaman Maluach of the Phoenix Suns averaged 19.5 points and league-leading 12.8 rebounds. Coward was first-team All Rookie last season, which makes the Summer League second team a slight disappointment, but he did average 19 points, seven rebounds, and four assists while making 41.7% of his threes. Third-year Minnesota Timberwolves guard Zyon Pullin had 39 assists, most in Summer League, while Liam McNeeley of the Charlotte Hornets averaged 21.7 points and shot 52.6% from three-point range, which should fit in nicely with his three-happy team. Egor Demin took the last spot almost by default after averaging 21 points in three games, a beneficiary of Bruce Thornton’s brutal final game for the Houston Rockets in the playoffs.
Other Summer standouts were Arthur Kaluma, whose reward was a two-way deal with the Los Angeles Lakers, Chaz Lanier and his league-leading 23 threes (51.1% shooting), Golden State’s own LJ Cryer, and Will Riley of the Washington Wizards, who was shut down after scoring 50 points and shooting 7-for-10 from distance in his first two games.
But the king of Summer League was Yaxel Lendeberg, right from his very first game. Now he has plenty of hardware to prove it.
