07-19-2025, 11:11 AM
(07-18-2025, 04:42 PM)HoosierDaddyKid Wrote: From the Substack podcast- There are two names that stand out that I want to talk about for different reasons.
Cooper Flagg did not have a summer league to remember. In addition to poor shooting (46 percent True Shooting), Flagg had only five assists, one block, and no offensive rebounds across two games. Tom Thibodeau likes to say you don’t need to shoot well to play well and Flagg’s all-around game should have lent itself well to filling up the stat sheet. But that wasn’t the case. I’m not sounding any alarm bells, but I may (slightly) re-calibrate my expectations for him next season.
Meanwhile, Collin Murray-Boyles was the number nine overall pick by the Raptors and has looked as advertised in summer league. He’s a do-everything small ball Big that’s drawn comparisons to Draymond Green. He can’t shoot for shit, but he can pass, defend, and he leads all rookies in offensive rebounds at summer league. When you’re not a threat from beyond the arc you have to be close to perfect in every other facet of your game. So far, the early returns on Murray-Boyles’s game outside of his three-point shot look pretty good.
Egor Dëmin’s name stands out from the rest. Dëmin, who Brooklyn drafted with the 8th overall pick, took a whopping 85 percent of his shots from beyond the arc at summer league on 11 attempts per 36 minutes4. Those two numbers give us more insight into what his game might look like at the NBA level than anything else he showed at summer league, including his outstanding three-point percentage (more on that later). Only three players last season in the NBA took more than 85 percent of their shots from three: AJ Green, Sam Merrill, and Nicolas Batum. Brooklyn should have no trouble finding minutes for Dëmin alongside their other players that need the ball as long as he’s willing to take threes at close to the rate he did in summer league. And based on historical precedent, there’s good reason to believe Dëmin will be letting it fly inside the Barclays Center next year.
What substack podcast is this?