MVN - Most Valuable Network

Gerald Green lighting up Rocky Mountain Revue

I don’t think there’s a more difficult summer league to cover in the NBA than the Rocky Mountain Revue. It’s held in a low-interest area of Utah, has little to no media coverage, and doesn’t even have much of a cohesive website to make it look official. In fact, it makes the Vegas Summer League look like the cream of the crop–at least some of the VSL games are broadcasted on NBA TV. With the Revue, you’re lucky to find a game streaming live online.

Therefore, in order to evaluate some of the events in the Revue we have to rely on some PDF box scores, which is the case of the Mavericks’ 84-77 win over the San Antonio Spurs. Now before we make too big of a deal out of this, let’s take a look at the opponent’s roster: ever heard of Malik Hairston? What about George Hill? Often the players in the Revue aren’t even good enough to be drafted, or in the case of Maverick reserves James Singleton and Richie Frahm, are veterans looking to make it back to the NBA.

Really the Mavericks have not been particularly exciting in the Revue, with the exception of one man: Gerald Green. He came into this off-season with something to prove, and in the game against the Spurs he did just that. Green had 27 points on 8-15 shooting to go with 7 rebounds. He did have 5 turnovers, but I’m more willing to overlook those considering he got to the free throw line for 7 attempts.

Why is this important? It may very well not be since rarely do great summer league performances translate over to great NBA performances. Look at JJ Barea for example–he tore up the summer league in 2007 and barely made a dent on the team in the regular season. What this stat line does prove, though, is that Green does have the necessary talent to succeed if so chooses to continue putting forth the effort.

Thankfully Revue coach Mario Elie is keeping the young man focused, saying that Green can be a “great defender” but “it has to do with maturity.” Let’s see if Gerald keeps it up going into the regular season.

–

On another note, congratulations to Dirk Nowitzki for getting the German National Team into the Olympics. I’ve been outspoken in the past about how players should not be discouraged for participating in international ball, and I can only dream about how honored Dirk must feel to finally have his team playing in Beijing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Showboating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.