Across two summer tournaments and eight games, Yaxel Lendeborg’s per-game averages barely moved. Fourteen-point-nine points. Six-point-eight rebounds. Four assists. Whether he was playing in Sacramento at the California Classic or grinding through six games under the lights of the Las Vegas Summer League, the production held flat. In an event built almost entirely on small samples and mismatched competition, that kind of consistency should have been the story of July. Instead it played understudy to a scoring race.

Meleek Thomas is the reason. The Cleveland Cavaliers’ No. 34 pick, acquired in a trade-down with Sacramento, averaged 27.3 points a game across four Summer League outings, third-highest scoring average in Summer League history, behind Marcus Banks’s 42-point average from a single game in 2007 and Donovan Mitchell’s 28 a night across two games in 2017. That number traveled. It’s also, if two decades of Summer League scoring data mean anything, close to noise. The number that should actually move a front office belongs to Lendeborg, whose quiet, repeatable line, capped by a 21-point, 10-rebound double-double in the Golden State Warriors’ 94-90 title-game win over the Grizzlies, made him the first player ever to win both season MVP and Championship Game MVP in the same summer.

I grew up watching this team from the East Bay, close enough to Oracle Arena to remember when the Warriors were actually bad, and I’ve learned to distrust anything about them that looks too good in July. Lendeborg’s line doesn’t look good. It looks stable. Those aren’t the same compliment, and in Summer League, stable is rarer.

The Number Everyone Will Remember

Thomas’s 27.3 a night is going to live in draft-class recaps for years, the way these numbers always do. It’s earned: 50 percent shooting from the field, 43.8 percent from three, a First Team All-Summer selection, all compiled in four games against defenses that, charitably, were still figuring out where to stand. None of that is a knock on Thomas specifically. It’s a knock on the environment he did it in.

Those defenses are a mess of two-way contract hopefuls, guys auditioning for spots overseas, and rookies who haven’t installed a single NBA-caliber rotation yet. Scoring against that group tells you a player can get a shot off. It does not reliably tell you the shot survives a jump to real NBA size, real NBA schemes, and real NBA scouting reports, the kind that show up by November.

Why Does Summer League Scoring Lie So Often?

Summer League scoring correlates weakly with NBA scoring, because thin, mismatched competition inflates volume for almost anyone willing to shoot. Rebounding and assist production hold up better, since positioning and live-ball decision-making measure effort and vision, traits that tend to travel, rather than a jump shot a real defense can take away.

The mechanism is straightforward once you say it out loud. A box-out doesn’t care whether the opponent is a fringe two-way guy or a lottery pick. Neither does a live-dribble read that finds the open man. Both require the same habits regardless of who’s guarding you. A jump shot against a defender who forgot to close out, on the other hand, is a different shot than the one that gets contested by an NBA wing in October. Scoring totals inflate against soft competition in a way rebounding and passing totals mostly don’t.

Lendeborg’s Line Didn’t Move Across Two Tournaments

This is the part of Lendeborg’s Summer League that’s easy to miss, because it isn’t dramatic. Across the California Classic and Las Vegas combined, eight games in two different buildings against two different sets of opponents, he shot 48.4 percent from the field and 45.9 percent from three across both events, to go with 11 steals and 7 blocks. Swap in the Vegas-only sample and almost nothing changes: 14.8 points, 6.8 rebounds, 4.0 assists, 1.5 steals, 45.9 percent shooting, 28.3 minutes a night.

Two events, two fields, one line. A player who scores in bursts against overmatched competition and disappears when the matchups get harder tends to produce a jagged Summer League chart, hot one week and invisible the next. Lendeborg’s is flat, which is a boring thing to say about a two-time MVP but an encouraging one for whoever’s building a roster around him. The title game was the proof: 21 points, 10 rebounds, 32 minutes, in a 94-90 win that didn’t ask him to do anything he hadn’t already done six times.

The league made it official not long after the final buzzer.

https://twitter.com/NBAPR/status/2079612467152318759

The trophy caught up to what the box scores had already been saying for two weeks.

What About Caleb Wilson?

Not every big scorer in this class is a mirage, and lumping Caleb Wilson in with Thomas would be lazy. The Bulls’ bet on Caleb Wilson, the No. 4 overall pick, produced 23.5 points, 7.3 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 1.3 steals, and 2.5 blocks a game on 50/41.9 shooting splits over four outings. That’s a real two-way stat line, rebounding and rim protection included, not just scoring volume dressed up to look complete.

But it came bundled with two red flags specific enough to matter: 5.3 turnovers a game and a 33.3 percent mark from the free-throw line. Chicago shut him down for the rest of Summer League not long after that stretch. Turnovers and free-throw shooting are exactly the kind of numbers that tend to get worse, not better, when the competition and the physicality jump at the same time. Wilson’s peripheral stats are the encouraging half of his profile. His hands and his touch at the line are the half worth watching in October.

Wilson’s box score carries real weight outside of points. Thomas’s, relative to how often he shot, is thinner everywhere else. Lendeborg’s has no thin column at all, which is the whole point.

Summer League’s scoring leaderboard turns over almost every year, and the names on it rarely carry into a real NBA rotation the following winter. That’s less a rule than a pattern worth remembering the next time a box score looks impossible in July. Anyone curious where the rest of that draft class is trending, or who wants the rest of our NBA coverage as the calendar turns toward October, will find the more durable signal in the same place it always hides: the numbers nobody’s tweeting about yet.

By the time Cleveland and Golden State open the regular season, the players worth trusting won’t be the ones who scored the most in July. They’ll be the ones whose numbers never needed an asterisk about the competition to make sense. Lendeborg’s didn’t. That’s the bet worth making now.