Jerryd Bayless Named Vegas Summer League MVP

OJ Mayo who? Initially when the summer league jumped off in Vegas, OJ was the main attraction. But by the end of it, it was all about Jerryd Bayless. His performance was unreal. He played 4 games (the Blazers actually played 5 games but he didn’t play in the first one) and put up 28, 26, 29 & 36pts – all in that order – to lead the summer league in scoring at 29.8 ppg. Just as impressive were his FT numbers. In his first game he went to the line 23 times! The next two games he was 13-16 and in his final game he was 6-6. He was 50-61 which is 82%, not to mention he shot 49% from the field, 43% from deep, to go with 4.8 rebounds and 1.2 steals. Now granted, you only play a handful of games in the summer league against other rookies and both signed and un-signed free agents so the competition isn’t really all that great, but it’s still the NBA and those numbers are a good indication that Bayless will be a very good pro and it echoes my point in an earlier post that the Blazers backcourt is going to give a lot of teams trouble this season.

Note: Bayless was also named to the USA Basketball Select Team along with Kevin Love as the two players who were to be selected from the Vegas summer league.