NBA Summer League is back. Cue the overreactions.

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This time of year, the sports world is a little bit … slow, to put it lightly.

Sure, you’ve got the middle of the MLB season — packed with the All-Star Game and its festivities starting July 18, followed by the trade deadline on Aug. 2 — along with the NBA Draft, NBA Free Agency, the British Open and, of course, one of the greatest sporting events out there in Wimbledon.

But compared to the fall, winter and early spring, the dog days of summer just can’t compete.

Hence why, as of last week, the national spotlight has shifted its gaze upon Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, where all 30 NBA teams are competing in the annual NBA Summer League, an event meant for younger players and those on roster bubbles to showcase their talents to front offices and the world-at-large.

Summer League is, personally, one of my favorite events of the year.

Despite the level of basketball not always being of the highest quality, the idea of the NBA’s brightest rookies and overlooked second- and third-year guys getting together to hoop for a couple weeks in the middle of summer has always been fun.

However, as great as Summer League can be, it also brings out one of the worst aspects of modern hot-take culture: overreaction season.

Every year, NBA Summer League is a hotbed for some of the most reactionary, overblown takes. There’s always that one player who exceeds expectations in Summer League and is billed as a potential star and then, shockingly, doesn’t live up to the hype once the regular season rolls around.

Then, naturally, there are a couple of players who fall on the opposite end of the spectrum, the ones that underperform in Summer League and are almost immediately referred to as a bust.

I am living, breathing truth in this phenomenon.

When I was just an amateur sportswriter with nothing but a laptop and a blog — entitled “Sack the Point Guard” — I spent the summer of 2014 covering the now-defunct Orlando Summer League, a league that played at the Orlando Magic’s practice facility and featured much fewer teams than the current iteration in Las Vegas.

Well, to say I “covered” it would be giving me a little too much credit.

Instead, I watched all of the games and, just as if I was a media member in attendance, wrote game recaps on my blog.

One of the players I fell in love with during the 2014 Orlando Summer League was Nick Johnson, former Arizona Wildcats shooting guard who was a second-round pick for the Houston Rockets earlier that summer.

In one of his five games, he posted a statline of 15 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists, notching a triple-double in a win over the Brooklyn Nets, which prompted me to write a line I’ve snickered at for nearly a decade.

“Nick Johnson didn’t just flirt with the triple-double against the Nets,” I wrote in the game’s recap, “he convinced it to come back to his place.”

His performance had many Rockets fans wondering if they’d hit on a second-round gem, comparing him to players like Chandler Parsons or Patrick Beverley.

But despite his standout showing in Orlando, Johnson never took off in the NBA.

He managed to make the Rockets’ roster, but played just 28 total career games, all during the 2014-15 season, averaging just 2.6 points per game.

The point is, the overreactions in regards to players during Summer League, good or bad, is a vicious cycle that happens every single season. And this year is no exception.

Through the first week of the Summer League, fans have already crowned some players while simultaneously trashing others.

Perhaps the most notable example came on July 5 in Salt Lake City, when the Oklahoma City Thunder blew out the Utah Jazz behind 23 points from 2022 No. 2 overall pick Chet Holmgren, who had plenty of doubters (including myself) during the draft process.

Let me be clear, however. Holmgren had one heckuva game.

In 23 minutes, he scored 23 points on 7-of-9 shooting (4-of-6 from behind the arc) and posted 7 rebounds, 4 assists and 6 blocks (a Summer League record). By the end of the first half, he already had 18 points and all four of his 3-pointers.

It was an absolute monster debut for the 7-footer out of Gonzaga.

And, as the natural flow of Summer League goes, the Internet was ablaze with takes praising Holmgren. Not just saluting his great game or breaking down the film, highlighting everything he did well, but takes that said the Magic’s front office should be ashamed of itself for passing on him at No. 1, among plenty of other wildly absurd overreactions about a player who’s played just a single game in the NBA Summer League.

Yes, Holmgren looked fantastic.

But making any sort of bold proclamations based off of 23 minutes against the Jazz’s J.V. roster is just flat-out silly.

The same could be said for Houston Rockets’ No. 3 pick Jabari Smith Jr.

In the Rockets’ opening game against the Magic last Thursday, Smith looked … bad. He didn’t seem to have much confidence, struggled to score the ball (10 points in 31 minutes) and was outshined by No. 1 overall pick Paolo Banchero in just about every way.

It happened again last Saturday against Holmgren and the Thunder, where Smith scored 12 points in 30 minutes on 5-of-19 shooting and looked inconsistent, to say the least.

While there have been flashes of defensive brilliance from Smith, he’s well underperformed by the standards of a top-three draft pick — especially when he was supposedly in the conversation to be the No. 1 pick.

But, as is the case with Holmgren, judging Smith off of subpar play this far out from the start of the NBA season is just as ridiculous as hailing Holmgren as the next Hall-of-Fame big man this early.

As a Magic fan, I’m guilty of using Orlando’s first two Summer League games as reason for why Banchero will be the greatest basketball player of all-time — which may or may not have been a tweet I sent out last week — but, the reality is, we simply don’t know.

Whether it’s Banchero dropping dimes, Holmgren shooting the lights out, Golden State Warriors forward Moses Moody showing out with 34 points against the Knicks or Smith underperforming, it’s better to take it all with a grain of salt. Temper expectations, refrain from posting a hot take over the Internet and just enjoy the flashes in a pan.

After all, the unexpected breakout stars are exactly what makes Summer League fun.

If you find yourself getting too high or too low on someone based on a Summer League game or two, just remember Nick Johnson. He’s the rule, not the exception.

Reporter Victor Hensley can be reached at vhensley@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @Frezeal33.