Victor Wembanyama will make his highly-anticipated NBA debut as his San Antonio Spurs take on the Charlotte Hornets on Friday night at 9 p.m. ET from the Thomas & Mack Center.
Cassidy Hubbarth will once again be part of ESPN’s lead Summer League broadcast team, working sidelines, interviews, and handling halftime duties from the arena. It’s Hubbarth’s seventh Summer League, with her first coming in 2016, and in that time she’s seen it grow from when only hardcore fans made the trek to the desert to becoming a gigantic event for the league.
The first big moment for Summer League was the Jabari Parker-Andrew Wiggins year — when the league, for some reason, put the showdown between top picks in the smaller Cox Pavilion. But even then, they weren’t coming close to selling out the arena. That started with Lonzo Ball’s debut, when Lakers fans swarmed Las Vegas to catch a glimpse of the player they hoped would be their new superstar.
“As far as the excitement around it, I think guys like Lonzo Ball and all of the attention he got heading into Summer League with his shoe deal and the reality show and his dad — that, to me, was one of the first times where I felt that the atmosphere was truly electric,” Hubbarth remembers. “And I think it seeped into the casual NBA fan wanting to know what Summer League was about. I think people understood like, hey, guys play in the summer, is it worth it to go to Las Vegas in the middle of July to see some rookies? And I think I started to see it turn into an event in itself. And if somebody — and I tell any NBA fan I come across who really love the game — a bucket list is to try to make it out to Summer League, because it’s only building and building. It went from Lonzo and the excitement, the stands selling out around his run. And then the excitement around Zion’s debut. And then obviously now Wemby, I just think it’s carried and it’s built over time, and it certainly is just an event on the NBA calendar worthy of regular season events.”
Summer League is now a true staple of the NBA calendar, with the league doing what it can to expand it with the addition of NBA Con this year for the first weekend. It’s a far cry from when some teams didn’t even attend because of costs, and the group of media and team personnel often outnumbered the fans in the gym.
Part of that is the buy-in from everyone in the league. It goes beyond the young guys playing in it, as stars in the NBA now flock to Vegas for workouts and to sit courtside, where they get their first glimpses of the biggest young stars up close.
“It’s truly a unique atmosphere unlike anything else in the NBA, or in just basketball, because it’s really a celebration of the league,” Hubbarth says. “I think a lot of times with the NFL, the league kind of comes together for Super Bowl, you see a lot of players mingling around and enjoying that week leading up to it. We have All-Star, but a lot of players who are not All-Stars, they’ll go on vacation. This, you have a lot of guys coming out to Vegas, getting workouts in, and just the energy you feel when guys like LeBron or Steph, who have made it routine to show up and sit in the stands with fans and watch these guys, you don’t get that [anywhere else]. You get maybe a guy here and there show up to a playoff game, but every single game, especially this first couple of days, it’s really just like a party atmosphere and you feel it. And it’s relaxed. Everyone is relaxed, whether it’s from GMs to coaches, even if they’re making deals in the stands, it’s just … everyone’s just mingling together. So, it’s quite a different atmosphere, which I feel is just a celebration of the league.”
This year, Friday night’s tickets were sold out days before, as the excitement for Wembanyama’s debut is palpable. The debuts of Lonzo and Zion are the closest comparison, but even then, those were players most American hoops fans had seen fairly regularly during their college seasons at UCLA and Duke, respectively.
Wembanyama is more of a mystery. He’s a generational talent most fans have seen once or twice at most. He’s been a leading topic of conversation for the last year, with the highlights of his truly unique abilities being passed around the internet. That is what makes this debut so exciting, and Hubbarth is just as excited to get her first glimpse at Wembanyama on the floor with other NBA players.
“We’ve heard so much about Victor. We’ve been talking about him for a year in terms of him playing in the NBA, watching his games in Vegas in October on ESPN,” Hubbarth says. “So it’s like, we were talking about him a lot, but how much do we really know about him? And I just don’t think we can know about him until he plays against NBA talent. I believe and I trust all of our experts. I can watch as much tape as I can of him playing on his French team, but I think the anticipation is just wanting to see him play. I think with Zion, he played to the crowd, he did the huge dunks, there was a highlight worthy video and dominance and force of like, hey, we’ve never seen anything like this.
“And I think that’s what people are going to be looking for from him, but it’s not going to be the similar ‘knock you on your behind’ type of plays out of Wemby like we saw with Zion in the half he played,” she continues. “You know, ripping the ball out of Kevin Knox’s hands and throwing it down. So I think people probably need to temper their expectations. He just said he doesn’t know how much he is going to play. But I think that he’s gonna be a marvel to watch — what we’ve seen of him, he is a special player. And so I think people just want to see that. They want to see it with their own eyes. They’ve heard enough about him. I think people are excited to see it with their own eyes.”
While Wembanyama and Brandon Miller will take center stage on Friday night, part of what makes Summer League so fun is the excitement it fosters. Hubbarth notes one of her favorite things about Summer League is how everyone is in a good mood thanks to the clean slate of a new season. Players are excited about new deals or new teammates and the prospects of a step forward next season. Coaches and executives are excited about the moves they made, because no matter what the outside world thinks, they believe they’ve positioned their team to achieve their No. 1 goal that season.
As such, there is a celebratory atmosphere. ESPN’s broadcast tries its best to play into this, all while it takes advantage of players, coaches, executives, and celebrities being willing to talk.
“That’s my role, to not only give the interviews with the players after the first and third quarters and do the halftime show, since we don’t have studio coverage like we do on a normal game, but my job is to go up to people and see who wants to talk,” Hubbarth says of the Summer League broadcast. “I’m roaming, walking, even doing laps and talking to people. Normally we’ll set up some people to come to the booth, and that’s a fun aspect to these broadcasts, because it’s not a traditional call of the game. That’s why I say it’s a celebration of the league in the sense that we’re talking about everything in and around the NBA. Whether it’s debuts of the rookies, transactions being made, moves, comments on other teams, expectations for new head coaches who sit down with us in the booth. So, it’s listening to an NBA podcast while also listening to a game call, so we try to get in as many interviews as possible.”
Last year, that meant nabbing Damian Lillard in the midst of his contract discussions with Portland — Hubbarth jokes she’d love to get Dame again this year, but notes he probably won’t be looking to talk on camera — or Carmelo Anthony when he arrived courtside. There’s also a certain tension (and excitement) when it comes potential deals waiting to be done. This year ,that’s Lillard’s trade request and James Harden’s future with Philadelphia.
Sometimes it’s something unforeseen that shakes up the league. During the Zion debut game, which was famously halted by a literal earthquake, Adrian Wojnarowski teased to Hubbarth the seismic Paul George and Kawhi Leonard moves to L.A. by saying he was “working on something big,” eventually breaking the news of the Clippers’ transactions later that night.
Then there was last year, when Russell Westbrook was in trade rumors and he and LeBron James arrived separately for the Lakers game. It provided an incredible, additional layer of drama to a Summer League game that you don’t get anywhere else.
“Last year with the situation going on with Russ and LeBron and them both showing up at the same time, and the tension that you could feel between those two and then Rob Pelinka, sitting on a different sideline,” Hubbarth recalls. “That, to me, that doesn’t happen in any other time other than NBA Summer League. And it’s just like, well, it was perfectly NBA awkward and it was theater. You know, Russ coaching up the Lakers Summer League team while LeBron was snacking on his homemade snacks on the on the sidelines. So it’s just those, that’s what my job is, trying to capture that atmosphere and all the people taking the time to show up at this event.”
There are no shortage of stories to tell on a Summer League broadcast — rookies looking to make their names, sophomores looking to cement their position on a roster, veterans looking to extend their careers, and the many transactions happening around the league and their subsequent fallout. For Hubbarth, the opportunity to tell all of those in a loose, in-game environment makes Summer League unlike anything else. While that’s headlined by Wembanyama’s debut this year, over the 10-day event, they’ll touch on the full spectrum of players looking to make a splash in Vegas.
