In this game, we learned the difference between tolerable and intolerable mistakes. Going for a behind-the-back pass is expected. Aday Mara was painted as a high-feel passer for a big man. Letting Adou Thiero jog his way to a banking floater at the third-quarter buzzer when you’re hovering the paint is not something you can just shrug your shoulders about.
The Oklahoma City Thunder remain winless in Summer League. Traveling to Las Vegas, they fell in a 96-84 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. The offensive woes continue. More concerning, though, their top draft pick faded into irrelevancy.
Mara finished with two points on 0-of-3 shooting, seven rebounds and one assist. He shot 1-of-3 on free throws. He also had two blocks and one steal.
In a vacuum, this was easily Mara’s worst Summer League game yet. He was invisible on offense. To the point that his passiveness was detrimental. You can’t be 7-foot-3 and pass up on floaters over defenders you eclipse. As the No. 12 pick, he looked anything but his prestigious draft status. And then on defense, he was just too indecisive and slow-footed — those two elements married spell disaster.
Mara was flat-out bad. Hence his F grade in our gamer. That said, how much of this actually matters? That’s the age-old question we universally ask every Summer League. Folks were panicking online. Especially after Morez Johnson Jr. and Yaxel Lendeborg have produced at this level. Fair or not, those three will forever be linked because of their time at Michigan and OKC’s affinity for them all as a No. 12 possibility.
But of the Thunder’s entire Summer League roster, it feels like Mara is most set up to fail. He’s a play-finisher. That’s what he was at Michigan. That’s what the advanced stats and game tape suggest. So to throw him out there without an actual playmaker is just undesirable. Sure, he looked a lot better in his two Utah games, but you can’t expect him to create his own buckets — at least not yet.
That has led me to beg for a nuanced view of Mara’s Summer League. He’s shown flashes. And that’s all you can really ask for in this environment. The fact of the matter is, none of this should be surprising. His strengths and weaknesses in the predraft process remain the same. And they aren’t going away anywhere.
While the potential is tantalizing — rostering a 7-foot-3 behemoth who is only shorter than Victor Wembanyama in the NBA — Mara has a long way to go to reach that ceiling. And with no promise he’ll even get there. That said, the Thunder likely won’t need him to help right away. You just gotta hope he shows incremental improvements over the long-term view.
So yeah, those are just my two cents on the Mara debate. Because this conversation felt inevitable to have. He played well enough in Utah to Eurostep his way around it. But his no-show in Las Vegas put it front and center for everybody to talk about.
“That’s the entire purpose of this Summer League. It’s for him to get better. It’s the first game here in Vegas,” Summer League coach Connor Johnson said about Mara. “We try to build on the things from the first two. But the rim protection. There’s a lot of pressure on the rim tonight. I put him in some difficult positions. I think he can continue to work on and grow from.”
This article originally appeared on OKC Thunder Wire: Why we can’t overreact to Aday Mara’s underwhelming Summer League
