Dallas Mavericks guard Ryan Nembhard shoots during a 2025 NBA Summer League basketball game against the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday, Jul. 12, 2025, at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nev. (Tyler Tjomsland/The Spokesman-Review)
LAS VEGAS – It took Ryan Nembhard all of two games at Las Vegas Summer League to become acquainted with the peaks and valleys NBA players experience through the course of an 82-game season.
Game one was a roaring success. Nembhard led the Dallas Mavericks with 21 points and hit the decisive 3-pointer with just under a minute left in a two-point win over the Los Angeles Lakers.
Game two? Nembhard, and most members of the Mavericks not named Cooper Flagg, would probably prefer to flush it and start looking forward to their next opportunity on the Summer League stage in Las Vegas.
The former Gonzaga point guard and his Dallas teammate struggled against an active, athletic San Antonio Spurs squad, making just 24 of 66 (36.4%) shots from the field in a 76-69 loss at Thomas & Mack Center.
Individually, Nembhard finished 1 of 10 from the field and 0 of 4 from the 3-point line. He had a game-high seven assists but also an uncharacteristic five turnovers, committing six fouls and totaling three rebounds.
“I’m going to be honest, I don’t think we helped him very much today,” Mavericks Summer League coach Josh Broghamer said. “I think he was doing some of the stuff that we asked him to do and playing one on one against these guys, if you don’t have space to work it’s much, much harder. I think he missed a couple of his pull-ups in that pocket that he normally makes, but the other stuff was, we had a guy standing next to him all night and we just couldn’t get our spacing correct. Probably a lot of that was on me.”
Nembhard’s shot didn’t fall the same way it did two days earlier when he made 8 of 14 shots from the field, but the undrafted rookie still got teammates involved and created one of the game’s top highlights when he tossed a high lob to Flagg in transition during the second half.
The play, which garnered lots of attention on social media, began when Dallas’ Cleveland grabbed an offensive rebound and pushed ahead to Nembhard, who didn’t take a dribble before delivering a high pass toward the basket. A soaring Flagg caught with both hands and finished the dunk, representing two of the 31 points scored by the Mavericks’ No. 1 draft pick.
“I think he did a lot of things well, we just didn’t help him out,” Brohamer reiterated of Nembhard. “So those shots will fall and obviously you saw it, when you’re making that comeback you put a lot of pressure both sides of the ball trying to play smaller. So probably lost some of his legs a little bit, but I think he did a really good job and still facilitated the way we wanted him to.”
Older brother Andrew Nembhard, a standout point guard at GU who just finished his third season with the Indiana Pacers, sat in a courtside seat next to father Claude for the second time this week in Vegas. Andrew caught three quarters of Ryan’s game before a Pacers staffer escorted him to the adjacent COX Pavilion, where Indiana was facing Oklahoma City in a Sumer League rematch of the teams that just met in the NBA Finals.
Nolan Hickman, a teammate of both Nembhard brothers during his time at Gonzaga, received a second straight “DNP” for the Mavericks on Saturday.
### Sallis balanced in 76ers loss
Hunter Sallis wasn’t one of the four 76ers to finish in double figures, but the former Gonzaga guard had a well-rounded stat line in Philadelphia’s 96-94 loss to the Charlotte Hornets.
Sallis scored eight points on 3 of 9 from the field and 0 of 3 from the 3-point line, but was one of Philadelphia’s most impactful defensive players, recording three steals and two blocks to go with four rebounds and four assists.
The former five-star recruit who played two seasons before becoming an All-ACC selection at Wake Forest missed a turnaround jumper with 39 seconds remaining and Philadelphia trailing by three points, then couldn’t get a driving layup to foul with 17 seconds to play.
DJ Rodman, who played at Washington State before transferring to USC, played two minutes but didn’t score for the Hornets.