It all started with an idea.

“My partner, Warren LeGarie, and I met when I was working for the Seattle SuperSonics back in the 1990s,” Albert Hall, who, along with LeGarie, serves as one of the co-founders of the NBA Vegas Summer League, told Essentially Sports. “We used to go to a bunch of different summer leagues, and we always thought to ourselves that they could be more effective than they were. Just needed a good location. We thought Vegas might be a good hub, found a loophole, and here we are 22 years later.”

In 2004, the Vegas iteration of the summer league was born. At the time, only six teams participated in the event (kind of like the California Classic). However, over the years, it has grown to become the marquee event of the summer, with all 30 teams officially joining the fray in 2018 (after the Orlando Summer League was shut down).

Despite their success, Hall and LeGarie are consistently looking for ways to sharpen their craft. Hall likens it to a primary ball handler looking to sharpen their crossover. The best are always finding ways to level up.

“We want to get better off the court while the players/coaches are getting better on the court,” Hart explained. “And we do that by talking directly to people and figuring out the kind of stuff they want from this event.”

Sports Medicine Series

One of their recent innovations over the last couple of years was to create a convention, or “series,” if you will, where people from all over the world can meet up to discuss the latest advancements in sports medicine. Physical Therapists, athletic trainers, strength coaches, sports science physicians, among others, journeyed from all over the world to attend the Sports Medicine Series.

“It’s just like we were talking about us needing to get better. How do trainers get better during the offseason? Simple. Put them in the room with a bunch of the brightest people in the room and let them all bounce their best practices off each other,” Hall said in an exclusive interview.

Of course, given all the other events (like their new film festival) that Hall and LeGarie must oversee, they need to delegate responsibilities to their constituents to maximize their time and the series’ effectiveness. And for this initiative, the duo entrusted none other than 30-year NBA executive Tommy Sheppard to shepherd the herd (no pun intended).

“Injuries are always going to be a part of sports,” Sheppard told Essentially Sports over the phone. “But how can we limit those as much as possible?”

“This year, we had professionals from every different sport. MMA, NFL, EPL, Cirque du Soleil. They all seem unrelated, but all of them are connected by the looming presence of injuries. And when you get so many high-minded individuals together in a room collaborating like that, you get some great results,” Sheppard reflected.

Sheppard, who spent two decades in the Washington Wizards’ organization, has been passionate about injury prevention/recovery his whole life. When he was working under Ernie Grunfeld, his job was to identify ways to keep players from getting hurt. And when they did get injured, he needed to help their medical staff come up with treatment plans to get players back to their full form as quickly and cleanly as possible.

If you’ve been keeping up with NBA injuries, you’ve surely heard something about the soft tissue epidemic that’s circulating throughout the league. Players are more skilled than ever, and schemes are more complicated than they were in the past. Couple this with the rigors of an 82-game regular season, and you have players succumbing to more soft tissue injuries than ever before. These injuries not only lead to games missed, but the extra tension that players are forced to put on their adjacent muscle groups has led to some catastrophic outcomes (see Tyrese Haliburton’s Achilles tear in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals).

This past postseason, Luka Doncic, Jalen Williams, Aaron Gordon, and OG Anunoby, to name a few, all missed critical junctures dealing with these types of problems. Premium talents missing the most high-leverage games. No one wants this to happen.

Fortunately, one of the big talking points of this year’s sports medicine series centered around discussions of how to properly treat/prevent these sorts of injuries, as noted by Sheppard:

“The goal of the Sports Medicine Series is to connect everyone across leagues and countries in all topics. For example, Enda King on soft tissue injuries, Brandon Stone on kinetic chain and pitching, and hip and groin with Kyle Moore from the Vegas Golden Knights. Those are all leading experts in the field of sports science and physical therapy who made amazing presentations during the convention. All of which generated some thought-provoking conversations and potential breakthroughs.”

Of course, the issue of soft-tissue injuries, or injuries in general, isn’t something that can be solved overnight. It’s a consistent battle. But it’s far more tenable of a fight when you get the best, most curious minds in the world together tackling the epidemic as a collective unit, and that’s exactly the kind of forum the Vegas Summer League creates.

The Vegas Summer League has changed a great deal since its inception, and along with it, the game of basketball as a whole.

This year, the Vegas Summer League took place from Thursday, July 9 to Sunday, July 19. The second annual Sports Medicine Series took place from Sunday, July 12 to Tuesday, July 14 at LIED Athletic Complex. The series is rapidly expanding, with attendance, duration, and activations more than doubling from the previous year.