Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Las Vegas NBA Summer League played its inaugural season in 2004 at the Thomas and Mack Center on the UNLV campus. It launched with six NBA teams playing a total of 13 games, and the NBA officially attached its name to the event in 2007.
NBA Summer League games are 40 minutes long, shorter than the 48-minute regulation NBA game. This matches the FIBA and WNBA standard. Overtime periods are two minutes each, with the first played in full and true sudden death from the second overtime onward.
The California Classic Summer League is a pre-Las Vegas summer competition hosted by the Golden State Warriors or the Sacramento Kings since 2018. It was created to replace the Orlando Pro Summer League and typically features four teams including the Lakers, Heat, Spurs, and the host teams. For 2024, it expanded to a dual-city format at both Golden 1 Center and Chase Center.
The first Las Vegas Summer League MVP was Randy Foye of the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2006. Notable winners include Blake Griffin in 2009, John Wall in 2010, Damian Lillard in 2012, and Lonzo Ball in 2017. The 2025 MVP was Kyle Filipowski of the Utah Jazz.
Jeremy Lin, a Harvard graduate who went undrafted, was invited to play for the Dallas Mavericks summer league team. He performed well in the 2010 summer league and was subsequently signed by the Golden State Warriors. Any NBA team could sign him after the league, not just the Mavericks.
The Rocky Mountain Revue was a summer basketball tournament hosted by the Utah Jazz from 1984 to 2008. It was launched as a community outreach campaign by Jazz public relations staffers David Allred and Kim Turner and eventually grew to feature as many as 16 NBA teams. It was cancelled after 2008 due to declining participation, though the Jazz revived a summer league event in 2015 under a new name.