NBA teams come together to try out different summer rosters instead of their regular season lineups, including rookie, sophomore and G League affiliate players.

[4] The Utah Jazz Summer League began play in 2015, replacing the Rocky Mountain Revue, an event held from 1984 to 2008 before going on a lengthy hiatus due to declining participation.

For example, Jeremy Lin, a Harvard graduate, was invited to play for the Dallas Mavericks summer league team despite being undrafted earlier in the year.

[11] The Las Vegas Summer League played its inaugural season in 2004 at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)'s arena, the Thomas & Mack Center with six NBA teams – Boston Celtics, Cleveland Cavaliers, Denver Nuggets, Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns, and Washington Wizards – playing a total of 13 games.

[13] Since 2018, all NBA teams play in the Las Vegas Summer League in the typical tournament style.

Launched as a community outreach campaign to encourage interest in the Jazz in the summer of 1984 under the direction of Jazz public relations staffers David Allred and Kim Turner,[14] initially the league operated as a three-week, pro-am league in July with alumni players from Utah, BYU, Weber State and Utah State.

In 1990, after sending a team to the California Summer League the previous summer, Scott Layden, then the Jazz's director of basketball operations, invited the Portland Trail Blazers, Phoenix Suns, and Sacramento Kings to join the league and moved to an all-NBA format.

[22] On May 6, 2018, reports surfaced that to replace the position previously held in Orlando by the Magic, the Kings would host its own Summer League event in Sacramento.

[24] For the 2019 event, the Kings announced the team's roster for their second annual California Classic Summer League that took place on July 1–3 at Golden 1 Center.

[25] The award winner's team represented who they played for at the time they won Summer League MVP.