The 2024 Olympic Basketball Tournament is over, and with it, so is all meaningful summer basketball. There are now a couple of months of relative downtime before the majority of the world’s leagues resume play, including the NBA.

Roster construction and scouting, though, never stop. And while the bulk of business is long since done, new information is coming in all the time, and situations are forever fluid. In particular, some players earned themselves some good money with their performances at these Games, and may have played their way onto the NBA radar.

There follows a look at 10 players from the Olympics who are not currently playing in the NBA, but who could be.

- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA on what's left of Twitter, email me at mark.s.deeks@gmail.com, or follow me in the street somehow. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks.

Be as effusive with your praise of Nikola Jokic as you dare. He has earned it. The uber-Brad Miller is a sport-changing talent, an all-timer, someone with a gravitational effect on the entire league.

Be fairly liberal in your appraisal of this year's Denver Nuggets, too. They are replete with offense, sporting a colossal seven players averaging double figures in scoring, all formulated around their historically good offensive lynchpin.

The fun is there. The scoring is there. The aesthetics are there. And the results, by and large, are there as well. However, the defence is not. And it is difficult to see how the Nuggets can find a way using the personnel that they have now to stem the tide. 

- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA on what's left of Twitter, email me at mark.s.deeks@gmail.com, or find me on Tinder somehow. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks.

All good things must come to an end. Having lost five games in a row, the hot start that the Utah Jazz got out to this season seems to have fully cooled off. They came out of the gates storming with an unlikely amount of synergy, and peeled off 12 wins in their first 18 games. They were considerably better than everyone expected, including those who expected them to be better than everyone else expected.

The same growing pains that it was thought they would inevitably hit, though, are seemingly finally here. But on the plus side, Lauri Markkanen has shown no sign of cooling off.

Markkanen has been playing more like Finland Lauri than NBA Lauri. That is to say, the Jazz have been giving him an expanded role on the offensive end, just like the Finnish national team do. Markannen is by far the most talented player in Finnish basketball, and so when he plays for his nation, he is empowered to do more than he has hitherto mostly been in the NBA.  Clearly enjoying his new style and new level of play, he has become a go-to guy for the Jazz in a way that he never was in either Cleveland or in Chicago.

- Find me @MarkDeeksNBA on Twitter, or email me at mark.s.deeks@gmail.com. For more of my stuff, try https://linktr.ee/markdeeks. For less of my stuff, go outside.