Why rebuilding Raptors might want to keep red-hot Jakob Poeltl

The NBA is an entertainment product. The spotlight shines brightly for anyone who wants to venture into it, and there are plenty of NBA players who take to the stage like Superman, even if off the books they might be more Clark Kent by nature.

And then there’s Jakob Poeltl, the 29-year-old Austrian centre who never seems to leave the phone booth. He’s polite, hard-working, diligent and selfless, which are excellent qualities to go along with being a light-footed seven-footer with soft hands and a sky-high basketball IQ.

But it’s not a recipe for star making, or attention grabbing.

Until this past week, Poeltl’s NBA story has been one of consistency, reliability and professionalism. Pick any month in his nine-year career, control the data for minutes played or number of possessions and you get some version of this: on a per-36-minute basis it’s somewhere between 13 and 16 points a game, right around 12 rebounds, a sprinkling of assists, a little more than a blocked shot per game and very few missed field goals. Poeltl’s career field-goal percentage — 63 per cent, all but four of his attempts coming from inside the three-point line — is second-best among NBA players with at least 3,000 shots since back when Barack Obama was still the American president.

It's like clockwork, and the clock always works.

“Jak has the simplest game ever and it’s like the most effective game ever. So effective, so simple too,” said Raptors point guard Davion Mitchell.

Garrett Temple, one of two players on the Raptors roster with more experience than Poeltl, agrees: “He finishes in the pick-and-roll. He’s not a crazy roll guy, but two points is two points is two points. He understands how to play the game.”

And through his first 550 NBA games, that was all that was needed to be said about Poeltl — which is a good thing: he is paid well to do an important job, and it almost always gets done to the best of his ability, regardless of circumstance.

Through the first 12 games of this season, more of the same: 13.9 points, 11.1 rebounds, 2.9 assists, 1.3 blocks, 1.2 steals and 56 per cent from the floor.

But then the past week happened, and Poeltl put up the best the of the best games of his career — 25 points and 18 rebounds, 10 on the offensive end — on Friday against Detroit, a career-best 35 points and 15 rebounds against Boston in Toronto’s loss to the Celtics in Boston and another 30 points to go along with 15 rebounds in the Raptors' win over Indiana on Monday night. He’s done it all while converting 71.9 per cent of his field goal attempts.

He'll get a chance to keep the momentum going Thursday night against Rudy Gobert and the Minnesota Timberwolves, but it’s worth hitting the pause button and admiring a man at the peak of his powers.

Not only are his past three starts the best three offensive games Poeltl has ever played consecutively — he’d never scored 20 points in three straight games in his career — but in aggregate they represent as good as a three-game stretch you’ll find by anyone.

For example, as NBA stats wiz Keerthicka Uthayakumar posted the other day, there are only six players who have averaged at least 30 points, 15 rebounds and shot better than 70 per cent from the floor over a three-game span since 1983-84 and all of them would fall in the no-surprise category, given their hall-of-fame resumes. They are Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, David Robinson, Dwight Howard, Nikola Jokic and now … Jakob Poeltl.

Cue the nicknames: Jakeem, Shaq Schnitzel, Jak Deisel. We’re just workshopping here.

Even the man himself seems a bit flummoxed by the burst of all-NBA level production, seemingly from nowhere.

I asked him after a career of being known for doing the little things as well as they can be done, what it’s like to pick up a box score and see all the gaudy numbers beside his name for once.

“I mean, yeah, it feels nice. It's a little bit of a throwback to like college times, I guess,” he said.

Quick fact check: Poeltl had an excellent college career. He was a first-team All-American as a sophomore at Utah and ended up being taken by the Raptors ninth overall in the 2016 NBA Draft, but he never had a stretch like this. The most he ever scored in a three-game span was 81 points. He only grabbed more than 14 rebounds once, and not on a night when he scored 20 points.

The best basketball Poeltl has ever played is right now, at age 29, for an injury-plagued Raptors team that has won three games in four weeks.

Why now is a bit of a mystery. Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic tried to suggest that this version of Poeltl has been a work in progress, that it’s taken plenty of encouragement and urging to get the big man to attack the rim with more speed and force.

“[We talk] a lot. ‘Jak, you can dunk with the ball. ‘Jak, you can be a lob threat’. ‘Jak, do this. Jak, do that’. And again and over again,” said Rajakovic on Monday. “He did not believe but then he started to question it and then he's believing it more and more now. So definitely, a lot of conversations, lot of film and lot of work. And again, credit to him being coachable and making good progress.”

It’s not clear if Poeltl has actually turned into a rim-running, lob-catching beast. His shooting stats suggest it’s been his touch from floater range – three-to-10 feet – that has been the difference. Poeltl is shooting more than a third of his field-goal attempts from that range and converting 50 per cent of them.

“I've always liked that shot,” said Poeltl. “I work on that shot a lot.”

But perhaps more than anything, Poeltl’s performance has been in response to opportunity. He’s on pace for a career high in minutes, averaging 32.9 per game, up from 26.4 last season. That and the connection he’s made with Mitchell and RJ Barrett in pick-and-roll actions have unleashed his inner All-Star. He sets good screens for the ball handlers, rolls to the rim with good timing to keep the passing windows open, catches the ball cleanly and has the footwork to stay balanced while getting his shot off.

It's basic stuff, but Poeltl has it mastered.

“I mean, maybe there's a little bit of a mindset change with me personally, but I think, more than anything, the reason why I feel like I'm getting more opportunities is just within the flow of our offence, our guys are finding me,” he said. “There are situations when I'm catching in rhythm because I'm getting a couple of easy ones. It feels more comfortable. I feel like I have more of a flow. And it's easier to just every now and then ... maybe break out of a play if I feel like I see something or be more aggressive in certain situations. So maybe it's that. Honestly, to me, it doesn't feel like I'm doing that much differently. But I think the opportunities just present themselves in a different way than they used to.”

What opportunities might be presented when the Raptors get back to full health will be interesting to monitor. There’s no reason for Poeltl to be de-emphasized, not when he’s among the most efficient scorers on the team, and a skilled passer in addition to that.

“I told RJ — and he knows — that the paint is probably gonna be even more open when [Immanuel Quickley] gets back, when Scottie [Barnes] gets back. They're not gonna be focusing on [Barrett] as much, which means the big is gonna help even more, and Jak is gonna be open,” said Temple. “So I think this is honestly showing Quick the ability Jak has to finish in the paint, for drop passes and things that nature. Scottie has seen it for the last probably three years. So I think it's just showing our team that we have a lot of different things we can do offensively. And when those two guys get back, it's going to be a lot more wins.”

Which is another potential issue.

Big picture, are wins what the Raptors want out of rebuilding season with a potentially star-laden draft class to pick from?

And bigger picture, is a 29-year-old centre the right fit for a team where the rest of the starters are 25 and under?

One school of thought is that there has never been a better time to explore trade options for Poeltl, who is in the second year of a four-year contract paying him $19.5 million per season.

But that may be wishful thinking. As effective as Poeltl can be, a quick survey of league insiders sees a non-shooting big who struggles at the free-throw line (64.6 per cent this year, but 54.3 per cent for his career), which makes him difficult to play down the stretch of crucial games. That’s not the profile of a player that nets an unprotected first-round pick.

The reality for teams in playoff mode trying to add is Poeltl projects as a high-end depth piece, some quality insurance. Because the market for traditional centres is fairly soft — Jonas Valanciunas in Washington and both Robert Williams III and Deandre Ayton in Portland are other names expected to be in trade discussions — a bidding war is unlikely.

But you never know. The Knicks, Pacers and Lakers are all teams that could be looking, with others just an injury away.

But perhaps the Raptors' best play is keeping Poeltl. Even through the injury-riddled squad is 3-12, the Raptors have shown they’re not all that far off from being a team that could be competitive sooner than later. With Barnes, Quickley and Barrett entering their primes, Gradey Dick developing rapidly and the Raptors' emerging contingent of bench pieces, if Toronto gets some lottery luck and adds another high-end talent from the top of the draft next summer, they could be in position to hit the ground running, their draft positioning days behind them.

In that scenario, having Poeltl on hand makes a lot more sense.

Rather than Poeltl’s run in the spotlight being an audition for the rest of the league, maybe him stepping out of the phone booth for a few games is proof he can be part of a long-term solution.