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

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

And then there’s Jakob Poeltl, the 29-year-old Austrian center who never seems to leave the phone box. He is 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 that’s not a recipe for stardom or attention.

Until this past week, Poeltl’s NBA story has been one of consistency, reliability and professionalism. Pick any month in his nine-year career, check the data for minutes played or possessions, and you’ll get a version of this: on a per-36-minute basis, it’s somewhere between 13 and 16 points per game. game, just about 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 percent, all but four of his attempts coming from inside the three-point line – is the second-best among NBA players with at least 3,000 shots since Barack Obama was still the US president.

It is like a clockwork and the clock always works.

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

Garrett Temple, one of two players on the Raptors roster with more experience than Poeltl, agrees: “He ends up 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’s all there was to say about Poeltl — which is a good thing: He’s getting paid well to do an important job, and it’s almost always done to the best of his ability, regardless of the circumstances.

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

But then last week happened, and Poeltl had the best of the best games of his career — 25 points and 18 rebounds, 10 on the offensive end — 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 with 15 rebounds in the Raptors’ win over Indiana on Monday night. He’s done it all while converting 71.9 percent 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 in a row — he had never scored 20 points in three consecutive games in his career — but collectively they represent as good a three-game stretch as you will find someone.

For example like NBA stats guiding Keerthicka Uthayakumar submitted the other day, there are only six players who have averaged at least 30 points, 15 rebounds and shot better than 70 percent from the floor over a three-game span since 1983-84, and they would all go down without 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.

Check out the nicknames: Jakeem, Shaq Schnitzel, Jak Deisel. We’re just at a workshop here.

Even the man himself seems a bit unsettled by the burst of NBA-level production seemingly out of 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 rack up a box score and see all those flashy numbers next to his name for once.

“I mean, yeah, it feels nice. It’s a bit of a throwback to like the college days, I guess,” he said.

Quick fact check: Poeltl had an outstanding 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 three games was 81 points. He only grabbed more than 14 rebounds once, and not on a 20-point night.

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 has taken plenty of encouragement and prodding to get the big man to attack the rim with more speed and power.

“(We talk) a lot. ‘Jak, you can dunk the ball. ‘Jak, you can be a lob threat’. ‘Jak, do this. Jak, do that’. And over and over,” Rajakovic said Monday .” He didn’t believe, but then he started to question it, and then he believes it more and more now. So definitely, a lot of conversations, a lot of movies and a lot of work. And again, kudos to him for being coachable and making good progress.”

It’s not clear if Poeltl has actually turned into a rim-running, lob-catching beast. His shooting statistics suggest that it has been his touch from the floater line – three to 10 feet – that has been the difference. Poeltl shoots more than a third of his field-goal attempts from that area and converts 50 percent of them.

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

But perhaps more than anything else, Poeltl’s performance has been in response to opportunity. He is 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, has unleashed his inner All-Star. He sets good screens for 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 masters it.

“I mean, maybe there’s a little bit of a mindset change on my part personally, but I think more than anything, the reason I feel like I’m getting more opportunities is just within the flow of our offense, our guys finds me,” he said. “There are situations where I catch the rhythm because I get a few easy ones. It feels more comfortable. I feel like I have more flow. And it’s easier just now and then… maybe to break out of a game if I feel that I see something or am more aggressive in certain situations. Honestly, it doesn’t feel like I do that much different. But I think the opportunities just present themselves in a different way, than they usually do.“

What options may present themselves once the Raptors return to full health will be interesting to monitor. There’s no reason for Poeltl to tone it down, not when he’s among the most efficient scorers on the team, and a skilled passer on top of that.

“I told RJ — and he knows — the paint is probably going to be even more open when (Immanuel Quickley) comes back, when Scottie (Barnes) comes back. They’re not going to focus as much on (Barrett), which means the big will help even more, and Jak will be open,” Temple said. “So I think this honestly shows Quick the ability Jak has to finish in the paint, for drop passes and things that 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 that we can do offensively. And when those two guys come back, it’s going to be a lot more wins.”

Which is another potential problem.

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

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

One line of thinking is that there’s never been a better time to explore trade options for Poeltl, who is in the second year of a four-year contract that pays him $19.5 million per year. season.

But that could be wishful thinking. As efficient as Poeltl can be, a quick survey of league insiders sees a non-shooting big who struggles at the free throw line (64.6 percent this year, but 54.3 percent for his career), making him tough to play down. the stretch of decisive games. That’s not the profile of a player who gets 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 centers 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 one injury away.

But the Raptors’ best play might be to keep Poeltl. Even through the injury-plagued squad going 3-12, the Raptors have shown they aren’t that far off from being a team that could be competitive sooner rather than later. With Barnes, Quickley and Barrett entering their prime, Gradey Dick developing quickly and the Raptors’ new contingent of bench pieces, if Toronto gets some lottery luck and adds another high-end talent from the top of the draft next summer, may they be in a position to hit the ground running, their profound 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, he might be proof that he can be part of a long-term solution if he steps out of the phone booth for a few games.