Powell goes from X-factor to ex factor
It was a year ago around this time that Dwane Casey, the Toronto Raptors coach, was hailing the emergence of a likeable hero.
Norman Powell, the secondround draft pick who’d previously toiled in the NBA’s G League, had just put up a teamhigh 25 points in a huge Game 5 win over the Milwaukee Bucks. The Raptors would soon be en route to beating the Bucks in six as a result; Powell would go a perfect 9 for 9 from three-point range in Games 4 through 6 combined. And in that moment — given that Powell was proving himself a worthy post-season contributor for the second straight spring — it looked as though Powell would be a Toronto mainstay for years to come. Certainly the four-year contract worth $42 million US he signed in October, which kicks in next season, suggested he was an indispensible piece. What wasn’t to like about a playoff-proven three-point shooter given the club’s 2017-18 push toward longrange bombing? What wasn’t to like about Powell’s relentless, rim-assaulting style?
“He’s that spark plug,” Casey told reporters this time last year. “He’s the guy. He’s an X-factor.”
Heading into Friday’s Game 6 of another first-round playoff series, this time against the Washington Wizards, it’s sometimes hard to fathom how it’s possible that Powell had so far counted as almost no factor at all. A year ago he averaged 25 minutes a game in the post-season. This year he’s averaging about six.
Last month Powell told reporters he was guilty of “pressing,” of being “worried about making something happen and it’s not happening.” Well, it’s still not happening. Even with the Raptors clearly looking for a reliable shotmaker to step up in the earlyseries absence of Fred VanVleet, the club’s most accurate threepoint shooter, Powell has barely been called upon.
“You’ve just got to go out there and clear your mind and just play basketball the way you’ve been playing it your whole life,” Powell said last month. “Things are going to switch around. This is a numbers game and the numbers are going to even out eventually.”
Casey, speaking to reporters back in March, said Raptors coaching staff had done all it could to help Powell succeed.
“Extra work, extra film work, encouragement if need be —but we’re professionals,” Casey said. “When we go in, we have to go in and do our job, whether we feel like we’ve been slighted, we’re frustrated or whatever. We’re pros.”
In some ways, Powell’s diminished position in the franchise hierarchy is a credit to an organizational hot streak of stuffing the talent pipeline with viable players.
Powell was the starting small forward for the opening dozen games of the season, this in the wake of DeMarre Carroll’s exit. But a hip-pointer injury knocked Powell out of the lineup for a few games in November. That’s when rookie OG Anunoby replaced Powell as a starter. And from nearly that day forward Anunoby has remained the club’s clear favourite as the starting three.
Heading into Game 6, Anunoby had proven himself a reliable performer.
Along with being one of the team’s best perimeter defenders, he’d made 5 of 9 three-pointers while doing his best to make up for the defensive inadequacies of veteran perimeter teammates DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry. Casey has said more than once this spring that he appreciates how Anunoby, at age 20, has the look of a more experienced pro.
“He’s not fazed by being in the playoffs, that type of thing. That’s the most important thing,” Casey said. “So that’s what I’m impressed with more than anything for being a rookie. He may miss a play or miss a scheme or whatever, but it’s not because he’s in the first round of the playoffs for the first time.”
It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Anunoby is, at six-foot-eight, substantially longer and sturdier than Powell, who is listed at sixfoot-four; or that Anunoby shot 37 per cent from three-point range to Powell’s 29 per cent.
“He’s knocking down threes. He’s doing a good job of defending, he’s getting offensive boards, which kind of cuts down on their running game,” Casey said of Anunoby.
The same hasn’t been said about Powell since — well, probably since the Raptors announced his extension back on media day.
The role has only diminished. There’s a long line for minutes at the three and its adjacent positions. C.J. Miles gets plenty of them off the bench.
And even when Anunoby was injured late in the regular season, the organization opted to give a couple of looks to Malcolm Miller, a G Leaguer, before ceding the floor to Powell. But Powell, since his back-to-back springs of playoff heroics, really hasn’t seized the moment in a way that’s held anyone’s attention. Rather than cementing his position as a member of the Toronto core, of late he’s looked like a spare part — and an expensive enough one given the deal put in place at the season’s outset.
The NBA can be a fleeting place. As Casey said last year at this time: “In this series (Powell has) been that X-factor. The next series, maybe the next game, it may be a different story.”
Looking at it from a distance, it’s a different story, indeed.