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Which Powell will it be when Anunoby returns?
It’s a perpetual push and pull in pro basketball. NBA players generally love to know their role. They appreciate the security of knowing, on any given night, what to expect and what’s expected.
NBA coaches, on the other hand, mostly hate to box themselves into a more limited number of options than is necessary. They’re generally less averse to dealing with the unexpected. The predictability that players crave, after all, can be a vulnerability opponents exploit.
So you could understand Nick Nurse’s subtle expression of frustration Saturday when he was asked how he intends to handle the impending reinsertion of OG Anunoby into the Raptors lineup. Anunoby, of course, has missed the past nine games with a calf injury but could become available for action as early as Sunday’s game against the league-worst Minnesota Timberwolves. For the bulk of Anunoby’s absence, Norman Powell has filled in admirably in the starting lineup. Powell has averaged 22.7 points a game on tidy 52 per cent shooting from the field. But that, for Nurse, is not the frustrating part.
The frustrating part is how Powell’s excellent performance filling in for Anunoby has fuelled one of the more perplexing narratives in Raptorland — specifically, the idea that it’s somehow an irredeemable law of nature that Powell can only be effective if he’s included in the starting five.
Much to the coach’s chagrin, there are plenty of stats to back up that very contention. There’s no arguing that Powell has been efficient and productive as a starter. There’s also no hiding from the fact he’s been comparatively dismal off the bench, averaging 10.5 points a game on 35 per cent shooting from the field — numbers that don’t exactly scream “instant offence.”
With that in mind, there are
those who’d suggest that Nurse’s best course of action, upon Anunoby’s return, would be to start both Anunoby and Powell. Sure, it would mean an awfully small lineup, with six-foot-nine Pascal Siakam the biggest player on the floor and Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet making up a diminutive backcourt duo. Considering the Raptors are preparing to face the Timberwolves, who employ the sporadically available six-foot-11 Karl-Anthony Towns, and after that the Bucks, who have seven-foot Brook Lopez and six-foot-11 Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nurse didn’t seem overly enamoured of the idea.
“I’m not so sure it presents itself here in the near future, just looking at who we’re playing,” Nurse said Saturday. “There’s some awfully big bigs here coming at us.”
The issue, of course, isn’t whether or not a small lineup can be effective. Clearly, depending on the situation, a fivesome of Siakam, Anunoby, Powell, VanVleet and Lowry is more than capable of holding its own. It not only consists of Toronto’s five best players. It
removes the struggling Aron Baynes from the starting lineup.
The fivesome has played together a grant total of 29 minutes this season. But the small sample size has offered a compelling glimpse of the possibility. While it has struggled to score, the group has allowed a ridiculously stingy 82.3 points per 100 opponent possessions. That’s some impressive defence, obviously, and it’s not necessarily a fluke. The same lineup was used by Nurse for 37 minutes in last season’s playoff run. It held opponents to 83.3 points per 100 possessions.
“Just being able to switch and be aggressive and fast,” VanVleet said, listing off some of the upsides of the small-ball Raptors.
While VanVleet said there’ll always be concern about a small lineup holding its own on the defensive glass, this particular unit has the upside of valuable familiarity. Outside of Lowry, who’s playing for his third NBA franchise, Siakam, Anunoby, Powell and VanVleet have enjoyed one-franchise careers. Anunoby, in his fourth
season, is the shortest-tenured Raptor among the group. So the strength of the fivesome, VanVleet said, is “the continuity of knowing what the next guy is going to do.”
“Defence is guessing sometimes and you’ve got to guess right,” VanVleet said. “So with guys that you’ve been playing with for four or five, six years, more often than not you should be guessing right, and I think that’s what you see a lot when you’ve got groups that have been together for a while.”
All of that’s fine, of course. Certainly Nurse identified the quintet in question as “one of our better lineups … as long as we can rebound,” and pretty much guaranteed it’ll see action in the days ahead. Maybe it’ll even see a lot of action.
But as Nurse was saying on Saturday, the coming matchups will undoubtedly demand deployments that are occasionally more sizable, perhaps from the opening tip. Maybe the coach would like to consider giving Chris Boucher his first NBA start. Certainly there’s hope Baynes, who has started all 23 games he’s played this season, will figure things out with more time.
“Being able to be versatile is really key,” Nurse said.
Which brings us back to the trouble with Powell’s seeming aversion to versatility. If it’s etched in stone that he can only be effective as a starter, after all, Anunoby’s return limits a coach’s options. Not starting Anunoby wouldn’t make sense, after all; he had been enjoying a career-best season before his injury. It also wouldn’t compute to move any of Siakam, Lowry or VanVleet to the second unit.
“We’ve probably got four guys for sure that are pretty locked in to needing to start,” Nurse said. “So it doesn’t give you a whole lot of room to manoeuvre around.”
On top of all that, if Powell could get past his bugaboo and replicate his work as a starter in the role of a reserve, it would lend a handy boost to Toronto’s anemic bench scoring. During Anunoby’s nine-game stint on the sideline, the reserves averaged a collective 31.9 points a game, which ranked 25th in the league over that span. Which explains why Nurse delivered a piece of not-sosubtle advice.
“Just get out there and do what you’ve been doing, whether you’re starting or not,” Nurse said, speaking of Powell. “You’ve gotta kinda just understand you’re playing well, you’re probably in rhythm, you’re probably in better shape now. There are a lot of things that are positives, and somehow you’ve gotta get out of that narrative (that you play better as a starter).”
So goes the perpetual push and pull of the NBA, where coaches cherish versatility as much as players appreciate knowing their role — with the possible exception of Powell, perhaps, if and when he’s informed he’s coming off the bench.