RAPTORS BOSS WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG ABOUT POWELL
Ujiri saw something nobody else could see when he signed super sub to four-year deal
It was early in October, two seasons back, when the news broke. Norman Powell had signed a four-year extension with the Raptors, just over US$10 million a year, and just about everybody on the planet gasped.
Ten million and Norm Powell didn’t seem to be belong in the same sentence, let alone the same salary range.
“What was Masai Ujiri thinking?” just about everybody mumbled. And really, should we ever, ever ask that question again?
It is two seasons, a half summer and one championship later, and Powell has surged from question to answer, from athlete who played basketball, to basketball player who changes playoff games. And halfway through his contract, Powell has become something of an NBA bargain, a difference maker who has grown month by month, season by season, in this his fifth and most personally rewarding professional year.
But even this season didn’t begin with promise.
Powell scored 8.4 points a game in October, 14.4 in November,
17.7 in December and then, in complete games, 29 points a game in March before the season was shut down. He has become the Amazon stock of the Raptors, changing almost every day, showing more sides of himself, almost all of the changes heading in the right direction.
In Game 1 of this somewhat odd first-round playoff series against the Brooklyn Nets,
Powell didn’t do a whole lot of anything and really wasn’t needed to. But in an awkward Game 2, a contest that coach Nick Nurse actually called a good example of playoff basketball, with the Raptors
reeling and looking rather benign against the castoff Nets, Powell rescued his team with more than energy.
He did it with explosive talent. He cut to the basket when there was nowhere to cut — never mind who was in front of him or beside him or what size they were — with a Saquon Barkley-like burst — looking like he must have starred in football at another athletic time in his life. He says he played Pop Warner once upon a time, the wrong position, but never high school. There he was a basketball star, a big-time prospect, a state champion.
He wasn’t like Allen Iverson, who some people still call the best high school quarterback they’ve ever seen. But when he takes a step, with that uncanny first-step quickness, he’s quick the way Barkley is quick, shifty the way Gale Sayers once was or Alvin Kamara is today. And at full speed, his hands are soft enough and deft enough to finish on his drives. The way he couldn’t finish early in his career. The way he looked at times like basketball’s version of a little kid learning to walk, with arms and legs all flailing, hoping to finish the right way in the right direction. And then like the kid who couldn’t walk straight, he started sprinting and learned he was quicker than those he played against, first step quicker, and then at times, like in the fourth quarter on Wednesday afternoon against the Nets, he was unstoppable.
The perfect sixth or seventh man, depending on what order you place Powell alongside Serge Ibaka.
The player the Raptors once couldn’t trust — even as recently as a year ago in the playoffs against Philadelphia — to a player who wins them playoff games.
Toronto trailed by six points after three quarters on Wednesday and this looked like the kind of sloppy outing that cost Milwaukee its opener against Orlando.
And then came Powell, scoring 12 of his 24 points in the final 12 minutes. Twelve when it mattered most. Twelve when the starters other than Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet weren’t producing much.
Twelve fourth-quarter points and the Raptors win by five, 10499.
It happened with Marc Gasol having an off day, zero points and minus-13. With Pascal Siakam scoring 14 points in the first quarter but making just one basket after that.
With VanVleet matching him with 24 points, but struggling with his accuracy. This is when you need Powell. This is when he came through.
There are, Nurse said, a million different ways to win a basketball game.
“Tonight,” he said of the afternoon game, “was a different game.”
He called Powell “pretty explosive and pretty decisive.”
That’s what Ujiri saw in the future, when he signed Powell up for $40 million.
Powell is now 27 years old, averaging 16 points a game off the bench, with 19 games of scoring more than 20 points this year, with three games over 30 as a starter.
That’s nowhere near that inconsistent five-point scorer he was when Ujiri saw something we didn’t and committed for four more years.
This is what the Raptors do. They find, they develop, they grow. And yeah, they win.