Raps hope Powell’s best becomes norm
Guard/forward’s tantalizing talent leaves the NBA defending champions wanting more
It has been 268 games now that the Raptors have seen Norm Powell in action — 68 of them starts, spread out over five NBA seasons and a bit of a sixth before Wednesday night — and they have watched sometimes in awe, sometimes with angst.
The 26-year-old guard/forward has been great and he has been much less than great: trying too hard sometimes, seamlessly fitting into smooth-running teams at other times.
Enigmatic. Sometimes promising and sometimes exasperating. Maybe that’s what the native of San Diego is destined to be: enthralling and infuriating and good enough to carry a team for long stretches, but also ineffective some nights to the point that someone else should get the chance.
Maybe that’s what the Raptors have got and will always have, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying to squeeze just a bit more consistency out of him.
“I always look at those things as, yes, there’s something there that we need to fix,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse was saying of Powell this week. “You sit here and say, ‘You don’t expect him to do it every night, 20-plus (points) every night,’ but maybe we could get it maybe one out of four. We could be at one out of three.
“And we chip away at it. And then maybe it’s two out of four, then three out of five. We chip away (so) that it becomes more of a consistent thing.”
Maybe it works, or maybe the history cannot be changed.
Take this season, for example. Heading into Wednesday’s home game against the Orlando Magic, Powell had six games where he had scored 14 or more points and eight games where he had
scored seven or fewer.
That inconsistent production hasn’t cost the Raptors very much — they are still one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference and had a 9-4 record going into the Magic game. Powell has been integral to many of the wins and often too invisible in the losses, however, and that’s the problem. He sees the numbers and watches the game tapes. He knows he’s giving his best effort, and that’s good enough.
“I mean, I go out there and play the game of basketball and live with the results,” he said after having 17 points in a rout of Charlotte on Monday. “I trust the work that I put in. I play with confidence.
“Obviously you want to shoot the ball better, but it all comes with game experience, being able to play, being able to take a couple — see what it’s like, see what it feels like with the increased minutes. And being able to start, you know you’re able to feel the game and adjust, and be able to take more shots and be more aggressive in your reads. I know the numbers and things are going to pan out and change, because I’ve been shooting the ball great in my preparation.”
The simple fact is, the Raptors have enough talent and depth to get by despite Powell’s occasional lapses in production. It’s a team built to withstand a slumping player or an injured one because someone will usually have a big game, and Nurse is savvy enough to make ingame adjustments so that he gets the right guy every night.
So maybe Powell can just be Powell and it’ll be enough most nights. Maybe they don’t need him to always be the guy who dominated the Milwaukee Bucks in two playoff series, who basically kept the Raptors alive in a 2016 series against the Indiana Pacers.
But you know they also wonder how much better they might be if he was that guy every time out, or at least more often. They’ve seen transformation in others. They think they can see it in Powell, too.
“I would have said that about Serge (Ibaka) a little bit in the past,” Nurse said. “There were unbelievable games, like one out of four. Now he’s pushed that up to three out of four where he’s just a force out there. That’s kind of the way we look at it.”