TORONTO — Pascal Siakam and Jakob Poeltl know this is part of the deal. Part of the growing pains, the stripe earning, the dues paying, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that they’ve had to withstand through their first six professional games and will continue to withstand for many more to come. Such is life for an NBA rookie. Such is life in a veteran’s league.
Let’s start with Siakam. It was Sunday night and the Toronto Raptors were hosting the Sacramento Kings in a not-entirely-crisp game that ended with a Sacramento victory.
With 9 minutes to play, Siakam’s Raptors were nursing a highly insecure one-point lead as both teams fielded very small lineups. The rookie Siakam, who has started all six of Toronto’s games so far, was doing his best to fill the rim protector role left vacant by the injured Jonas Valanciunas. He camped out in the paint, keeping an arm on Kings guard Jordan Farmar, who was driving to the basket, and his eyes on centre Kosta Koufos, who had switched on to Kyle Lowry and earned himself a considerable size advantage.
Farmar made the obvious choice and fed the ball to Koufos, who leapt up and over a mismatched Lowry on his way to what looked like an easy two points. But that’s when Siakam came rushing over, rising over Koufos and throwing down the purest block you’ve ever seen, sending the ball and Koufos crashing to the floor beneath him. It was the best defensive play he’d made all night—maybe in his entire career.
And then the whistle came. A personal foul was called on Siakam, who was guilty only of swallowing up the ball and much of Koufos’ pride. All five Raptors on the floor reached their arms out incredulously. At the opposite end of the court, Dwane Casey put his hands on his head, his suit jacket fanning out at his sides. Towels hit the floor all along the Raptors bench. Siakam shook his head.
“I’m getting a little bit used to it. I know I’ll get those calls. I’m just trying to play through it and not think about it,” Siakam said after the game. “It’s going to happen. You just have to play with it. Just play. Just keep playing. That’s what I try to do.”
These are the welcome-to-the-league calls all rookies must swallow during their early days in the NBA, especially relatively unheralded and unknown first years like Siakam and Poeltl, who suffered a similar experience throughout a foul-filled night.
“It’s not easy,” Poeltl said. “You’ve got to find the right balance between still playing your best defence and not wanting to foul out. Maybe sometimes you’ve just got to take the foul and sit on the bench.”
Poeltl did an awful lot of that on Sunday. His night began on a high, when he arrived in the Raptors locker room after getting his pre-game shots up and was informed he’d be starting his first-ever NBA game in Valanciunas’s absence.
But things quickly deteriorated from there as Poeltl was victimized by a number of precarious foul calls that forced him to ride the bench for large swaths of the game while Casey tried to prevent him from fouling out.
“What happened was exactly what we were afraid of,” Casey said. “Poeltl getting in foul trouble.”
The 21-year-old had two fouls less than five minutes into the game, which put him on the bench for the rest of the quarter and the first five minutes of the second. But less than a minute after he checked back in he was given a third on a particularly egregious call as he tried to defend Sacramento’s world-destroying forward DeMarcus Cousins, which sent Poeltl straight back to his seat before it had a chance to get cold.
Perhaps you see where this is going. Poeltl sat for the rest of the half, started the third quarter on the floor and was given his fourth foul just three minutes later. Again, Poeltl went back to the bench. And again, he checked back in and was dinged with a foul less than a minute later.
At that point, with a little more than six minutes remaining in the game, Casey let Poeltl ride it out and try to learn how to guard a nightmare matchup like Cousins without a foul to give. Poeltl did his best, until he was given a sixth foul with 12 seconds remaining in the game.
It was a particularly torturous experience for Poeltl, who was playing well when he was on the floor. He flashed a 10-foot jumper he hasn’t had a chance to show yet over Koufos in the third quarter and pulled down three big rebounds in the fourth.
Siakam, too, was playing like it wasn’t only his sixth NBA game. Moments after the dreadful foul call on his block of Koufos, the 22-year-old went soaring past the baseline behind the Kings basket to corral a Lowry miss and chuck it back inbounds before his feet hit the floor. He whipped the ball past four Kings and right back into the hands of Lowry, who drove and hit a lay-up as Siakam boxed out Cousins beneath the rim. The play gave the Raptors a two-point lead.
When Cousins collected the ball for the inbounds pass, he slapped it in frustration. And after the game, he acknowledged how well the two young Raptors showed, even though he didn’t know their names.
“I think [Poeltl] did a good job. He was confident, he was physical, he came in and gave it his all,” Cousins said. “Same with [Siakam.] The two young big fellas had a lot of energy. They were tough.”
More than anything, Sunday night was a learning experience for both players. Not only learning how to play in the NBA, but learning how to play with the NBA’s tendency to eat its young. Asked how they deal with it all after the game, both rookies provided reasoned, mature takes on the challenge.
“I mean, see, I’ve gotta live with that. Some of them are stupid fouls on my part and some of them are a little cheap where I can’t really do anything about it,” Poeltl said. “But the way I have to approach it is to take away the stupid fouls I’m making and all of a sudden I’m not in foul trouble anymore. I can take the one or two fouls that maybe aren’t too much contact. I can take that and still be out there on the court.”
These are hard lessons to learn. But crucial ones in the maturation of the two young Raptors, as Casey’s team tries to contend and develop simultaneously.
“It’s going to help them. It’s going to help Jakob and Pascal tremendously,” Casey said. “Getting starts against a guy like Rudy Gay, against an experienced player like Koufos, and another experienced player like Cousins—it’s a situation that is only going to help them.”
