TORONTO — About three-and-a-half years ago, The Utah Utes were on the road in Kansas, playing the Jayhawks in an early-season clash of 7-1 teams. A lanky senior named Delon Wright was playing point guard and leading the Utes with 14.5 points per game. Jakob Poeltl, a seven-foot freshman from Austria, was Utah’s starting centre. On Kansas’s side, a high-energy guard out of a prep school in Nevada, Kelly Oubre Jr., was averaging nine points a night off the bench.
Wednesday at Air Canada Centre, all three found themselves on the same floor again. And as he watched Wright go off in the fourth quarter, pouring in 11 as the Toronto Raptors beat Oubre’s Washington Wizards, 108-98, taking a 3-2 lead in the first-round series between the two teams, Poeltl’s mind drifted back to that night in Kansas.
“At one point, he just took over,” Poeltl says. “We were down by like 20 in the second half. And he brought us back single-handedly.”
To be specific, it was a 21-point deficit, as the Jayhawks ambushed the Utes, with Oubre scoring seven of their 39 points before halftime. Early in the second, Kansas was doubling up Utah, 42-21. That’s when Wright went to work.
Over the next 14 minutes, Wright scored 10 points, dished out three assists, scooped up two steals, grabbed a pair of rebounds, and even blocked a shot as he commandeered Utah’s comeback. With a little more than four minutes left and the game tied, Wright led Poeltl with a perfectly-weighted pass in the post, which the 18-year-old centre put in off the glass, giving his team its first lead as Utah’s bench exploded.
Now, the unfortunate thing about this story, narratively-speaking, is that the Utes went on to lose. Utah’s shooting went cold after Poeltl’s bucket and Kansas edged out a three-point victory.
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But that’s neither here nor there. Poeltl still thought about that night Wednesday, as Wright took over another game, this time at a much higher level, and this time in a win. He thought about how poised Wright is when he goes on runs like that. How he plays like everything’s within his control.
“That’s the thing with Delon — he always seems so calm,” Poeltl says. “Even when he’s going off, his demeanour’s always so even, so confident. He’s always showing his teammates, like, ‘don’t worry, we got this.’”
In Game 5 the Raptors needed it. Toronto and Washington had taken turns holding the advantage on either side of a one-possession game for most of the night. The lead changed hands 17 times. The game was tied on 10 instances.
After subbing in late in the third, Wright started the fourth running the floor for an all-bench unit. He tried to create, tried to bring energy. He had a block and a steal in the first three minutes of the quarter, and missed a couple shots, too.
At one point, Oubre charged into the paint after missing a three, took a feed from Ty Lawson — who, at all of five-foot-11, inexplicably grabbed the offensive rebound — and finished a massive dunk over Poeltl. And-one. Oubre hit the free throw. The Wizards were up five with less than nine minutes to play.
But Wright was determined. Less than a minute later, he stabbed the ball out of John Wall’s hands in a pick-and-roll, and pounced. He raced up the floor with Wall in pursuit, Euro stepped like he’d activated slow motion as the Wizards guard sailed by, and finished a lay-up at the rim. A minute later, he ran a play in transition after another Wall turnover, finding a streaking DeMar DeRozan for a jam.
And minutes after that, he took a pass with three seconds left in the shot clock, and a good 30 feet between him and the basket, and drilled a three-pointer that was shot so perfectly the net never moved.
It was all part of an exhilarating fourth-quarter takeover, but that three-pointer in particular was an important one for Wright. On Sunday, in Game 4 of this series, he was bewilderingly hesitant to shoot, turning down several open looks and letting good ball movement go to waste.
Wright was putting his team in disadvantageous situations, forcing his teammates to create different looks — never as good as the ones he turned down — with limited time remaining on the shot clock. And in the two days since, he’s heard a lot about it.
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He and his entire team watched it singled out during a film session. His head coach, Dwane Casey, brought it up repeatedly in press conferences. He estimates he was told directly by 30 people, family and friends included, to “stop hesitating and just shoot the ball.”
“I mean, I had people all on my Twitter, my Instagram,” Wright says. “I kind of felt bad. I saw the film and I was like — it’s crazy.
“Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you [why I wasn’t taking the shots.] It was just one of those things where I was trying to be unselfish and make an extra pass. But there wasn’t an extra pass there.”
Wednesday, he took the shots. And he took over a fourth quarter. It was all part of an 18-point night that saw him contribute all over the floor, finishing plus-13 with five rebounds, two steals and an assist.
“He just has a great feel for the game,” Poeltl says. “The way he plays defence, he has his hands, his arms, everywhere. He gets steals, and then we get out and running. And tonight he was being aggressive with it.”
But maybe not quite as aggressive as he once was. We’ll explain.
Late in the game, C.J. Miles picked off a pass and fed a sprinting Wright, who went up for a lay-up and was fouled aggressively from behind by Wall. Wright was sent flying into a cameraman beneath the basket, legs extending high in the air as he crash-landed. He took a moment, picked himself up, and walked calmly to the free throw line, where he drained both buckets.
Poeltl was watching from the Raptors bench, remembering that night in Kansas. Remembering when Wright regularly took games over like he did in the fourth. And remembering one small difference.
“I mean, today was a great game for him. But, I don’t know, back in the day in Utah he would’ve dunked that breakaway,” Poeltl says with a wry grin. “But he made the free throws. So, that’s all that matters.”
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