Breakouts don’t all happen the same way. Some happen linearly, sustainably, with Pascal Siakam adding more and more to his game, year over year, until he’s one of the very best in the NBA. Some players smash into stardom like wrecking balls, averaging 16 points one season and 21 the next, like Kawhi Leonard. Still others become stars like boiling frogs: so slowly and invisibly that the increasing heat isn’t even noticed. That’s how O.G. Anunoby is playing over the last several games. It’s hard to see what he’s doing different, but he’s still a star regardless.
The heart of Anunoby’s ability on the offensive end is his jumper. He’s a preposterously good shooter, one of the best and most consistent on the catch, which is the heart of his value.
There’s no world in which defenders want Anunoby shooting a triple. He’s at 40.0 percent from deep on the season. A possession that ends in an Anunoby triple is worth, statistically, 1.2 points. That is just above the most efficient halfcourt offense in the league (the Boston Celtics), and it doesn’t account for Toronto’s ability to rebound if Anunoby misses. So what happens when Anunoby catches the ball?
Teams run him off the line with extreme prejudice. As they should. He has willingly put the ball on the floor, and with that advantageous defensive concern combined with his enormous frame and strength, he is uniquely empowered to reach deep into the paint on his drives. Anunoby has a friendly environment to extend his drives further than any other Raptor.
“Well, I think it’s mostly strength,” said Nick Nurse of Anunoby’s ability to hit the paint on drives. “I think he just keeps on going, he gets a bit of an angle and then he uses kind of his physical strength to keep working his way down there. And he is pretty quick too for his size.”
And hit the paint he has. Every time, consistently. When he drives, he’s getting deep. Ask any coach in the world: offense is better when the ball touches the paint. Immediately. Like magic. Anunoby may be shooting very poorly on his own drives, but the team has scored quite well when he’s passed out of drives. And he’s driving more than seven times per game, which is the third-most on the team behind only Pascal Siakam and Fred VanVleet.
This is the star turn Anunoby needed. He’s hitting his triples, but he’s always hit his triples. He’s shooting almost 70 percent at the rim, but he’s always been elite at finishing at the rim. (If his triples are worth 1.20 points, his shots from within three feet are worth a ridiculous 1.37.) He’s defending like a monster, but he’s always defended like a monster. (Ok, he hasn’t always been this best-defender-in-the-league type of defender, but he’s been close for a while.)
Anunoby has statistically been the best advantage converter on the team since Norman Powell. A play that ends with an Anunoby shot, whether behind the arc or at the rim, is just about the best Toronto’s offense (or any offense) can muster. For him to improve, he didn’t need to improve on that. What he needed to add was creating advantages, both for himself and others.
“He’s probably getting a lot more chances at [driving], that’s probably makes it seem [better]. And, again, I think he needs the chances,” said Nurse. “I think there’s a level up he can make, by either springing up immediately for the shot or understanding how many people are around him and somehow getting it out of there a little more cleanly, and finishing a little bit better.
“But I like that he’s getting it in there.”
Anunoby isn’t yet creating from a standstill, but the Raptors don’t need that from him. They need him to be a second-side driver, attacking rotating defenses, and using his driving to extend advantages already created. He showed all facets of his driving against the Houston Rockets in Toronto’s 116-109 win. With Pascal Siakam sidelined by injury, the Raptors need others to do more with the basketball in their hands. Plenty of players have had more opportunities, but few have done as much with them as Anunoby, hitting the 20-point barrier in two of the three games since Siakam’s injury (and 27 in the game Siakam went down, too).
He learns and grows from possession to possession. On one possession in the second half, he caught the ball in the corner. He had previously hit several triples, and so his defender ran him off the line. But Anunoby didn’t even pump fake; he was already gone, baseline. He lost his footing and was blocked, but the process was excellent. Indeed, the next time he caught the ball, he drove middle this time, exploded off one foot, and powered down a two-handed dunk in traffic. Recognizing solid process, even with poor results, and repeating it is the mark of confidence in your craft.
“We need pressure on the rim,” said VanVleet after the game. “It’s one of our keys for our offense and keys for our team is to put pressure on the rim. So to see O.G. be aggressive, show assertiveness, we’ve got to get him those paint touches, for kickouts and get him to the line. We’re going to continue to need him to do that, and once he gets down there, he’s so strong that he can make the right play at any time.”
The advantage finishing was there. He hit his first three triples of the game. He finished a lob dunk with a crisp back screen from VanVleet creating the space he needed. That’s nothing new. The defense was there, as he turned multiple pick-sixes into uncontested points, basically spotting his team a 4-0 lead. Again: nothing new. The paint touches aren’t exactly new, but they’re not old, either. They haven’t been this impactful for very long. His breakout is coming along slowly, but the payoff isn’t linear. Hitting the paint twice more on his drives might not impact Anunoby’s numbers by a wide margin, but it helps his teammates get more open shots, helps to force the defense to collapse or change its coverage on the next possession. There are ripple effects to Anunoby’s breakout.
His usage faded for a time in the third quarter. He was used off the ball and didn’t get many opportunities as a second-side driver. But the benefits of his earlier success were still clear within the context of his lower usage.
Midway through the third quarter, the Raptors ran the same play that earlier resulted in a lob dunk to Anunoby (Shake, for those keeping track at home, the same as the Barnes lob to Anunoby detailed in this piece), again with VanVleet setting a backscreen for Anunoby. Because the latter had finished an easy dunk earlier in the game on the same play, the defense sank into the paint, so VanVleet jetted into the veer screen for an open catch-and-shoot triple. Easy work, and another ripple benefit of Anunoby’s play finishing. Small advantages lead to big ones later.
As a result, the Raptors won Anunoby’s minutes by a wide margin: 18 points in a seven-point win, by far the most among any non-Thad Youngs. He finished with a pristine 27 points, 10 rebounds, 1 assist, 3 steals, and 1 block.
Ultimately, Anunoby is still not a star, not every night. But he’s in the process of becoming one. He’s closer now than he was at the start of the season. The steps forward are real, even if games such as his against the Rockets exaggerate the distance he’s traveled down that path. He won’t always play against teams with practically no defender his own size. He won’t always get 20 shots — he finished the game tied for the eighth-most of his career. But the means by which he’s impacting the game are creeping outwards. He’s always been one of the best play finishers. Now he’s adding the other side of that coin to his repertoire, play creation as a second-side driver, and he’s doing it exactly when the Raptors need him to. The Rockets game may have been an outlier in just how impressive he is in that regard, but allow it also to show how dominant a star he can become when he’s mastered both sides of the advantage coin.
