It didn’t take Jontay Porter and Jordan Nwora long to make magic together. The two played together for the first time in the Toronto Raptors’ loss to the Atlanta Hawks, entering the game in the first quarter. It happened so fast you might have missed it. Porter threw an assist, splashed two triples, and then hit free throws. The second quarter began. Nwora hit two triples of his own. While the Raptors lost, they won the 17 minutes with both Nwora and Porter on the floor by 16 points. It was magic, beautiful magic: a young and energetic bench driving winning, if for a short time.
For a long time the Raptors found gems late in the draft or outside of it entirely, and then they stopped doing so. Norman Powell and Chris Boucher and Fred VanVleet became Jalen Harris and Dewan Hernandez and David Johnson. It’s hard to find rotation players where other teams do not, but the Raptors did so, over and over.
And it’s possible that they are once again.
Porter went undrafted in the 2019 draft and signed with the Memphis Grizzlies in 2020. His knees were not doing well, having suffered so many injuries that he wanted to quit basketball. He didn’t stick in Memphis. He bounced around the G League and eventually signed a two-way deal with the Raptors in December. Ron Harper jr. had filled the spot, but the Raptors opted to sign Porter after Harper suffered a season-ending injury. It was a quiet beginning to his Raptors career. (If you want to read more about Porter’s journey, Blake Murphy’s feature on him, linked here and above, was predictably fantastic.)
Nwora, on the other hand, was drafted to the NBA. The Milwaukee Bucks chose him 45th in the 2020 NBA draft, and he played over 1000 minutes in each of his second and third seasons. (Porter played 54 minutes total for the Grizzlies.) Nwora had seen opportunities. But the Bucks dealt him to the Indiana Pacers as part of a jumbo deal that brought Jae Crowder to town. And then the Pacers traded him to Toronto in acquiring Pascal Siakam.
The knocks on both were clear. Porter is undersized for a center and slow for a power forward. He has athletic limitations, particularly given the knee injuries, which leads to inefficiency around the rim. Nwora lacks a clear feel for the game, particularly in making reads other than ‘shoot.’ There are reasons why neither have hit as rotation players in their years in or around the NBA. Yet both are shooters, and they are young. Still, it was not clear that they would do this upon entering the rotation for Toronto.
Porter has popped as a passer for the Raptors. He has averaged 2.1 assists per game, but that puts him in the top 10 among centers for assists per 36 minutes. He’s done it in lots of ways — out of delay actions, finding backdoor cutters, throwing blind swings to shift the angle of attack, in transition, as a big-to-big connector. Everything. He has great feel for when to continue within the confines of a set play and find teammates, and when to circumvent an action and drive or pop the ball elsewhere. When he touches the ball, teammates start buzzing around — a sure sign of a trusted passer.
Despite the reputation as a shooting big, Porter has only hit 33.3 percent of his triples in Toronto. And he’s shooting only slightly better inside the arc (39.3 percent). But he fires them up and draws attention on occasions. At the very least, he draws the center defender further outside the paint than someone like Jakob Poeltl, if not all the way to the perimeter yet. I imagine his 3-point shooting nudges upwards — he has been shooting with hesitation, trying to be a good teammate and pass first. As he gets out of his own head, he’ll have better preparation into shots. He was terrific against the Atlanta Hawks when he shot without any hesitation. Even if he remains inefficient as a scorer, he’s a solid screener and offers enough with the passing to help on the offensive end.
Defensively, Porter is a magnet for the ball while it’s still in opposing hands. He has great block and steal rates, even for a big — he’s averaging 2.0 blocks and 2.0 steals per 36 minutes. But he’s an overmatched backline rim protector, and he’s not cleaning up others’ mistakes. Opposing teams are shooting very efficiently with Porter as the primary defender within the paint. He is not a great rebounder, especially for a center. He is great at getting the Raptors in transition, but if opponents are getting a shot up, Porter isn’t doing a whole lot to end possessions, which involves both forcing a miss and grabbing a rebound.
He has mostly played drop, but he has held up at points as a switch big. His aggressive assaults on the ball when switching can force negative dribbles, pickups, and lots of turnovers.
All this points to Porter being overmatched as a starting center. That’s fine! Two-way players aren’t supposed to start. But if he plays 15 or 20 minutes a game against opposing benches, throwing dimes and getting the Raptors in transition, switching against non-stars, he could do much to help Toronto win minutes. He has played like a rotation player. And the Raptors found him on the periphery, not spending a draft pick or other players in a trade to acquire him. This is a win for the front office, and, most of all, for Porter himself, who is finally entrenched in an NBA home. He has earned this, and he should be rewarded with a full, multi-year contract after the trade deadline so the Raptors can keep him in house.
Nwora has been perhaps more successful even than Porter — and perhaps in less replicable ways. He is a huge shooting guard, standing 6-foot-7, and he has the speed on his trigger like Billy the Kid. Per 36 minutes, he’s been averaging 25.5 points while shooting 50 percent from deep. That’s probably not going to stick around, in all liklihood. But the man can shoot the ball.
Nwora is a career 38.4 percent shooter from deep, so he will continue to hit them. But his ability to get them up at a high volume is the real takeaway. He has a bag that contains stepbacks, shake-and-raises, side dribbles, jab steps, and more. He has long fired up a whole whack of pull-up jumpers, and his career average there is 37 percent. He’ll probably keeping making them as long as he keeps taking them.
But his usage rate in Toronto has been a beefy 23 percent — boosted by the absences of Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett in his high-minutes games. Expect him to continue taking those jumpers, just … fewer. And outside of the shooting, Nwora has shown more in Toronto than anywhere else. His assist rate has been higher than in any other stop. He’s taken a larger share of his shots at the rim than ever before, including a split-the-screen wildfire that saw him just miss an and-1 dunk. His driving as a Raptor has been very efficient. That has never been a strength of his game, and if it comes along, Toronto would be overjoyed.
Nwora’s passing has had some real gems. He has run some picks himself and found the roller. He even threw a live-dribble skip to the corner for a triple. These are small highlights that the Raptors should cherish and nurture in trying to grow him into a wing that will fit into their system.
It’s hard to know to what extent those abilities should be here to stay. Milwaukee was a very difficult home for a player like him; with Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton, and others firmly entrenched in the lineup the entire time Nwora was there, he had to fit into an established, championship-hunting system with no room for experimentation. For a raw, talented youth like Nwora, that set him up for failure. Indiana wasn’t hunting championships like Milwaukee during Nwora’s time there, but the system — and the hierarchy within it — was no less established. Feel matters more than anything there, and Nwora’s feel for the game is a work in progress. He can shoot, but if he couldn’t cut and sprint through multiple actions every possession, Indiana preferred others alongside Tyrese Haliburton.
Toronto has its own system, of course, and its own hierarchy. Like the Pacers, the Raptors try to get into their sets early and run lots of actions. They want quick decisions. They cut with fiery aplomb. But they run more actions from the elbows than the Pacers. They have more second-side attackers. They have the space to work on players’ feel while accepting mistakes. Perhaps Nwora can find more space as a creator in Toronto. He has so far, and as long as it works, he’ll continue getting the touches there. It’s possible he’ll slide back down the depth chart when Quickley and Barrett return, and if he’ll find it difficult to get touches and shots when he’s playing eight minutes a game rather than 18, it’s easy to see him fall out of the rotation. But there’s a foundation for success there, and it’s on Nwora and Darko Rajakovic both to ensure it continues.
Defensively, Nwora has strengths and weaknesses. He is terrific at dodging screens, but he can succumb to dribble moves and fall behind after a strong side-to-side crossover. Once his man reaches the paint, he doesn’t do a terrific job of contesting and sometimes plays smaller than his size. Opponents have scored well with him as the primary defender at the point of attacking in ball screens or just in isolations. I get the feeling he would be more impactful as a defender alongside Poeltl as a wall into which Nwora can shepherd the ball. But his impact there is more theoretical than on the offensive end.
Nwora is an unrestricted free agent after this season, and I would imagine as long as he keeps showing this potential, Toronto tries to bring him back on a cheap contract. The team should be prioritizing peripheral finds like Nwora and Porter.
And so the Raptors have two contributors that have thrived during a period of struggle. The team has been losing, and injured, and in flux — but Porter and Nwora have emerged as real contributors. That’s the point of this whole thing, growth from inside the roster, unencumbered by expectations. If either, or even both, hit as contributors when the Raptors start winning games again, that would be a huge victory for Toronto. They won’t win their combined minutes by double digits, but that’s a cherry on top, rather than the point. The point is that they both have nascent, NBA-level skills. And the Raptors are going to nourish those skills and see how good both can become.
That’s what a retool means. In Porter and Nwora, the Raptors are finding success despite the losses.
