The difficulties of being a rookie big man in the NBA are not limited to wrestling with opponents who are faster and stronger than you. True, that’s arguably the largest difficulty — consider all 280 pounds of the Denver Nuggets’ Jusuf Nurkic coming down the lane, for example — but there are other problems, intricacies that involve more than muscled body parts crashing into each other.
For Raptors rookie Jakob Poeltl, a still-sleight seven footer, the expectations heading into his first season were low. This is not to say the big Austrian doesn’t have potential and talent — remember, Jakob was picked ninth overall in the draft — but he was supposed to play behind one or both of Jared Sullinger and Lucas Nogueira.