Jakob Poeltl: A Triumph of Substance Over Flash

As I’m preparing for the upcoming 2026 NBA Draft cycle, there’s one narrative that I keep seeing on my Twitter feed that really bugs me. The narrative is that this upcoming class is lacking in quality bigs.

Though there’s no Victor Wembanyama in the projected 2026 draft pool, I generally disagree with that take. The big that a lot of people seem to be highest on coming in is Chris Cenac, which is another take I disagree on; I feel like there’s more flash than substance with Cenac.

Unless you’re someone like Nikola Jokic, chances are that as an average NBA center you’ll mostly do dirty work that largely gets unnoticed, like rebounding, screening, protecting. And finishing at the rim, which is one of the single most underrated traits for a big. Unfortunately, you have to be very athletic to be able to finish with the best. Or do you?

Enter Jakob Poeltl, the 7’0” Austrian big who’s about to start his 10th NBA season. For most NBA fans, Poeltl is just someone who, i guess… is there? Outside of his first couple of years playing for the Toronto Raptors, he spent most of his best years wandering around the NBA’s basement in San Antonio, and then back in Toronto.

I’m by no means saying that Poeltl is an elite NBA player, but I definitely think he has flown under the radar during the last decade. One of the factors is the aforementioned reason that he has spent most of his career on either poorly managed teams with multiple lottery misses (hi, San Antonio) or, since the middle of 2022-23 season, a largely directionless Raptors franchise.

But the second reason, which is the more interesting one, is that Poeltl doesn’t really stack up with regards to the aesthetic standards of the consensus thinking.

That’s even true with somewhat similar players that actually haven’t spent their primes in San Antonio or Toronto. In ESPN’s latest ranking of top 100 NBA players, Ivica Zubac ended up just 36th, right behind De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis, despite the fact that Zubac is coming off a season where he was 12th in EPM and an indispensable player on a 50 win team that almost advanced to the 2nd round of the Western Conference playoffs.

What is interesting is that Poeltl, for a good part of his career, was at least as productive, or even more productive, than Zubac, before the Croatian shot to new heights in 2024-25.

One of the more striking aspects of Poeltl’s DARKO graph is just how consistent he has been throughout his career, delivering productive seasons as a starting-level NBA center for five or six years now.

All of this may sound unremarkable on paper, but highly malleable, fundamentally sound and consistent 7’0” bigs are an extremely valuable proposition. There’s such a finite number of guys befitting of that archetype, so I’m kind of shocked by the fact that Poeltl has played so few high leverage NBA games to date, while, at the same time, teams with playoff aspirations struggle to find productive bigs to round out their rosters.

During his last couple of seasons, Poeltl has had some bad luck with injuries. He played just 50 games in 2023-24 and 56 in 2024-25 and, despite already pushing 30, his production has barely flinched throughout all of the injuries, roster turnover and mediocre seasons in Toronto.

Non-dunking finisher

Poeltl to me is one of the good examples of a high floor player, something that’s still thoroughly undervalued both by the majority of NBA fans and even executives.

One of the factors that significantly raises Poeltl’s floor, to the point he’s able to be a neutral offensive player despite being a non-shooter without a consistent post game and overall lacking a high level of versatility in his offensive profile, is that he finishes plays around the rim so effectively. His rim% has been lurking around mid-70%’s for the past few years.

What is interesting and rare about Poeltl’s rim finishing is that being truly elite at this trait is most often reserved for hyper athletic bigs with a high frequency dunking ability. For example, if we look at NBA players while they were in college, we can see that most of the best play finishers are rim breakers who dunk on half, sometimes even more of their rim makes.

With Poeltl, the opposite is true, and this has been the case stretching back to college. He was a 70%+ rim finisher in both of his seasons playing Pac-12 basketball at the University of Utah, despite dunks making up a very small part of his rim scoring picture.

This trend has very much continued in Poeltl’s NBA career as he’s been able to generate a high volume of rim attempts and making them at high efficiency, despite rarely dunking. Among bigs with 8+ FGA/100 who played 40+ games in 2024-25 (excluding rookies and sophomores), Poeltl had the 8th best rim FG% with 74,5%.

If you look at this table, there’s a pretty clear correlation between effective rim finishing and dunking. For example, Jaxson Hayes, and incredibly efficient play finisher, had a total of 125 dunks on 172 rim makes, per Synergy data. Among the most efficient high volume play finishing bigs, Poeltl was the outlier with just 32 of his total 259 rim makes coming on dunks.

Poeltl’s career rim finishing trajectory stacks up very well against other NBA bigs that haven’t met the high rim volume query in the previous table, but who also don’t dunk with high frequency and are of a similar age to Poeltl. For a good stretch of his career, Poeltl had better rim scoring numbers than Nikola Jokic.

Per Synergy, in 24-25 NBA season Poeltl scored 1.46 points per layup, second best only to Luka Doncic among NBA players who had at least 4 layup attempts per game. And that trend of Poeltl being one of the best layup finishers in the league has continued for multiple years: applying the same criteria, he was 2nd in 2023-24, 1st in 2022-23 and again 2nd in 2021-22.

Overall, Poeltl’s strong finishing and steady passing ability, especially as a DHO hub, meant that he had a significant positive influence on their offense in terms of generating better, more efficient looks.

How?

Despite the fact that he can’t break rims like Jaxson Hayes, physically Poeltl is no slouch. At 7’1” and 260 lbs, he’s a strong body down in the paint. He doesn’t have plenty of additional length with a 7’2” wingspan, but the Austrian is a respectable shot blocker (4.9% BLK over his career, per Basketball Reference) and an excellent rebounder on both ends of the floor.

Looking from the biomechanics point of view, Poeltl’s blend of fluid hips, super strong feet, legs and big frame provide the foundation for his tremendous under the basket play.

The Raptors big is good not at just making contact with the on-ball screen defender and creating an advantage that way, but his lateral mobility is super underrated with the way he’s able to peel towards the basket with great timing after barely making contact with the defender on a screen.

When watching his film, one of the things you notice is that Poeltl ends up with a ton of uncontested or weakly contested layups.

One of the reasons for that is his high level of spatial awareness. Around 15 years ago, the term of raumdeuter - literally translated as ‘interpreter of space’ - entered the soccer dictionary. It was used to describe the unique abilities of a then-emerging German superstar Thomas Mueller who wasn’t the most gifted technically, but had a unique ability to roam away from his starting position, anticipate patterns of play, find space and place himself in positions where he could create danger.

Basketball is a different sport, but while on the court, Poeltl can be seen doing something similar - he’s consistently on the move, exploring, moving into space, he rarely holds on to the ball for long and ends up in spots where he can score easy points. And, as much as we admire tough shot making, generating as many easy looks as you can is broadly the primary goal on the offensive end.

I especially like the second clip where a trailing Poeltl reads the play some time before it happens, directing a pass for Scottie Barnes in the mid-post where he has a mismatch. That mismatch forces a quick weak side help which opens up space under the basket for Poeltl to roam into.

When approaching the basket, Poeltl is exceptional at removing rim defense via pumpfakes. He’s highly coordinated, has excellent feet and reads approaching rim protection super well.

To balance out his scoring when he’s 0-3 feet to the basket, Poeltl does have some counters that keep defenses alert in and around the paint.

For example, he has developed a highly capable, soft push shot that, at times, can extend almost to the free throw line. On some occasions, when Poeltl catches the ball around the dunker spot, he uses that push shot to just get up an attempt as quickly as possible. That allows him to a) get up a shot quicker than defenders can rotate and b) avoid a body-to-body contest on the layup.

What is it for?

So, why the hell would I write a long piece about Jakob Poeltl? I’m mostly interested in NBA Draft and player development process, so is there anything to learn from the soft-footed rim finishing craftsman?

Well, for one, Poeltl does prove that you can be a high volume play finisher without having to rely on explosive athleticism.

Like I mentioned, it’s not like Poeltl lost the genetic lottery - with his big frame and lateral mobility, he was well positioned to develop a rather unique knack for under-the-basket interior scoring.

But it’s not just that - Poeltl is incredibly smart and just knows his way around the rim. That may be less sexy than 7 footers shooting threes off the dribble, but the aesthetics of one’s game don’t always translate to impact. And that is something that player evaluators must have in their minds consistently.

On the player/career development side, his skillset i probably going to allow Poeltl to stretch the productive part of his career for a little longer just because he doesn’t rely on his athleticism so much and athleticism, you know, is something that fades away eventually.

For example, we can look at this graph of Clint Capela’s rim% over the years. At his peak in 2019-20, Capela was 98th percentile in rim frequency and almost 40% of his attempts came from dunks. Since that, his rimFGA/100 progression and rim% have been on a downward spiral as he’s unable to dunk as much as he did in his athletic prime.

Poeltl is just one of the examples of a guy who’s not an NBA star, but who consistently delivers substance over flash, impact over raw box score numbers, and he does that in an unassuming manner. I really hope that Poeltl is yet to play his high leverage games in the playoffs, whether it’s in Toronto or somewhere else.