Inside Jakob Poeltl’s injury-filled season

The following is part of Raptors Republic’s series of pieces reviewing the season for the Toronto Raptors. You can find all the pieces in the series here.

Just a season ago, Jakob Poeltl was coming off the most successful campaign of his then nine-year NBA career. He was rewarded with a four-year $104 million extension for his efforts, which ties him to the team until the end of the 2029/30 season. How did he do after securing his handsome contract?

He started the season looking solid in the blowout win against Atlanta, as he was able to come away with 14 points on just one missed shot, but he followed it up with some really poor play to end the opening month of October, averaging just 6.5 points, 5.3 rebounds, 0.5 blocks and 0.3 steals per game.

He followed that up with averages of 12 points (second most in a month for the season), 9.5 rebounds (most all season), and 1 steal per game while shooting a season high 77.1 percent for November, and playing the most minutes of a month of 27.7 for his season.

In December, Poeltl aggravated his back injury for good, the same one that popped up in training camp, but he was able to manage it until then. He wasn’t having a particularly amazing month, averaging just 8.8 points and 7 rebounds prior to the game in Brooklyn, where he was able to play just 7 minutes and come away with two points and two rebounds.

That was it for his 2025 portion of the season, as Poeltl would miss the rest of December and the whole of January before finally making his return midway through February. His first game back was against the Eastern Conference’s first seed, the Detroit Pistons. It felt like a weird decision to bring him back for that game, as this was the last game before the All-Star break, and I’m sure some of the fans thought they would just play it cautiously and bring him back after to give him some extra rest, but that wasn’t the case. He came away with a respectable nine points and six rebounds from 20 minutes of action in his return.

His first game back from the All-Star break was an all-time stinker, as he came away with just two points and an assist to show for in 16 minutes of competition, but more importantly, he came off the bench in favour of Collin Murray-Boyles, who did a phenomenal job of filling in as the undersized center while Poeltl missed all of his games due to injury. It ended up being just a one-off as the Bulls were operating without a true center themselves after offloading Nikola Vucevic.

He returned to the starting lineup the next game after and put together a solid five-game stretch of 13.4 points, 8.2 rebounds, 1.4 steals and 1.6 blocks per game, where it looked like things might be back to normal for the Austrian, but he followed it up with two average performances before another hot streak of his best three-game stretch during the whole regular season.

He averaged 20.3 points, 12.3 rebounds, a steal and a block per game in three games against the Detroit Pistons, Chicago Bulls and Denver Nuggets. Actually, outside of another stinker in a rematch against the Phoenix Suns, where he only came away with two assists and two blocks in 17 minutes, plus a few other average performances, Poeltl had the best stretch of his season from the end of February all the way to mid-April.

It really looked like Poeltl was back to last season’s form that won him the big contract extension, but the final three games of the season were foreshadowing the playoffs. Averaging just 18.3 minutes, he put up just 7 points, 3.3 rebounds and just 0.6 blocks per game.

During the playoffs is where the Raptors needed Poeltl the most, as the dual big lineup of Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen was locked in as Toronto’s matchup. Toronto was out-rebounded in the series by 31, and Poeltl wasn’t a factor at all outside of two decent games in games four and five. For the series, he came away with just 7 points, 6 rebounds, 0.9 steals and 0.9 blocks per game while playing 19.1 minutes per game.

We already know what Poeltl is. He’s a traditional big man who shoots a majority of his shots at the rim while anchoring the paint on the defensive end, which he didn’t do too well of a job on this season, averaging his second-lowest blocks per game since his rookie season, where he played just 11.6 minutes per game. At this point, it’s very unlikely he comes back with a mid-range or three-point shot, but he needs to clean up the places in his game that Toronto depend on.

For the season, he averaged 10.7 points, 7 rebounds on a career high of 70 percent shooting from the field on 6.7 field goal attempts per game, his lowest total in the past four seasons, while shooting over 60 percent from the free throw line for just the second time in his career. Those were the positives, as even in a poor year, the numbers don’t look that bad, but beyond the numbers, everyone knows that Poeltl didn’t look the same after suffering a back injury that was with him the whole year. Perhaps a summer of rest can have his back all sorted out, and we’ll see the 2024-25 version of Jakob Poeltl, which could be a huge asset to the Raptors as he’s currently the lone Raptor on the squad who is over 6 feet 9 inches.