Toronto Raptors: Three ways Pascal Siakam has improved this season

Leadership

The third area of Siakam’s game that has noticeably improved is his ability to be a leader, something I’ve talked about a fair bit already in this piece. He remains far from a finished product, but it’s already evident that Siakam relishes the opportunity to be the main man on an NBA roster.

On top of growing as both a playmaker and a scorer on the floor, Siakam has been more involved on the glass this season, averaging 9.1 boards per game in six appearances. Siakam’s rebounding percentage to date is 13.8, more than two entire percentage points higher than his career mark of 11.9. As we came to learn a year ago, “Board Man Gets Paid”.

Good leaders lead by example across all areas of the game, not just scoring, and Siakam has consistently shown a willingness to do that in the season’s early stages, albeit with mixed results at times. In Toronto’s loss against the Milwaukee Bucks, Siakam tried to impose his defensive will against Giannis Antetokounmpo and ended up fouling out. Live and learn.

Overall, it’s hard to take issue with anything we’ve seen from Spicy-P in the infancy stages of the 2019-20 season. There is noticeably more variety to his offensive game and, on defence, besides some early season foul trouble, Siakam has done a good job slowing down whoever he’s matched up with. Sure, he struggled a big against the Bucks; he’s far from the first player to have a hard time with Antetokounmpo. As a whole, Siakam has been as good as even the highest expectations this season.

Not lacking for spice by any metric, expect Pascal Siakam’s game to get even spicier as the calendar turns to 2020.