Toronto Raptors: Siakam has been the Bubble’s biggest Disappointment

Toronto Raptors: Pascal Siakam is settling on offense

You can see the gradual decrease in Siakam’s play and that has a lot to do with how teams are guarding him. Siakam’s best area to score has always been the rim, so what do teams do? Well, they give him the Ben Simmons treatment, of course, it isn’t as severe as Simmons, but players do sag off from Siakam when he has the ball around the three-point line.

We all know Siakam isn’t like Simmons and he will shoot the ball if he’s open, but he is feeding to the other team’s hand when he does so on high volume. Siakam’s strength was never his shooting, he’s at best a good shooter, having average shooting splits across the board.

Siakam’s obvious strength on offense was always his speed and agility to get to the basket and finish around the rim. It was the biggest consistency in his game, shooting 65 percent around the rim before the bubble.

But even that has become a flaw of Siakam’s. In the bubble, he is shooting an atrocious 56 percent around the rim, which ranks among only the 20th percentile among all forwards in the bubble, per Cleaning The Glass.

Opposing teams are crowding the paint and playing mind games giving him enough space to shoot the open shot. Siakam also isn’t driving as much as before, he seems much more reluctant to do so and it seems he has resorted to post-ups, which is the next topic of conversation.