The NBA is an entertainment product. The spotlight shines brightly for anyone willing to venture into it, and there are plenty of NBA players who take the stage like Superman, even if off the books they may be more Clark Kent in nature.

And then there’s Jakob Poeltl, the 29-year-old Austrian center who never seems to leave the phone booth. He is polite, hardworking, diligent and selfless, excellent qualities that suit a light-footed seven-footer with soft hands and a sky-high basketball IQ.

But it’s not a recipe for making stars or attracting attention.

Until last week, Poeltl’s NBA story was one of consistency, reliability and professionalism. Pick any month of his nine-year career, check the data on minutes played or number of possessions, and you’ll get some version of this: per 36 minutes, that’s somewhere between 13 and 16 points per game, about 12 rebounds. , a few assists, just over a blocked shot per game, and very few missed field goals. Poeltl’s career field goal percentage (63 percent, all but four attempts came from inside the three-point line) is the second-best among NBA players with at least 3,000 shots since Barack Obama was U.S. president.

It’s like clockwork, and the clock always works.

“Jak has the simplest game ever and it’s the most effective game ever. So effective, so simple too,” said Raptors point guard Davion Mitchell.

Garrett Temple, one of two players on the Raptors roster with more experience than Poeltl, agrees: “He finishes in the pick-and-roll. He’s no fool, but two points is two points is two points. He understands how to play the game.”

And through his first 550 NBA games, that’s all there was to say about Poeltl — and that’s a good thing: He’s paid well to do important work, and it’s almost always done to the best of his ability, no matter what also. of the circumstance.

More of the same through the first twelve games of this season: 13.9 points, 11.1 rebounds, 2.9 assists, 1.3 blocks, 1.2 steals and 56 percent from the floor.

But then last week happened, and Poeltl put up the best of the best games of his career — 25 points and 18 rebounds, 10 on the offensive end — on Friday against Detroit, a career-best 35 points and 15 rebounds against Boston in Toronto’s loss to the Celtics in Boston and another 30 points to go along with 15 rebounds in the Raptors’ win over Indiana on Monday night. He’s done it all while converting 71.9 percent of his field goal attempts.

He’ll get a chance to keep the momentum going Thursday night against Rudy Gobert and the Minnesota Timberwolves, but it’s worth hitting the pause button and admiring a man at the height of his powers.

Not only are his past three starts the best three offensive games Poeltl has ever played consecutively — he had never scored 20 points in three consecutive games in his career — but in total they pretty much represent a three-game span you’ll found by anyone.

As NBA Stats’ Keerthicka Uthayakumar recently posted, since 1983-84 there have been only six players who have averaged at least 30 points, 15 rebounds and shot better than 70 percent from the floor in a three-game span. they would all fall into the no-surprises category given their hall of fame resumes. They are Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, David Robinson, Dwight Howard, Nikola Jokic and now… Jakob Poeltl.

Find the nicknames: Jakeem, Shaq Schnitzel, Jak Deisel. We’re just workshopping here.

Even the man himself seems a little confused by the burst of production at the NBA level, seemingly out of nowhere.

I asked him, after a career in which he was known for doing the little things as best they can, what it’s like to pull up a box score for once and see all the flashy numbers next to his name.

“I mean, yeah, it feels nice. It’s a bit of a throwback to college days, I guess,” he said.

Quick fact check: Poeltl had an excellent college career. He was a first-team All-American as a sophomore at Utah and was ultimately drafted ninth overall by the Raptors in the 2016 NBA Draft, but he’s never had a trajectory like this. The most he ever scored in a three-game span was 81 points. Only once did he grab more than 14 rebounds, and not on a night when he scored 20 points.

The best basketball Poeltl has ever played is now, at age 29, for an injury-plagued Raptors team that has won three games in four weeks.

Why now is a bit of a mystery. Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic tried to suggest that this version of Poeltl is a work in progress, that it will take a lot of encouragement and pushing to get the big man to attack the rim with more speed and power.

“(We talk) a lot. ‘Jak, you can dunk with the ball. “Jak, you can be a lob threat.” “Jak, do this. Jak, do that’. And again and again,” Rajakovic said on Monday. ‘He didn’t believe it, but he started to question it and now he believes it more and more. So definitely a lot of conversations, a lot of film and a lot of work. And again, it’s an honor that he’s coachable and making good progress.”

It’s not clear if Poeltl has actually turned into an edge-running, lob-catching beast. His shooting stats show that it was his touch from the floater’s distance – three to three yards – that made the difference. Poeltl shoots more than a third of his field goal attempts from that range and converts 50 percent of them.

“I always liked that shot,” Poeltl said. “I work on that shot a lot.”

But perhaps more than anything, Poeltl’s actions were a response to opportunity. He is on pace for a career high in minutes, averaging 32.9 per game, up from 26.4 last season. That and the connection he’s made with Mitchell and RJ Barrett on pick-and-roll plays have unleashed his inner All-Star. He sets good screens for the ball handlers, rolls to the rim with good timing to keep the passing windows open, catches the ball cleanly and has the footwork to stay balanced while making his shot.

It’s basic stuff, but Poeltl has mastered it.

“I mean, maybe there’s a little bit of a mindset shift going on for me personally, but I think the reason why I feel like I’m getting more opportunities is mainly within the flow of our offense, our guys are finding me. ” he said. “There are situations where I get into a rhythm because I get some easy situations. It feels more comfortable. I feel like I have more flow. And it’s easier to occasionally… maybe break out of a play if I feel like I’m seeing something or being more aggressive in certain situations. So maybe that’s it. To be honest, I don’t feel like I do it all that differently. But I think opportunities just present themselves in a different way than they used to.”

What opportunities may arise once the Raptors return to full health will be interesting to watch. There’s no reason Poeltl should get less emphasis, not when he’s one of the team’s most efficient scorers and an accomplished passer to boot.

“I told RJ – and he knows – that the paint will probably be even more open when (Immanuel Quickley) comes back, when Scottie (Barnes) comes back. They won’t focus on (Barrett) as much, which means the big will help even more, and Jak will be open,” Temple said. “So I think this clearly shows Quick that Jak can finish in the paint, for drop passes and things that are natural. Scottie has probably seen it for the past three years. So I think it shows our team that we can do a lot of different things offensively. And when those two guys come back, it will be many more wins.”

That’s another potential problem.

Big picture: With a potentially star-laden draft class to choose from, are wins what the Raptors want during the rebuilding season?

And the bigger picture: Is a 29-year-old center a good fit for a team where the rest of the starters are 25 or younger?

One school of thought is that there has never been a better time to explore trade options for Poeltl, who is in the second year of a four-year contract that pays him $19.5 million per season.

But that might be wishful thinking. As effective as Poeltl can be, a quick survey of league insiders shows a non-shooting big struggling at the free-throw line (64.6 percent this year, but 54.3 percent for his career), making him difficult to downplay. the trajectory of crucial matches. That’s not the profile of a player picked unprotected in the first round.

The reality for teams in playoff mode trying to add is that Poeltl projects are a high-end depth piece, a kind of quality insurance. Because the market for traditional centers is quite weak — Jonas Valanciunas in Washington and both Robert Williams III and Deandre Ayton in Portland are other names expected to figure in trade talks — a bidding war is unlikely.

But you never know. The Knicks, Pacers and Lakers are all teams that could be watching, while others are just an injury away.

But perhaps the Raptors’ best play is keeping Poeltl. Despite being 3-12 with an injury-riddled roster, the Raptors have shown that they are not too far off from being a team that could be competitive sooner or later. With Barnes, Quickley and Barrett entering their prime, Gradey Dick developing rapidly and the Raptors’ emerging contingent of bench pieces, if Toronto gets some lottery luck and another high-end talent from the top of the draft, they can join position to get started, with their draft positioning days behind them.

In that scenario, it makes much more sense to have Poeltl on hand.

Rather than Poeltl’s appearance in the spotlight being an audition for the rest of the league, perhaps the fact that he steps out of the phone booth for a few games is proof that he can be part of a long-term solution.