The 28-year-old insists that because most of the players he shared the court with when he was drafted to the Raptors in 2016 are no longer there, he doesn’t often think about how he went from a member of the Bench Mob to the starting center, central playmaking hub, and veteran leader of the new era Raptors after spending five-and-a-half seasons in San Antonio in the interim.
But it’s rare that a player is drafted in the lottery, developed for two seasons, shipped away in a superstar trade, and then traded back to the team that originally drafted them. And it’s even rarer for that player to hone his skills under Gregg Popovich and Tim Duncan while watching his friends and former team win its first-ever championship. But Poeltl’s career has never followed a script. The son of two former volleyball players for the Austrian national team, Poeltl grew up in Vienna, where skiing was the most popular sport and there was no rich history of a national basketball team or NBA players to look up t
Jakob Poeltl Career Raptors Trade Championship Basketball