Deni Avdija, in his sixth NBA season and second with the Portland Trail Blazers, is suddenly a monster. Sunday night he put up a crazy triple-double against the invulnerable Oklahoma City Thunder, in an encouragingly narrow and competitive home loss for the Blazers. Avdija scored 31 points on just 14 shots, pulled down 19 rebounds, dished 10 assists against just a single turnover, and finished plus-four in 37 minutes of floor-time. It's not even that weird a line for Avdija, who was once considered a draft near-bust by the stewards of the Toiletburg Toilet Creatures. Avdija has topped 25 points in 12 of Portland's 20 games; he's got six double-doubles and a couple of triple-doubles; he leads the Blazers in scoring, is second in usage, rebounds, and assists, and is third in blocks; and he's doing it all on mighty 62-percent true shooting. He is producing like a superstar.
Avdija seemed to figure something out right at the tail end of his time with his first NBA team, an outfit which shall go unnamed in this space. He's tall and long, and fast and strong, and after a couple of wasted seasons playing glorified spectator around that abominable franchise's trumped-up alpha dogs, Avdija realized that if he gets the ball at one end of the court—say, if he grabs a defensive rebound—and just immediately tears ass toward the other end, good things will happen often enough that no one will yell at him for trying. That was his first brush with NBA success, and it was fun, and his teammates started doing a little motorcycle dance to encourage him forward. As is the case with lots of other fast young guys, eventually Avdija picked up some counters, little secondary ways of broadening the advantages that come from being faster in a straight line than other people his size. Now he's got moves on moves, and has become something of an offense unto himself: Per Cleaning The Glass, the Blazers are a whopping 16 points better per 100 possessions with Avdija on the floor, which ranks in the NBA's 98th percentile, within touching distance of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Nikola Jokic, winners of six of the last seven NBA MVP awards.
It is so cool that Avdija's first team shrugged, signed him to a bargain contract, and then traded him for Malcolm Brogdon, Bub Carrington, and a couple of scratch-off tickets.
Developing offensively from a foundation of valiant transition attacks seemed to teach Avdija how to absorb and to hunt contact, and from there he has refined a somewhat savage shoulders-and-elbows method of navigating traffic. Lots of players know how to ride a defender who they've pinned to their hip; Avdija has a weird ability to seemingly climb onto a defender at just about any angle, so that he does not need to have thrown a particularly persuasive dribble move at his man before he has suddenly mounted him like a stunned burro and yee-hawed his way to the front of the rim. There's an undeniable recklessness to it, almost a provocation. Watching this new, assertive Avdija tangle himself into the body of surprised defenders over and over again, I'm reminded of the way that Max Verstappen, determined star driver of the Red Bull Formula One team, once treated overtaking on a racetrack as a game of deadly chicken: Sure, you could fight him for the position, knowing that he will simply never yield, but then you are accepting that one of the two of you might die.
The sheer force of it reminds me of an earlier era of NBA basketball, when there was less artistry to the generation of free thro5ws, or anyway the artistry was somewhat less cynical. Avdija takes a genuine beating, his style risks much, and his drives tend to end with an honest attempt at a bucket. For the effort, he is living at the stripe: Avdija has attempted the third most freebies in the entire NBA, and is making them at a healthy 81-percent clip. Sunday night, against the Thunder, he made 19 of 23 free-throw attempts, both career-highs. The Thunder put narrow-chested Chet Holmgren onto him and Avdija acted as if his left shoulder was magnetized powerfully to some point on Holmgren's spinal column. They put Gilgeous-Alexander onto him and Avdija didn't bother at all with moves, just bashed him into the paint and shot over him. Even Lu Dort, who is built like a bank vault, was shouldered out of the way. I give Avdija a pass for the free-throw merchantry because for the most part he manages it without a lot of Jimmy Butler-style head-spasming and arm-flinging. It may not be the very most ethical brand of hoops, but Avdija generally stays well free of the Trae Young Zone.
Besides, it's not all bloody bulldozing. Avdija has become really good at changing speeds on the drive, so that he can go from sprinting to moseying just in time to let a groping defender vanish off-screen. He's good at misdirection, using his eyes and chin and the bright orange ball to make defenders lean, or reach, or leap, false steps that become all the more fatal as Avdija suddenly releases the drag chute. He's got jump-stops and eurosteps; he's got one- and two-footed take-offs; he's got craft from floater range and a knack for the physics of a backboard and hoop. He's become so dangerous with any forward momentum that defenders have to fight up into his personal space in order to keep him angled away from the paint, an advantage normally only enjoyed by great shooters. Teams might eventually try to drop back and wall off the paint—might try to defend him the way campers scare off a curious foraging bear—but Avdija is both a vastly more willing shooter than Ben Simmons and a vastly better one that Antetokounmpo. This season he is knocking down a healthy 38 percent of more than seven three-point attempts per 36 minutes; his accuracy isn't great when shooting off the dribble, but so far a large number of those are coming in step-backs and in the pick-and-roll. The point is that he is more than capable of exploiting the privacy-fence tactics used to frustrate certain of the league's other smash-and-bash point-forwards.
Sunday was Avdija's second straight 30-point game, his sixth of the season, and the 14th he's posted in 92 games with the Blazers, after he produced a nice round zero across the first four seasons of his career. Below are the highlights of his performance on Oct. 26, against the Spurs, when he went for 37 points on 19 shots, plus eight assists. Please enjoy the video while I rip my living room sofa in half with my bare hands.
It's surprising and unlikely that all of this would come together in a player's sixth NBA season, until you recall that Avdija was used as a stanchion as a rookie, starving nearly to death on paltry sub-12-percent usage, 81st out of 88 rookies who'd taken the floor by the time his season ended. Avdija didn't come anywhere close to average usage until his fourth NBA campaign, when he finally ticked just above 20 percent for a hideous shit-show of a 15-win team. That team was led on offense by Kyle Kuzma, so I am just going to step away for a moment and jam a screwdriver into my brain.
That unfortunate origin story is part of why it is maybe not so hard to believe that what you are seeing today was in there all along. Avdija is a tricky, funky player, but the NBA is in a tricky, funky period of transition. Exaggerated floor spacing, diversified and distributed skills and offensive responsibilities, and rules that make it illegal for any defender not named Alex Caruso to so much as breathe warmly on a ball-handler have combined to make it functionally impossible to guard the cup without at least one bonafide rim-protector down around the basket. Suddenly it is dangerous and possibly fatal for a team to go small, for the first time in what feels like decades. Nobody knows what is meant by the term "power forward." Some squads are going huge; meanwhile, and perhaps consequently, other teams are going fast and the game overall is accelerating. The Blazers churn out the fifth-most transition possessions per game and play at the league's third-fastest pace. There's a groove in all of this for a large strong guy who wants to run, who has a taste for collisions, and who learned in desperate circumstances that he can impose his style on a contest through physical daring and sheer will. Evaluators were worried that Avdija might never been a good enough shooter to function as a 3-and-D specialist, without ever anticipating that the game might suddenly invite itself over and climb onto his dinner plate. To hell with specialization.
It's a fun development, and Blazers fans are lucky to benefit by it. I am insane with envy, and not only because my own team threw away one season of Avdija for Russell Westbrook and another for Jordan Poole, ignored his qualities as a player, treated him like like a stiff, and traded him for beans. The Blazers are not yet good, but they have a dude, and that dude is a blast. Maybe it only could've happened the one way, maybe Avdija's whole deal had to have been forged in the fires of hell, or else he would've been the second coming of Mario Hezonja, or worse. Maybe that's what I will tell myself, as I bundle up for a winter that has no end.
