Player Facts
Height: 6'10"
Weight: 240lbs.
Date of Birth: July 20, 1991
College Experience: Stanford (4 years)
Selections
All Star: 0
All-NBA: 0
All-Defensive: 0
Player Grades
Speed/Explosiveness: 8
Physical Strength: 8
Positional Size: 7
Positional Wingspan: 6
Paint Scoring: 9
Midrange Scoring: 2
Three-Point Scoring: 2
Dribbling: 4
Passing: 4
Perimeter Defense: 6
Interior Defense: 8
Rebounding: 8
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STRENGTHS
Intro
Dwight Powell is an athletic, undersized big man. He's a screen-and-dive style five-man who is very efficient from point-blank range. Defensively, he brings solid rim protection, rebounding, and ball screen coverage.
Picking-and-Rolling
He makes himself useful in the half-court be being a premier screen-setter and roll man for the likes of Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving, and Tim Hardaway Jr. He gets out of screens athletically and with a sense of urgency. The Stanford product proceeds to show his hands and be a nice target on both short rolls and hard rolls.
The 6'10" big cracked the top-8 in 2021-2022 total screen assists. This led to a chunky 661 points for his ball-handling teammates. Impressively, he logged less minutes than all but one other member of the top-8 (Deandre Ayton). 2022-2023 saw him help lead to 534 points for teammates here.
Dwight's roll-man tracking data supports the notion that he's one of the league's best here. Of course, having a generational P&R passing savant like Luka has a lot to do with this too. Regardless, Powell more than kept his end of the bargain by finishing on 64.4% of the 465 passes from Luka (2021-2022).
Powell has recorded multiple seasons in the 90th percentile or above as the pick-and-roll screener (93rd in 2022-2023). He actually led the league in per-game point volume too back in 2020-2021 (2.1 ppg as roller). The Torontonian blends bounce, footwork, good hands, and nice timing on alley-oops to be effective here.
Powell can do some short-roll passing for you too. He willingly keeps the ball moving if he notices the rim is walled off. He continually understands where his reads are.
High-Level Rim Finisher
DP is just a very strong at-rim finisher on the whole. 2021-2022 saw him finish a sky-high 77.4% of shots in the restricted area. The burly 240-pounder even notched 44 and-ones that season.
He fills the lane in transition as a willing rim runner. The fact that he is fleet of foot is not even the biggest boon here. That would be his likeliness to just outwork the other big down the floor.
Hunting O-REB Position
Powell is a robust offensive rebounder. He will hurriedly blast to the basket when/before the shot goes up. As a strong cutter too, this will often place him in good spots to offensive rebound.
He amassed 173 O-boards across 2021-2022. Those directly led to 80 putback points. At 1.29 points per chance here, he was in the 82nd percentile for second-chance point productivity.
Mobile Big Man Defense
Dwight is a hard-hat and lunch pail type of big man defender. He moves his feet well in dynamic actions – playing the cat-and-mouse game nicely. It is also clear from the film that he is an active communicative lynchpin on the back line.
Powell plays with his feet first, but does not forget to use his hands too in calculated ways. He has a strong deflections rate given his positional expectations. He'll get these by nicking pocket passes and the like.
Verticality + Man Defense
Powell brings helpful basket protection to his squad. At 6'10" with a reasonable 7'0.5" wingspan, he brings the requisite size to be a factor down there. His help defense is buoyed by by a high compete level, proactive roations, and staunch verticality.
He's not a huge shot-blocker but advanced stats show a positive impact nonetheless. 2021-2022 saw him cause opponents to shoot below their average on both two's and three's with him there. This leads to another point – he is a strong option to check step-out bigs.
Dwight's individual defense is firm too. He realistically can defend four's and five's well. He's recorded multiple years of 65th percentile+ defense on both isolations and post-ups.
WEAKNESSES
Offensive Holes
Dwight has the limitations characteristic of his player mould. Put simply, he is a roll and cut big who cramps spacing, is a below-average creator, and lacks much general scoring juice.
Powell has dabbled in shooting threes at different points throughout his career. However, he has mostly cut that out of his game. Even as a trailer, where once upon a time he may have pulled the three, he now does not really look at the rim.
The Canadian pivot is not as gifted as say a Kelly Olynyk or Jakob Poeltl in terms of high post hub-ness. He will sometimes hit cutters but typically sticks to flowing into the next action. That is fine, but this narrowed focus can translate to missed high-leverage passing windows.
Powell's off-ball game is limited to glass-crashing (which he is great at) and shallow cutting. He cannot space to 18-feet let alone three-point land. However, he does remain active in order to maximize the off-ball threat he does carry.
Dwight in the post is not typically the picture of finesse. He can expose smalls at times, particularly when the mismatch is egregious.
However, against wings or fellow bigs, the offense is much better served to attack a different matchup on the court. Powell's measly 18 post-up possessions across a full 82-game 2021-2022 season matched the total of guard D'Angelo Russell.
Picking Nits on Defense
Powell is strong across most of the archetypical "big man" defensive criteria. When switching this lens out for the "modern big" one, the same extent of serviceability is not there.
He can guard perimeter dudes in a pinch but he is, somewhat surprisingly, not as gifted a switch-out big defender as his physical tools may suggest. Even forwards can really burn him out in space – 52% shooting allowed to wings in 2021-2022. Consequently, the team is limited to more high drop, trap, or up-to-touch ball screen coverages.
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Players Appearing Here – Check Out Their Profiles
- Luka Doncic [Coming Soon]Opens in a new tab
- Kyrie Irving [PATREON]Opens in a new tab
- Tim Hardaway Jr. Opens in a new tab
- Deandre AytonOpens in a new tab
- Kelly OlynykOpens in a new tab
- Jakob Poeltl [Coming Soon]Opens in a new tab
- D'Angelo RussellOpens in a new tab
