Obi Toppin is taking a leap, please free Obi Toppin

Obi Toppin’s sophomore campaign is off to a fantastic start, putting to bed most fears about his game prior to his being drafted. The only problem? He can’t seem to find the floor while playing behind the Knicks’ best player at his same position.

Obi Toppin points to the rafters, and we all lean in for what happens next. 

His point is a perched bird’s pre-flight upward gaze. Up to his own personal playground of NBA sky, where only select sneakers soar, where only a rare few fly. You see, the thing about Obi is that he doesn’t move through space the way normal humans move through space, or even how abnormal humans move through space: he sort of swims, vertically, through air. He plays with equal parts childlike joy and predatory athleticism. He’s the most enthusiastically fast person I’ve ever seen do anything, eviscerating the open court like it’s made of magma and his legs of chocolate, and he’d rather go for a playful airborne swim than have his legs melt, thanks very much.

Which is to say: watching Obi simply move is a pleasure in and of itself, distinct sometimes from the game he’s playing in and the game he’s playing, something rare in an NBA where everywhere you look there’s fast-twitch freakery, which by sheer available mass dampens and normalizes how athletically monstrous most of these guys are. 

What’s nice, this season, is that the eighth pick in the 2020 NBA Draft has not only been a delight to watch, but has been impactful in his minutes, emphatically contributing to winning basketball and ferociously putting to bed any remaining doubts from a rookie season that had a few foolish non-believers wonder if he would stick in the league at all. 

What we can reasonably claim to know about Obi’s game a month into his sophomore campaign — he has an elite motor, he has untapped playmaking chops, he has an analytically gold-stamped shot profile, he can impact winning without hitting shots, he can bend the pace of entire games with his energy, and perhaps most importantly: he can defend — has changed the primary question about his future from a tentative “will he be good?” to a boisterous “how good will he be?”

Zoom out from the early season storm of small-sample everything, and this question is a huge win for the Knicks. Having Obi as a productive player already, prowling the sidelines for more minutes, gives Leon Rose and his front office optionality on how they turn this team into a sustainable contender. The trajectories of the young guys on this roster — headlined by the warp-speed development of RJ Barrett, but reinforced by Toppin, Immanuel Quickley, and Mitchell Robinson — mean the Knicks can comfortably straddle multiple timelines while remaining competitive, and wait for the right all-important next move, as opposed to just the next available next move.

For Obi, the swing skill was always his defense. Well, folks, it gives me great pleasure to digitally pour one out for The Pre-Draft Hip-Haters, The Pelvic Naysayers, The Hypothesisers of Defensive Doom. Toppin has crushed the arctic-cool consensus on his defensive mobility under an avalanche of activity and technical tweaks. When isolated one-on-one, he’s mostly held his own with improved footwork and a less upright stance, allowing for quicker hip-turns that keep his 7-foot-2 wingspan within striking distance of disrupting shots. 

Speaking of wingspans, he’s blocked all manner of attempts already this season: closeout threes, fallaway mid-rangers, would be blow-by layups, dunks from the weakside — all of them. Including whatever the hell category of miscellaneous insanity this falls under:

Per Cleaning the Glass, his 2.8% block rate puts him in the 76th percentile for bigs — just behind Mitchell Robinson and just ahead of Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Offensively, while he’s just 2-16 from three to start the season, he’s shooting a check-it-again-because-it-can’t-be-real 28-of-31 from inside five feet, good for 90% at the rim. Only 11 of these have been dunks, most coming in transition or on lobs. But the rest have been an impressive series of contorted layups, avoiding or absorbing attempts to contest, and finishing anyway. He has been fouled on 26.8% of his shot attempts this season — the third-highest number in the league, behind only Dwight Howard and Rudy Gobert, who exclusively dunk.

All in all, it’s safe to say Obi has been a two-way revelation this season, which in true Knicks fashion, is obviously a huge problem. 

Stuck behind Julius Randle and Tom Thibodeau’s preference for 48 minutes of traditional rim protection in the rotation, he can’t get on the court, and is averaging just over 14 minutes a game so far. Even this number is warped, since he opened the season playing 28 minutes in the double-overtime thriller against the Boston Celtics, and followed that up with 23 minutes against the Orlando Magic — with Nerlens Noel and Taj Gibson out for both games. Since then, he’s averaged 11.7 minutes a night. 

He played more in his debut playoff series against the Atlanta Hawks — 13.1 minutes per game — than he has to open his sophomore season, where he has been nothing short of scintillating.

On the court, this is obviously a Thibodeau problem, which is trending, next year and beyond, towards a front office solution. Over the course of this season, though, the Knicks’ head coach has to do some soul searching — which I imagine for Thibs looks something like sitting in an ice bath at the center of a prayer circle of box scores in some kind of meditative cold-tub flagellation — and get as weird as he has to get with his rotations to find Obi more minutes. But this is nevertheless a problem in its infancy. 

It’s a problem that’s 11 games old, because as promising as he looked towards the end of last season, that Obi wasn’t this Obi. Ever conservative, Thibs prioritizes consistent roles above all else at the start of the season, especially when he’s incorporating three new starters into the equation. As much as a eureka turn-to-Obi moment would be a wonderful thing, it’s unlikely to happen quickly, and barring injury, we are going to have to re-litigate the yin and yang of what makes Thibodeau, Thibodeau at least 20 more tortuous times before we see some unforced Obi-centric experimentation.

It feels like the sky is falling because our best conduit to the sky is rooted to the bench, but this is just the early-season sharp end of a very good problem to have. Is it infuriating? Yes. Is it going to disappear in a festive puff of progressive small-ball kumbaya? No. Are we going to keep talking about it anyway? Of course.

Of course we’re going to talk about not being able to watch maybe the most watchable player on the roster more. This is a fanbase that furiously debated Ronald Baker-themed dissension. But make no mistake that this is an emotional cul-de-sac of dead end feelings that will test our love of Thibadeau by pitting it against our love of Obi. Even if it ends well, it has very little chance of ending any time soon, so grab your duffel full of baked beans and head down to your bunker of blue and orange angst to bed in for the long haul.

Especially this season, where — per Cleaning the Glass — the Knicks are third in offense and 23rd in defense, 48 minutes of rim protection makes sense. It’s the best use of a Knicks roster featuring a defensive-minded trio of bigs. A defense-for-offense trade-off with Obi and Randle playing together doesn’t add up in this general context, although obviously would be useful situationally in specific games, and could do with some seasoning for deployment down the road, in the playoffs. Right now, though, a player like Nerlens Noel is arguably more valuable on this team — where his offensive shortcomings aren’t felt anywhere near as much — than he was on last season’s roster.

The best we can hope for in the short term is Obi stealing a handful of minutes from Randle, but even that seems farfetched in the early going.

Case in point: the Knicks’ latest win against a laughably shorthanded Philadelphia 76ers team, where Randle logged 35:40 — right at his season average — and Obi only managed a measly 8:42, leaving minutes unaccounted for: three minutes and thirty eight seconds went elsewhere. Ironically, they went to a small-ball look with RJ Barrett at the four and Taj Gibson at the five to match up with Andre Drummond surrounded by shooters. Those are Obi’s minutes, he’s earned them with his play all season, and while RJ at the four is justifiable in a vacuum — Thibs has to be conscious of the lack of trust in Obi it implies, which is the exact opposite message that should be sent to a kid who is playing the best basketball of his life. Just sit Alec Burks and let RJ and Obi get some run together. Problem solved.

Sprinkles of Obi Toppin aren’t the ideal measure of Obi Toppin, but they’re what we’ve got. So far, they’ve been downright delightful to watch, something like watching a superhero do superhero things through a 10-year-old’s eyes, an irresistible flex of possibility by a player who plays at a different shutter speed to everyone else. Next time he points to the rafters, let’s remember to celebrate the thing that happens next, before dutifully kicking and screaming for the next few months about not getting enough of those moments — the ones that make us lean in, and look up, at the kid who’s taking a leap.