After hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy, taking home his Most Improved Player award and signing a four-year, $130 million contract extension in the course of a few months, Pascal Siakam had to prove himself again. Last October, no one knew how he would handle his leading-man role and the added scrutiny that came with it. No one even knew how many of his championship-winning Toronto Raptors teammates would still be on the team after the trade deadline.

Now that the 2019-20 season might be over, it is obvious to any reasonable person that Siakam delivered. He averaged 23.6 points, 7.5 rebounds and 3.6 assists with a 28.2 percent usage rate, the first option on a team that went 46-18, the third-best record in the league. In February, the man who left his native Cameroon to play his first real organized basketball at the age of 18, who two years ago averaged 7.3 points and bricked most of his 3s, started in the All-Star Game.

A cursory glance at Siakam’s statistics, however, reveals that he still has room for improvement. His true shooting percentage fell from 62.8 to 55.9 percent, a product of similar drops in his accuracy at the rim and in the midrange. According to Synergy Sports, he wasn’t particularly efficient in isolation (54th percentile) or running pick-and-rolls (55th percentile). This is where he can make yet another leap.

In January at Madison Square Garden, Raptors coach Nick Nurse said that Siakam had “changed his tempo a little bit,” sometimes slowing down to survey the floor when he sees multiple defenders looking at him. As he’s dribbling and working through his options, a possession can stall.

“Take what’s there,” Nurse said. “But also, if they’re sending two, three defenders, you gotta find the right play. There’s still a lot of growth there yet.”

Early in the game that night, Siakam dribbled the ball up with a mismatch: New York Knicks point guard Elfrid Payton was on him. The Raptors spaced the floor so he could attack, but Taj Gibson sagged off of Marc Gasol and knocked the ball away:

Here, Detroit Pistons wing Tony Snell catches Siakam by surprise twice in the same game:

In terms of efficiency, these avoidable turnovers are low-hanging fruit. The same goes for his free throw rate, which increased significantly in the nine games he played after the All-Star break. 

The bigger challenge is the superstar stuff. Can Siakam become the kind of player who reliably makes plays that have nothing to do with Toronto’s offense, even against the league’s best defenses? He saw Kawhi Leonard do it in 2018-19, and there are some encouraging signs: Siakam now hunts the above-the-break 3s opponents used to willingly surrender, and both he and the Raptors were excellent in the clutch this season.

In Toronto’s last game before the shutdown, Siakam had one of his finest performances, a 27-11-8 night against the Utah Jazz featuring a bunch of difficult but smooth turnaround jumpers. Even in that game, though, there were a couple of careless miscues in the halfcourt:

Too often, Siakam’s midrange attempts feel like concessions. When he makes his Dirk Nowitzki-style one-legger, he looks unguardable; when he misses it, it just looks like a bad decision:

In the offseason, Siakam needs to keep working on the same areas of his game he focused on last summer: his handle, his off-the-dribble jumper and his playmaking. If the playoffs started tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to see many of those Dirk shots, nor would I want him to regularly stray from the Raptors’ system and do a Leonard impression against a set defense. (It is not an accident that Toronto’s offense was terrible late in the shot clock.) 

The question is what Siakam will be able to do a year from now and beyond. Toronto used this season to get him reps as the No. 1 guy, and next season should be about either getting better at the aforementioned superstar stuff or doing less of it. He needs to clean up some of his defensive mistakes, too — he was noticeably less consistent on that end in 2019-20. 

Siakam turned 26 last month. While you typically wouldn’t expect significant strides from a player his age, there is nothing typical about his story. Siakam’s career has been defined by extraordinary improvement, and, in his own words, he is “obsessed with development.” This would be a strange time to start betting against him.