A game after fouling out for the first time in his NBA career, Jahlil Okafor displayed immediate purpose on Sunday against the Dallas Mavericks. Thirty-six seconds into the opening quarter, he floated home the first of his 12 field goals. Within the next two minutes, he had knocked down three more buckets. By the time Brett Brown had finally given Okafor a breather with just over two minutes left in the period, the rookie center’s box line spoke for itself. He had scored 18 points, hit eight of his nine shots, all while making Dallas’ defensive attempts - particularly those of Zaza Pachulia, who is 11 years Okafor’s senior - look futile.

Whether he was marked by Pachulia, rookie Salah Mejri, or veterans Chandler Parsons and Wesley Matthews, Okafor used both finesse and power to have his say in the first period.

“My teammates were getting me the ball in good position to score,” Okafor said of the factors that contributed to his showing. “They kept telling me to be aggressive.”

And aggressive Okafor was. He delivered four dunks (shown below), which is a relatively high volume figure for Okafor (a season-high, in fact), despite the fact that he scores so frequently and proficiently at the rim. Per stats.nba.com, the Duke product entered the evening with 33 total slams.





Having exhausted virtually all of his traditional low post defensive options towards the end of the first half, Dallas head coach Rick Carlisle finally decided to give small forward Chandler Parsons a crack at defending Okafor, even though Parsons is two inches smaller and about 45 pounds lighter than the Sixers’ center. Parsons put forth far more physical resistance than any of his predecessors, and remained on Okafor for most of the third quarter.

That the Mavericks allowed Okafor to go four for 10 from the floor in the aftermath of his smoldering first-quarter effort reflects, in part, the success behind their defensive adjustments. On the other hand, it would have been a tall order - Anthony Davis at Detroit-esque [link] - for Okafor to maintain a similar rate of production for the rest of the game. To Okafor’s credit, when his shots stopped falling as regularly as they did in the first period, he still managed to get to the free throw line, where he knocked down five of six tries between the second and fourth frames. In all, Okafor was seven for 10 on his foul shots, and has converted 20 of 24 attempts from the stripe this month.

As skilled as Okafor has been offensively, he leads all first-year players with an average of 17.4 points per game, and on Sunday became just the fourth rookie to reach the 30-point mark, he and the Sixers both recognize that his continuing defensive development is a top objective.

“We obviously had a hard time stopping them,” said Okafor. “They are a veteran team, and they played a really good game.”

