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Want to know how the Minnesota Timberwolves 2023-24 season is going?
Wednesday night’s win over the San Antonio Spurs was a lackluster victory, a repast akin to the 5 p.m. supper special for senior citizens on the outskirts of town.
Why yes, it happened to be the Wolves fifth win in a row, and their 15th in the past 17 games. But squinting the parameters down to the just-completed Spurs game and the team’s previous ho-ho-hum triumph over the lowly Hornets in Charlotte on Sunday, I asked Wolves Head Coach Chris Finch – asked him with a straight face and a sincere heart, in fact – whether he viewed these insufficiently glorious victories as half-empty or half-full.
Finch caught the woe-infused wavelength and deigned to surf it for a few sentences.
“I’m probably more of a half-empty guy by nature. We have got to get better through winning. It is a challenge and a sign of maturity … Our turnovers are creeping up, the intensity defensively has got to maintain when Rudy (Gobert) is off the floor and I think we just have to continue to stay in the flow of the offense.”
Understand that within the previous five minutes, Finch had said of 10-year veteran center Gobert, “this is best I have ever seen him play on both sides of the ball,” and, after being asked about the importance of point guard Mike Conley, replied, “There is no new way to say how important he is. Pretty damn important.”
The Wolves are breathing in the atmosphere that surrounds an elite team, but with lungs that have yet to be vaccinated. With a record of 16-4, they are on a 66-win pace for a full 82-game season, which would obliterate their previous best of 58 wins, which is itself seven wins better than any other campaign in the 35-year history of the franchise.
Adapting to this new environment is tricky. At this point the Wolves should come into every game expecting to win, but cannot let their mindset and performance tip over into that of a team that has become accustomed to winning. It is a balancing act that requires a measured mixture of gushing and critical fretting.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Craig Lassig[/image_credit][image_caption]Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert[/image_caption]Recency bias demands that we open the mix with Gobert, who performed in his inaugural year with the Wolves like the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz,” be it the stiff movements or the need for a heart. This season the joints are oiled, the mind is open, the trust in coaches and teammates is cemented and he’s playing like a banshee joyously working out a grudge with the rest of the league – never so obviously as Wednesday against the Spurs.
The Wolves went on three second-half runs that decided the game and Gobert was at once the linchpin and the detonating force in all of them.
Beset by foul trouble that cost him half of 24 minutes of the first two periods, Gobert broke a sweat by starring in a 9-0 burst in the period’s opening three minutes comprised of a salty and sweet confection of his virtues. He forced two misses and two turnovers from his defensive assignment Zach Collins. He ornamented a chase-down rebound with a saucy behind-the-back pass to his teammate while heading up the court. He drew a foul on Collins with a torrid drive that began 15-feet from the hoop. There was also an underhanded dime (assist) for a Conley trey and a pair of slam dunks from a Conley bounce pass and his offensive rebound, respectively.
Gobert’s contributions to the 11-0 run later in the third quarter and the 16-2 run that iced the game in the fourth quarter would take too long to describe. Suffice to say that on defense he was like a cruel middle-schooler scaring smaller kids by scampering around to pop out of crevices in a haunted house. On offense he picked, rolled, dished, and retained his suddenly secure handle both catching and dribbling the ball – his lone turnover was prompted by one excess movement during the literally dozens of screens he set that night.
During his 30 minutes 11 seconds on the court, the Wolves scored at a pace of 117.5 points per 100 possessions and allowed 69.4 points per 100 possessions. In the locker room afterwards, told of Finch’s assessment that he hasn’t played better than he’s playing now, he assented. “Personally, I think I’m the best Rudy I’ve ever been.”
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Craig Lassig[/image_credit][image_caption]Minnesota Timberwolves power forward Karl-Anthony Towns[/image_caption]Gobert’s partner in the ballyhooed two bigs experiment, Karl-Anthony Towns, was much less effective on Wednesday. During his 32 minutes and 5 seconds on the court, the Wolves scored at a pace 87 points per 100 possessions – only Shake Milton had worse numbers, and Milton’s downward spiral toward self-immolation is beginning to resemble Bryn Forbes’ spectacular flameout from a season ago.
“KAT was trying to drive and they were throwing bodies at him all the time tonight,” Finch said in his postgame presser on Wednesday. “He needed to kick it out early – I think he had four or five drives where they stripped him or he got an offensive foul. That is something we haven’t seen (from him) for a couple of games.”
Indeed, we are here mostly to gush, not fret about, KAT’s recent performances. My persistent pessimism about the viability of Gobert and KAT sharing the floor on defense has been discredited mostly due to KAT’s adaptability when defending in space. His seven-foot frame, but especially his enormous feet, are not designed for quickness and agility. Yet here he is, the current leader in playing time for the top defense in the NBA.
Before Wednesday’s game, I asked Finch in what ways has KAT helped himself and the team most on that side of the ball.
“Being more comfortable navigating all the actions that he finds off the ball,” the coach replied. “(His) containing drives have been a significant improvement. I think he is still fouling less.
“We are way more comfortable understanding the positions to put him in when we go through a game plan. But it is literally about him, and Naz (Reid). Both have spent most of their careers guarding pick and roll. Now they have to guard a variety of actions. Their skill awareness is higher.”
The “containing drives” improvement has been especially apparent. KAT’s mastery of “verticality” – the ability to challenge drives by jumping or otherwise extending the body straight upward, to avoid fouling, is especially praiseworthy because he has a (mostly earned) reputation for being both foul prone and a poor defender. Yet his dedication to the fundamentals of footwork, positioning and timing his leap – plus the enhanced maturity of playing the theatrical martyr much less frequently – has already begun to erode those negative impressions.
This isn’t to say that KAT is destined for any All Defensive NBA citations. He is still better defending from the center position, especially if the scheme isn’t classic drop coverage – frontcourts that swap out Gobert to include KAT with Naz and Kyle “Slo Mo” Anderson, or KAT with Slo Mo and Jaden McDaniels, are among the Wolves’ most effective three-player lineup combinations in terms of defensive rating. But the fact remains that in the 297 minutes KAT has been off the court thus far this season, the Wolves have allowed less than 100 points per 100 possessions, a stingier mark than with any other Timberwolves’ player absence.
Of course the offensive output also plummets when KAT sits, and along with him lessening his defensive liability when paired with Gobert, the fact that he has retained his stellar shooting accuracy despite the switch to power forward is reason to rank his play among the reasons why the Wolves have made such a significant leap thus far this season. Finch would still like to tilt his shot selection more toward three-pointers.
“We definitely need him and are at our best when KAT is stretching the floor from three,” Finch said Wednesday.
But without the magnetism and marksmanship generated by KAT’s versatile shooting, the Wolves 19th ranked offensive output would surely sink into the league’s bottom 10 this season.
[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Craig Lassig[/image_credit][image_caption]Timberwolves small forward Kyle Anderson[/image_caption]If one were asked to name the Wolves’ most reliable, worry-free player last season, Slo Mo would be the obvious choice – especially if Finch were involved in the voting. This season, however, in his classically slow but sure manner of doing most everything, Slo Mo is providing the Wolves with reason to fret.
Most blatantly, he is reluctant to shoot, especially from three-point range. He’s never been a gunner from distance – only once in his 10-year career has he averaged more than two trey attempts per game. (And that was a wild outlier, 3.8 3PA in his 2020-21 season in Memphis.) But Finch and smart Wolves adore him for the quality of his decision-making, and coming off the bench for a Wolves team that desperately needs shooters to space the floor and spice up the offense for their second unit, the right decision is to shoot open threes as often as possible.
Instead, Slo Mo has attempted exactly four three-pointers over the past month, a period that includes 13 games. He’s had ample opportunities – because of his playmaking abilities, he is often camped out on the perimeter and the Wolves sets and flow both feature perimeter ball movement. At least once or twice per game, sometimes more, he receives the ball with all the factors – the rhythm of the ball movement, the placement of the defense, the positioning of the opposing defense –indicating that he should let it fly. Instead, he increasingly either furthers the ball movement with a quick pass, or dribbles inside the arc looking for open teammates, a possible foul or a different shot.
None of this is wise, except for the existence of another fretful factor: Slo Mo has made just two treys all season, and none among those four he has attempted since Nov. 8. His 16.7 shooting percentage from long range is a sharp careen away from his career-best accuracy of 41% (on 1.5 attempts) last season.
Adding to the fretful situation is the fact that Slo Mo underwent surgery on his left eye during the off-season after being injured in the next-to-last playoff game against Denver. Once he was on a clear road to recovery, he admitted that the injury was significant enough that at one point the thought his career might be over. He recovered rapidly enough to play for China in this summer’s FIBA World Cup games.
But last month, he angrily tossed aside the goggles he had won all season while having trouble making free throws. The goggles are still gone but the shooting accuracy hasn’t returned.
There is evidence to support the contention that this is more of an aggravating slump than a medical issue. Slo Mo has suffered through shooting woes before, sometimes for an extended period. Three times in his career he has shot below 30% from long range, and as recently as his last season in Memphis two years ago he posted the third-worst effective field goal percentage of his career, making just a third of his three-pointers and 48.1% of his two-pointers.
Be it slump or something else, it is affecting the way both he and the team perform. When Milton was getting heavier minutes off the bench and clanking most of his shots, opponents began to give both him and Slo Mo room to shoot from the perimeter, hurting the Wolves spacing, and offensive output, with the second unit.
Also, Slo Mo is too wise not to recognize what is going on and his attempts to compensate are getting in the way of his smooth decision-making. You can see him hesitate for a split second eschewing a shot you know he should take. It is a tribute to his formidable court IQ that he is finding alternate ways to wring points out of the situation. Given that he has lost confidence in the trey, he is still not settling for the long two, continuing to penetrate so that the percentage of his shot attempts from 3-10 feet and 10-16 feet are both career highs, as are his free throw attempts per game as he works to draw fouls.
The Wolves have downplayed the situation and neither the team nor Slo Mo seem inclined to make anything more of it than a temporary slump. “I’m not worried,” Finch said dismissively.
Meanwhile, when Slo Mo is on the court, the Wolves’ already elite defense tightens another notch, allowing 102.7 points per 100 possessions. No other member of the nine-player rotation helps create a stingier defense. As with the rest of the things surrounding this charmed season, there is more gushing than fretting involved to create a true balance.
