Is it time for the Minnesota Timberwolves to revisit the use of Kyle Anderson?

The previous week had been bookended by embarrassments.

It began with the Minnesota Timberwolves taking “hero ball” into a dunce-cap donning display of self-ownership, fixating on the skyrocketing point total of teammate Karl-Anthony Towns while ignoring the basics of defense and dignity in a loss to the woebegone Charlotte Hornets.

Then, after teetering through a couple of road games against also-ran competition, where the Wolves unsuccessfully tried to give away the games in the fourth quarter, the week ended with a cringe-worthy collapse in San Antonio, where the talented but developmentally adolescent Spurs took antic delight in the fourth-quarter hairball of clanked shots and clueless turnovers coughed up by the Wolves.

A new week began with a foreboding matchup against the Oklahoma City Thunder to close out the four-game road trip. Although the two teams were tied for the best record in the Western Conference, it didn’t feel like a fair fight. Although relatively inexperienced, the Thunder have plundered an unsuspecting NBA thus far this season with masterful preparation and execution while riding the skills of MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. After losing to Minnesota back in late November, they had systemically dismantled the Wolves in their past two meetings.

A few hours before the game, it was announced that Wolves point guard Mike Conley would miss his fourth game in the past five contests due to a stubbornly sore hamstring. It was no coincidence that the Wolves composure and collective IQ had plummeted with Conley on the sidelines. Now 36, in his 17^th NBA season, he is a calming presence on the court and an engaging sage in the locker room, a fixer of flaws who carries himself, and performs, with the fastidious integrity of a haiku. His absence portended writer’s block on any Wolves script for redemption.

But that’s why they play the games.

The matchup turned out to be as competitively rugged and suspenseful as the teams’ won-lost records indicated it would be, with one double-digit lead – by the Wolves early in the third quarter – that lasted all of 19 seconds before a 16-2 Thunder roll restored the possession-by-possession intensity.

Conley or no, the Wolves did indeed flip the script on their recent scroll of bad habits, most notably reversing the fourth quarter pratfalls that had plagued them throughout the road trip. The recipe for their 34-24 advantage in the final stanza to close out the 107-101 victory wasn’t ever hard to decipher: On offense, make quick decisions to move the ball and move without the ball while avoiding turnovers and trusting your teammates. On defense, stay focused, don’t foul, get back in transition and keep your poise.

Voila!

After registering 13 assists but 12 turnovers in the first three periods, the Wolves doled out eight dimes with just one miscue in the fourth quarter. A lot of that arose out of top scorers Anthony Edwards and Towns choosing to get off the ball and feed their teammates as the savvy Thunder sought to follow their game plan and cut off the heads of the snake via traps and double-teams.

KAT had four assists and the team’s one silly turnover (which yielded no points), tacking on seven points despite no field goal attempts in the final 7:36, and five rebounds. Ant had five points on four shot attempts – including a resounding dunk to create a rare two-possession lead with 1:57 left to play – two assists and zero turnovers.

Both stars created more fourth quarter points via the pass than the shot, feeding subsidiary personnel the Thunder gambled wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be counted upon to score. KAT twice dished to Conley’s replacement in the starting lineup, Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW), for an open corner trey and pullup midrange jumper, as well as a layup for Jordan McLaughlin and a dunk for Rudy Gobert. Ant’s assists were modified drive-and-kick three-pointers splashed by Naz Reid and Jaden McDaniels.

I’ve belabored the Wolves maddening tendency – with Ant and KAT by far the biggest offenders – to ignore the simple pass and instead barrel into the painted area toward the basket and a bevy of defenders waiting to thwart them. Rather than another chapter-and-verse rant this time around, I’ll simply point out a few stats from the tracking data at nba.com.

When it comes to the play type “drives” – the barreling toward the hoop – the Wolves are 10^th among the 30 NBA teams in frequency, 15^th in field goal percentage and 10^th in free throw attempts. They are 24^th in the percentage of times they pass during drives, 23^rd in the percentage of times they register an assist on a drive, and first in the percentage of the times they turn the ball over.

Wouldn’t it by lovely if there were more “drive and kick” instead of merely “drive?” A pretty significant argument for that is under the tracking play type “catch and shoot,” the Wolves have the second-best overall field goal percentage, the best three-point percentage and the best effective field goal percentage (which properly weights the added value of threes).

So, worst turnover rate on drives, and most efficient production on catch-and-shoot field goal attempts. Add in the fact the Wolves NBA-best defense becomes positively superhuman in the half-court game, when turnovers aren’t creating transition opportunities for the opponent, and you understand why a team that features the firepower of Ant and KAT continues to languish somewhere between 18^th and 20^th in points scored per possession this season.

The irony of all this is that Wolves Head Coach Chris Finch has always preferred a movement-oriented, “flow” offense that involves multiple passes and quick decisions. At the beginning of the season, the need for more structure in the offense was a hot topic, but mostly in reference to positioning and spacing so that the multifaceted ways both KAT and Ant could score were given freer rein even as the potent pick-and-roll combination of Conley and Gobert could also be utilized.

I asked Finch – poorly timed, as it was the pregame before the ridiculous charade of teamwork against Charlotte – why the players had been slower to adopt his mantra of quick decisions, ball movement and movement without the ball this season compared to the previous two years.

“That’s a good question,” he said, and chose the words in his answer carefully. “I think we have got some guys who have become really comfortable trying to – well wanting to – break off the offense early; trying to get into an iso (isolation) game. We’re a heavy ‘drive-it’ team so guys are trying to penetrate a little too early before we actually can create a gap or turn corners. I think (that is because of ) our reluctance – or at times frustration – to just kind do something for each other early in the (shot) clock; sometimes it has been there and not others. I’m not sure exactly why but when you add it all up it is still … there is room for growth and we need to keep trying to hammer down on those things.”

Is that a delicate balance of when to give players full freedom of their talents and when to bring them up short? I asked.

“The deal I have always tried to strike with those guys is you have the freedom to do your thing in the flow of the offense but you also have the responsibility to keep the offense going,” he responded. “Most of the play-calls are going to go in your direction anyway – there is a kind of a natural selection; you are going to get more of your share of opportunities anyway, so you don’t need to always be forcing it.  But it feels sometimes like guys are forcing it. They have to do a better job of making the offense work for them and everybody else.”

After the Spurs hustled the Wolves out of the gym in the fourth quarter in San Antonio, Finch was blistered on social media, in general for the fourth straight final stanza collapse (albeit two of them wins anyway) and in particular for a lineup featuring four unreliable shooters – McLaughlin, Kyle “Slo Mo” Anderson, Shake Milton and Gobert – alongside either KAT or Naz to start the second and fourth quarters. In those two stints, comprising 6:30 of playing time, the Wolves were outscored by 15 points in an eventual one-point loss.

Granted, the offense couldn’t be synergistic with that group, which is why Finch put them out there with his team up double-digits each time. Conley was out, making NAW the starting point guard and McLaughlin the backup. Because J-Mac is hot-and-cold as a shooter, Finch also put Slo Mo out there as another playmaker and savvy decision-maker. He could have substituted Troy Brown for Milton – and did against the Thunder – but Milton played very well with J-Mac and Slo Mo, and crucially, Ant and Naz in the first quarter.

A review of the two rotations reveals that the alpha scorers among the quintet –KAT in the second quarter, Naz in the fourth – were as costly as the iffy shooters. KAT had his shot blocked driving into traffic twice and turned the ball over via a bad pass and an offensive foul, all in less than four minutes. Naz’s sins were mostly defensive lapses and a failure to secure rebounds. Would they have performed better if there was less onus to score thrust upon them? Yeah, probably.

A surprising amount of fans who apparently root with their heart more than their head, called for Finch to be fired; many citing a through line between the Wolves epic late-game failures in the 2022 playoffs against Memphis and this current dollop of dysfunction. That the Wolves “fell” to 34-12 and hadn’t lost more than two in a row all season was not a context they wanted to countenance.

Why revisit this? Because as one whose bias is that Finch has been the best coach in franchise history, I think a reckoning is nigh with the way he regards and deploys Slo Mo.

I’ve written the basics of this before – how Finch called Slo Mo “our most important player” and one who “saved our season” during the 2022-23 campaign; how Slo Mo suffered an eye injury that required offseason surgery he doesn’t want to talk about; and how his shooting splits this season have fallen off a cliff compared to last year.

Despite all that, Slo Mo retains great value. He is a vocal leader who demands accountability on the court and behind closed doors. Nobody on the roster, including McDaniels, is a better on-ball defender against the vast spectrum of NBA forwards. He remains a phenomenal tactician out of the court – because his three-point accuracy has essentially disappeared, he is shooting them less frequently than at any point in his 10-year career, but is trying to compensate with the highest free throw rate of his decade in the NBA.

[cms_ad:x104]In other words, nobody knows better than Slo Mo the ways he’s become a liability. When he did hit a couple of threes about a month ago, he truthfully noted he had to keep doing it to keep defenses honest – but hasn’t done it since then. Finch treasures his wisdom and desire and offers a full-throated endorsement of his play whenever his name arises.

But here’s what the numbers say: In the 1,049 minutes Slo Mo has been on the court this season, the Wolves have scored 107 points and given up 106.2 points per 100 possessions, for a net rating of 0.9 (sometimes the math is a bit off). In the 1,180 minutes Slo Mo is on the sidelines, the Wolves give up nearly two more points per 100 possessions, 108.1, but score a whopping 11 points more, at 118, for a net rating of 9.9.

The eye test bears this out. On a boatload of offensive possessions this season, the Wolves have adroitly moved the ball to the point where they have found a player wide open behind the arc. But too often, that player is Slo Mo, and his response increasingly has been to dribble forward to bring defenders toward him in order to either draw the foul or make the assist. That’s why his assist percentage is at a career high – and also why his turnover percentage is likewise a career high.

In those fateful rotations when Slo Mo was on the court with three unreliable shooters and a scoring big man against San Antonio, he couldn’t pull his weight. In the second quarter he was fouled and missed two free throws, then missed a 7-foot floater taking a smaller guard into the lane. In the fourth quarter he missed a 15-foot pullup jumper and had his layup blocked by gigantic rookie Victor Wembanyama. When Finch subbed in more scoring, he immediately missed another short midrange. (He did have a dime to Naz and a nifty pass to Gobert that Rudy couldn’t convert.)

Finch’s loyalty is understandable, and admirable in the sense that Slo Mo has a lengthy track record of value and may yet see his way clear of the doldrums. But as of now, he can no longer be regarded as a net asset on offense, and it is on Finch to respond accordingly.