The signature shot for Minnesota Timberwolves forward Jaden McDaniels during this 2023-24 NBA season thus far has been what we’ll call his rocking-chair floater.
It’s a dribble-penetration maneuver, beginning with McDaniels squaring his lanky, 6-foot, 10-inch frame up with the basket at least 20-feet away as he sizes up his defender. Shielding the ball with his body for long strides off the bounce, he wends his way forward until the resistance from one or more opponents is unassailable. Then he lifts off, often re-squaring in the air, but contorting backwards with more horizontal torque than a classic fade-away jumper, like a limbo contestant.
It should be awkward, and there are occasions when McDaniels eventually lands on his rump after getting the shot off. But the process is expertly calibrated, with McDaniels’ body hovering with the easy grace of someone at the tilted extreme of a rocking chair’s sway, as he lofts the ball over the outstretched arm of the nearest defender with exquisite finesse.
The first basket the Wolves scored in their game against the Denver Nuggets on Tuesday night was a slight rocking-chair pull-up jumper by McDaniels over the bulldog defender Aaron Gordon eight feet away from the hoop. He missed another one with Gordon in his face during the first minute of the second quarter.
By that time the Wolves were already down by nine points. The ballyhooed, nationally-televised contest between teams tied for the third-best record in the 30-team NBA already felt emptied of drama after the gametime announcement that the Timberwolves absentees would include Rudy Gobert, out with a bruised rib, and Naz Reid, sidelined by a head injury, joining Karl-Anthony Towns, healing from surgery to repair a torn meniscus.
Over the past two seasons, Nuggets versus Wolves has been keynoted by the clash of skilled, brawny big men. That narrative seemed demolished with Minnesota’s trio of bigs excised, leaving McDaniels, who weighs less than 200 pounds, as the tallest of the Wolves’ five starters that night.
But all season long the Wolves have scrapped for their resilience, and as the night wore on they surged back from 18 points down and put the outcome in doubt until Anthony Edwards clanked a potentially game-tying three-pointer in the final seconds of a 115-112 defeat. A crucial component of their spirited play was McDaniels delivering the kind of dynamic offensive performance characteristic of Naz and KAT, the power forwards he was replacing by default.
It began with a torrid flurry of plays during a two-and-half minute span midway through the second quarter. Squared up against Jamal Murray, he tossed aside the rocking chair during his dribble-drive, knocking Murray back with his arms and slamming the ball through the rim before the double-team from the Nuggets Peyton Watson could stop him. Less than two minutes later, after Murray poke-checked his dribble away from him and he won the battle against Gordon to retrieve it, he spun back, Euro-stepped around Murray, and again finished with a surprisingly quick and vicious slam dunk.
On the Wolves next offensive possession, he drove hard from the left side, forcing the Nuggets to foul him. Twenty seconds later, running the floor in transition, only a desperate foul prevented his third slam of the period. The four free throws resulting from those two plays were two-thirds of the six attempted by the Wolves in the entire second quarter. And with five minutes to play before halftime, he added a blocked shot on Denver’s seven-foot superstar Nikola Jokic for good measure.
In the third quarter, McDaniels buried a three-pointer in the first minute and later got Murray to bite on an upfake at the rim for his fifth and sixth free throws of the game. And the fourth quarter, with the resident clutch-time scorer Ant stymied into a scoreless period, McDaniels surged into the fore in the final 4:08 of the game.
He cut from the right slot and took a feed from Kyle Anderson in stride for a tomahawk slam, his third of the game. Then he nailed a trio of treys. On the first he was fouled but missed the free throw that would have made it a four-point play. On the second, he splashed an open look from the left corner. The third was the most unlikely, shot above-the-break, where McDaniels had made just 20 in 76 attempts (26.3%) for the season, with Murray’s hand in his face. It cut the deficit to three and set up Ant’s last-second attempt to tie it.
Without question, it was McDaniels most aggressive offensive game of the season. His 26 points tied his career-high for scoring. His seven trips to the free-throw line were a season high, as were his three dunks. His four made three-pointers was his second-highest total of 2023-24. It was a game the Wolves have been waiting for, if not expecting, since KAT went down just before the six game road trip commenced on March 7.
In those half-dozen contests, McDaniels barely made a third of his shots (22-for-65, 33.8%), hemorrhaged his way to 14.3% accuracy from long range (3-for-21) and got to the free throw line a grand total of 5 times. It was a precipitous dip in an already sub-par season at that end of the court.
Even with Tuesday night’s bump, McDaniels has declined in every traditional box score category compared to a year ago, with inaccurate shooting and a propensity for ill-timed fouls being the biggest concerns. His three-point percentage is mired at 34.6% after nuzzling up against 40 percent (39.8%) last season. At the other end of the court, his calling card as top-10 wing-stopper is pockmarked with games where his assignment has won the matchup. In Cleveland, his inability to contain point guard Darius Garland was a factor in that overtime loss. That’s relevant history, given that the Cavaliers are the Wolves’ next opponent at Target Center Friday night.
There are counter-arguments to all of this. If McDaniels is an “inaccurate” shooter, why is his effective field goal percentage of 55.7, which includes proper weight for all those clanked three-pointers, still above the NBA average of 54.7? (True shooting percentage, which adds in free throws, puts him under the league mean at 57.1%, versus 58.1% overall.) Per the website Cleaning the Glass, which filters out garbage time performance when games are already decided, reveals that he is in the 91st percentile in accuracy among NBA wings in shot at the rim or in the “short midrange.” (The latter distance is where the rocking chair floater makes its home.)
The retort is that average players don’t get signed to 5-year, $136-million contracts, which is what McDaniels will be paid beginning next season. He set that high bar with his peak season to-date in the 2022-23 campaign. Among the trio of Timberwolves who earned fat paydays and comprise the future core of the roster—Ant and Naz are the others—he is the one who has not immediately demonstrated the wisdom of that investment.
McDaniels has been cited by coach Chris Finch as the “barometer” of the Wolves offense—meaning that if he is getting a lot of opportunities as the fifth option among the starting five, the team is moving the ball and moving without the ball in ways that enable widespread participation. And yes, as might be expected, his shooting is less accurate in games the Wolves lose than in victorious results.
But his usage rate—the stat for “participation level”—is higher in games the Wolves lose than it is in games the Wolves win. He also plays longer in losses, scores and rebounds more, and has more assists— albeit with less efficiency.
More significantly, the Wolves’ offensive performance doesn’t seem to be as large of a factor as their defensive performance during wins and losses in the games McDaniels has played. Per the statistics at nba.com, the Wolves score four fewer points per 100 possessions in the 20 losses when McDaniels plays than they do in the 39 wins with McDaniels’ participation. But they yield a whopping 20.4 more points on defense per 100 possessions during the losses than they do during the wins in those 59 games.
A rational argument can be made that because McDaniels usually guards the opponents’ best scorer, and thus rests when that top scorer is resting, the Wolves defensive rating with him on the floor is apt to take a hit. But he has been a wing stopper on this team for much of the prior two seasons (and even a little his rookie year) and this is the first time it has made a difference.
Specifically, in the first three seasons of his career, the Wolves allowed fewer points scored per possession when McDaniels played compared to when he didn’t. From 2020-21 through 2022-23, the differences were .07 fewer points, 1.2 fewer points and 0.7 fewer points, respectively, per 100 possessions. But in the current 2023-24 season, the Wolves have given up 110.1 points per 100 possessions during the 1725 minutes McDaniels has played, and 104.3 points per 100 possessions during the 1612 minutes he hasn’t played, a significant difference of 5.8 more points. This includes the 10 games he hasn’t played at all due to injury. The Wolves won 8 of them and lost 2.
It’s important to remember than McDaniels does the dirty work. Sometimes his assignment can be a jitterbug point guard like Garland; at other times he might find himself on a behemoth like Zion Williamson. Against Denver on Tuesday, he was the de facto power forward in a lineup when combo forward Kyle Anderson was forced to play center. But on defense, McDaniels’ primary assignment was point guard Jamal Murray. That’s tough, variable, double duty.
With Gobert, KAT and Naz all dinged up to varying degrees, it might be time to lighten his load a little. If, as a power forward, he is going to have more responsibility for rebounding—and those numbers have climbed from 3.1 to 5.4 per game since KAT went down—maybe he should guard someone less taxing than Murray. The matchup data in the advanced box score of the Denver game shows Murray shooting 3-for-7 and dishing out 5 assists when McDaniels was the primary defender, versus Murray missing all four shots and issuing one assist when Nickeil Alexander-Walker was on him, a comparison skewed by the fact that McDaniels guarded him much more frequently.
The point is, NAW can be as good, or even better, than McDaniels as a wing stopper, depending on the matchup and the overall responsibility each player has in the Wolves schemes that night. One silver lining in these lineup changes and disruptions due to injuries is that the coaching staff and front office have a better bead on a broader array of possibilities via the forced experimentation. As the regular season barrels into its final weeks with the gap between the best and 10th best teams narrower than ever in the Western Conference, the Wolves still have no clue who will be their first-round opponent.
In that context, the smallball that puts McDaniels at power forward and Anderson at center has occasionally resembled the “fly around” performance and sensibility of the 2021-22 edition of the Wolves, when Patrick Beverley and Jarred Vanderbilt were spearheading the defense. The strength of this current Wolves team is the plethora of rugged on-ball defenders, which is led by McDaniels but also provides opportunities to deploy Ant and NAW and Anderson and of course Gobert is ways tailor-made to stop an opponent in a seven-game chess match.
That is what the first round will be, regardless of opponent. And despite what has been a relatively lackluster season thus far, McDaniels is vital to the mix. The rocking chair is at the ready. So is the fierce competitor who will, for better or worse, raise his intensity in the postseason. If he can knock down a few more threes, get out in transition and perform overall at the level he did on Tuesday night, the Wolves will be even more stingy at the time of year when it matters most.
Britt Robson
Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.
