More than 90 minutes before the opening tip, Target Center is at once empty and intimate enough to hear the echoes from the dribbles and to calibrate the nuanced accuracy of deadeye shooting based on the slight differentiation in the sound of the swishes.
It is a time of both relaxation and focus, as early-bird patrons get to cluster down by the courtside fat-cat seats and watch various members of the Minnesota Timberwolves go through their pregame routines.
Naz Reid is a prominent presence, elegant as he methodically works through his paces. He alternates steady bursts of three-point shooting and dribble penetrations to the hoop, flexing the svelte brawn and finely-honed finesse of his self-molded, “Little Big Man” hybrid that makes him such a matchup nightmare.
As his assistant coaching partner Kevin Hanson zips passes toward his chest with assembly-line regularity, Naz stands in the right corner behind the arc and starts churning out treys. Absorbing the pass begins the rapid-fire rhythm of his unorthodox style. Naz has always been top-heavy from long range, eschewing the crouch in favor of a barely perceptible bend and using the strength of his arms and chest so that his shooting motion resembles a slightly strained shrug, a physical economy that enables a quick release.
During workouts before home games against San Antonio and Memphis earlier this week, Naz seemed to seek a further acceleration. Hanson’s metronomic feeds – in bunches of eight to 10 before Naz moved to a different place around the arc – didn’t allow Naz much time to regather his frame, and he seemed intent on loading even more responsibility on his upper body to cut portions of a second off the process. That efficiency is meant to cause the opponent guarding him to close out harder and with less hesitation, leaving him more susceptible to Naz blowing past him on a drive to the hoop.
That is the complementary second portion of Naz’s workout. He takes Hanson’s feed and attacks the rim, only to be confronted by another large assistant coach, simulating the defensive help in rotation that an opposing team would muster. This is where the feline ferocity of Naz comes to the fore. Now the knees are bent and coiled to pivot and spring sideways, the trunk set forward as Naz eyes his foe and crossover dribbles the ball like a whisk between his legs. He uses his two steps for dekes and jabs and feints the rest, pouncing as the opponent leans wrong.
For these two pregame practices, right-side layups were straight kisses off the glass. But the left-side maneuver is a crowd-pleaser. Using his body as a shield, he goes hard left but stays with his right hand for an over-the-head shot flicked with the wrist, creating the spin that conquers the angle and succeeds more reliably than the degree of difficulty suggests that it should. (The playground name for such refinement is “jelly,” and Naz was dubbed “Big Jelly” before he hit the pros.)
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Naz broke out of a recent shooting slump at precisely the time he was most needed. The Wolves were without starting power forward Karl-Anthony Towns against San Antonio Tuesday and without combo forward Kyle “Slo Mo” Anderson versus Memphis on Wednesday. Naz didn’t start either game but was absolutely vital on offense in two different ways while leading a resurgent bench unit in a pair of Wolves victories.
Against San Antonio, Naz used his guile and foot speed to make seven of eight shots from two-point territory (compared to converting just one of two three-pointers), including a trio of layups in transition and a hook and a runner in the more structured half-court set. He challenged the Spurs seven-and-a-half foot praying mantis, rookie sensation, Victor Wembanyama, drawing two of the five fouls that hampered Wembanyama’s effectiveness over the course of the game. He had a half-dozen rebounds, two steals (one from Wembanyama) and a blocked shot. The Wolves outscored San Antonio by eight points during the 32 minutes and 53 seconds he played, and by just one point in the 15:07 he sat.
By contrast, on Wednesday against Memphis, Naz racked up points from long range, splashing four out of six three-point attempts compared to two-of-five from inside the arc. After the starting unit yet again lapsed into isolation plays with little ball movement or movement without the ball, he was the antidote in the first half, doling out both of his assists (a three-point play finished by Anthony Edwards and a three-point shot for Nickeil Alexander-Walker) all four of his treys in the first half. The Wolves outscored the Grizzlies by 18 points in the 25:30 he played and were outscored by nine in the 22:30 he sat.
Naz is a prime example of how and why the Timberwolves have become a quality organization. He was a chubby teenager when he declared for the pros after a single year at LSU, and went undrafted because he wasn’t tall enough at six-feet nine-inches to be a classic NBA big man and not quick enough really to be anything else.
The Wolves signed him to a two-way free agent contract in early July of 2019 but his skills and work ethic were so apparent that the team upgraded it to a four-year minimum deal just two weeks later. That rookie contract totaled just $6.1 million, an amount that made Naz a more phenomenally valuable bargain with each passing season.
Every year has brought substantial improvement. As a rookie, the “Big Jelly” sobriquet could just as easily referred to his physique. Each succeeding season, the fat has been burned away and/or been transformed into the rubbery muscle and sinew. The footwork in the paint became terse dance steps. The three-pointer began morphing into a weapon rather than an anomaly.
When the Wolves swung a blockbuster deal for center Rudy Gobert in July 2022, bumping KAT to power forward, credible sources within the Wolves organization privately told me Naz’s future with the organization was essentially kaput. But he got sleeker yet, and became as rugged as a razor strop. An injury to KAT opened up bench minutes and he seized the opportunity.
Wolves president of basketball operations Tim Connelly walked his talk about fostering a team culture that recruits and retains quality characters by signing Naz to a three-year, $42-million pact last summer despite the presence of Gobert, KAT and Slo Mo on the squad, and promising draft picks like Josh Minott and Leonard Miller looming in the frontcourts of the future. And Naz has yet again made that deal look like a bargain.
The arrival of Gobert was supposed to make the Wolves into a defensive juggernaut. After an awkward season of adjustment for both player and team, Minnesota’s defense has been the best in the NBA and the best in the history of the franchise. Gobert is the godhead of it, but Naz Reid is the disciple whose development at that end of the floor demands the most attention.
Defense was the last, and seemingly most elusive, piece of making him a complete player. Even last season, he lacked the stolidity and knowledge of positioning to reliably contain frontcourt personnel, and assuming that his slim-fast physique was organic enough to throw him into guarding wing players out of the perimeter felt foolhardy. But lo and behold, the Naz of 2023-24 has been staunch, speedy and steadfast working the defensive schemes and rotations against the gamut of NBA personnel.
Wolves Head Coach Chris Finch is fond of saying that your position is defined by who you can guard. Under those terms, Naz is legitimately as much of a small forward as he is power forward. When I asked him after the Spurs game if perimeter defense is where he has improved the most this season, he boldfaced the tone in his reply – “100%.” Finch phrases a similar sentiment by citing Naz’s enhanced ability at “chase and pursuit.”
In the big picture, the most remarkable aspect of Naz’s emergence has been his ability to infuse incongruent virtues of play into his skill set without compromising the strengths he had in the first place.
He came into the NBA at 264 pounds and is currently listed at 240 pounds, which may be a dozen pounds too generous. Yet he hasn’t lost his ability to power his way into buckets near the rim, as his recent performance against Wembanyama attests. And while he’ll never be an outright bulwark against the beefy leviathans of the NBA, his lower body balance and acquisition of the jousting fundamentals involved in paint warfare have improved his rim defense.
Another way to dramatize Naz’s ability to accrete skills without forfeit is to consider how well he works in tandem with the team’s alpha scorer and alpha defender. Last season, the Wolves scored 4.2 fewer points per 100 possessions than they allowed when Naz was on the court. When he was paired with Ant, the net rating was better, just 0.9 points fewer scored than allowed over 807 minutes. But in his 199 minutes with Gobert, it was a disaster – 12.7 fewer points scored than allowed.
This season, Naz has flourished alongside both partners. In 777 minutes with Ant, the net rating is a gaudy 15.6 more points scored than allowed, owing to a 5.5 jump in points scored per 100 possessions and an 11 point decrease in points allowed. With Gobert, the improved chemistry is even more spectacular. In 585 minutes together, the Naz-Gobert tandem rivals the goodness of the Naz-Ant tandem at 15.5 more points scored than allowed. That’s a whopping 28.2 point swing over the net rating of a year ago. Their offensive productivity together has increased by 9.7 points per 100 possessions. But the defensive improvement – they’ve allowed 95.6 points per 100 possessions compared to last season’s 114.1 points – is 18.5 fewer points.
After the San Antonio game, Finch couldn’t stop gushing. Asked what makes the Ant and Naz pairing so effective, he responded, “They are our two most dynamic scorers. Defensively Naz has been outstanding. He has taken a lot of different matchups and in his switching (on to other players) Naz creates a lot of transition opportunities for us. We don’t get a ton of those and he is responsible for a lot of it, whether it is pushing it (via passing and dribbling) or at the end of it (with the finish). And he is just a ball-mover; he has that dynamic quality for our offense.”
Later, when asked if he thought his recent penchant for playing two point guards at the same time with just a single big man could be sustainable, Finch included the interior defense of Naz as well as Gobert as a reason why it could be. Specifically, he said, “Naz has been great at rim protection; he’s gotten a lot of blocked shots since we came back from the (All Star game) break.”
The Wolves have been very fortunate in terms of the health of their roster thus far this season. More than two-thirds of 59 games they have played have featured all five members of the starting lineup they projected going into the season. The team is 29-11 in those 40 games.
But the Wolves are also 13-6 when one or more of those starters are missing, a testament to their versatile and overachieving bench personnel.
Along with the Naz success story, there is Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW), a throw-in on the trade that brought Mike Conley here in exchange for D’Angelo Russell this past February. Like Naz, NAW is already on the verge of setting a career high in minutes-played for a season with more than 20 games yet to go. He is a combo guard who has filled in admirably for Jaden McDaniels when the Wolves need a wing-stopper, a calm catalyst with plenty of room to grow at age 25. Wednesday night against Memphis, he scored 12 points, doled out five assists without a turnover, and blocked four shots.
After churning through two other teams with multiple coaching changes, NAW enjoyed the supportive and stable role he was given late last season so much that he took a slight pay cut – he’s in the first season of a two-year, $9 million pact that might even be a bigger bargain than what Minnesota is paying Naz.
Then there is Slo Mo, the combo forward with a point guard’s passing acumen who is one of the best on-ball defenders on a roster suffused with superb defenders. And most recently, there is Monte Morris, the backup point guard who is extremely smart, deceptively physical, and has racked up 21 assists versus just one turnover in his first seven games with the Wolves.
Bottom line, it is a stellar quartet of people Finch can bring off the bench. (And Jordan McLaughlin has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the NBA’s best 10th men in a 9-man rotation.) Two of the four – Slo Mo and Morris – are mature vets with playoff experience and impeccable self-control. The other two – Naz and NAW – are already ace role players for a team currently holding the top playoff seed in the Western Conference. And they are going to get better.
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.
