Late in the second quarter of last night’s win over the Memphis Grizzlies, Andrew Wiggins was smiling. Shabazz Muhammad had just been fouled on a fast break shot attempt, and Wiggins helped him off the floor with a big grin on his face.* For the last few minutes of action, they — led by Ricky Rubio’s passes — had been running the Grizzlies off of the Target Center floor. Just a few minutes earlier when Rubio checked in, Memphis was leading by 5. After Shabazz went to the line and made both of his free throws, the Wolves led by 14. Wiggins was presumably smiling because he and Shabazz were having such an easy and fun time scoring on the fast break.
Monthly Archives: January 2016
Running with Ricky: A Way for this Wolves Team to Improve & Have Fun
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Fun with the Eye Test
LSU’s Ben Simmons
Eds. Note: We decided to watch two of the highest touted players in this year’s upcoming NBA Draft, LSU’s Ben Simmons and Duke’s Brandon Ingram. We basically flipped back and forth between the games and did ad-hoc eye tests of the two players. Be warned: This is not an analytics piece, it’s a fun comparison piece. Your mileage may vary. Have fun.
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Quarterly Report Card: Wolves Slide into Season’s Halfway Point
After last evening’s blowout loss at Oklahoma City, the Timberwolves reached the season’s midway point. They have a 12-29 record. That they were at one time 8-8 and have not suffered any serious injuries this season (knocks on all of the wood) tells you just about everything you need to know about how their second quarter of the season — the last 20 games — went for them. They won 3 of those 20, defeating the Nets, the Kings, and the Jazz who were without most of their best players due to injuries. Many of the 17 losses, like last night’s, were lopsided.
However, since I need to write something and this represents a calendar benchmark of sorts, I’ll dig into the bloody details of the past quarter of the Wolves season. Just like last time, I’ll do letter grades, with each one representing the player’s performance in the last 20 games only. All advanced stats referenced come from nba.com if they aren’t otherwise linked, and refer to the last 20 games of the season.
As with last time, grades take role and expectations into account. An A for one player doesn’t necessarily mean he’s playing better basketball than someone else with a B.
Ricky Rubio: A- (First Quarter Grade: B+)
Rubio grades out slightly better than last time (B+) for the simple reason that he played in all 20 games of the season’s second quarter. Health has been a major concern for Rubio in his career to date, and it’s nice to see him playing without any injury problems. His minutes remain a little bit low compared to how crucial he is to the team (30.4 per game) but some of that owes to the lopsided losses the Wolves have suffered in recent weeks. In those 30 minutes per game, Rubio has compiled impressive all-around stats including an assist-to-turnover ratio of 8.7 to 2.3. He averaged 2.7 steals per game in the second quarter of the season. Russell Westbrook leads the NBA with a 2.4 average overall. (Rubio trails him slightly at 2.3, playing fewer minutes.) Rubio’s net rating (+/- per 100 possessions) has been negative (-2.4 to be exact) but much better than all of his teammates who play significant minutes.
The two most interesting Rubio stats from the season’s second quarter: (1) When he sits on the bench, the Wolves are outscored by 18.3 points per 100 possessions. That is simply incredible. This team has simply been unable or unwilling to address its backup point guard problem in the last few seasons and it remains an abject disaster in the minutes Rubio doesn’t lead them; (2) Rubio is shooting 41.7 percent from three-point range. His form doesn’t look any different, but hey: We’ll take it! Almost nothing would be better for this team’s progress than Rubio improving as a perimeter shooter. In the occasional possession where the Wolves properly space the floor around a double-teamed Andrew Wiggins, the ball often ends up in Ricky’s hands with a three-point shot to be had, if he’ll take it. The better he becomes at knocking those down, the better the team will be.
Rubio remains a good player and despite how disastrously his team has been playing, he continues to do everything he can to help them try to win.
Zach LaVine: D (First Quarter Grade: B+)
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A Simple Play
If the Wolves spread the floor with uninvolved players standing behind the three-point line, particularly in the corners, they’d have more success. Last night, one simply play involving Bjelica and Wiggins demonstrated as much.
Kevin Martin actually brought the ball up the floor in a semi transition scenario and 4 Timberwolves spread out evenly around the arc, with Karl-Anthony Towns posted near the lane.
Bjelica is playing the 4 and has Rockets big man Clint Capela on him. Capela’s natural instincts are to protect the paint first, so when Martin swings the ball to Bjelica, Capela has to close out hard.
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Wolves Keep Losing, Need Backup 1 & 4
The Timberwolves lost at home to the Dallas Mavericks yesterday, extending their current losing streak to 6 games. They’ve lost 10 of their last 11, and face a difficult upcoming schedule. Their next three games include an away game against James Harden’s Rockets bookended by a pair of matchups against the Thunder. The All-Star Break is 16 games and about a month away. Of those 16, the only ones that feel potentially winnable right now are the pair of games against Anthony Davis’s Pelicans, the home game against the dysfunctional Phoenix Suns, and a game at Staples Center against the Lakers. If I had to bet right now, I’d say the Wolves will win 2 of those 4, and maybe 1 random game out of the other dozen, which involve legit NBA teams that are putting away this Wolves team with ease.
Coming into the season, the Wolves were predicted by gamblers and experts to struggle. This was largely because of how young the roster is. Part of me wanted to believe that they’d exceed expectations for the simple reason that every time Ricky Rubio has been healthy, the Wolves have been competitive. Although Kevin Love was obviously a great teammate, there were times when Rubio-led Wolves teams had poor supporting casts, but he was able to set up enough dunks and open jumpers to make his teammates better and win games; sometimes against the best teams in the league. They beat the Spurs twice in Ricky’s first season with players like Michael Beasley, Darko Milicic, Wesley Johnson and Derrick Williams logging significant minutes. I figured that if Ricky could win with those players, he might be able to do the same with Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns, too — even despite their extremely young ages and lack of experience.
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Talkin AAU Blues
Last night, the Timberwolves lost another game. Not just another game, but they lost another home game, and another home game against a mediocre opponent. This time it was the Milwaukee Bucks, who came into the contest rocking a 13-21 record, near the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The Wolves lost for a variety of reasons. They shot the ball poorly; even rookie phenom Karl-Anthony Towns, whose shot is one of the few reliable things about this year’s team. After stingy defense in the first quarter, led by the usual cast of defensive characters — Ricky Rubio, Tayshaun Prince, Kevin Garnett — they defended worse and worse as the game went on, surrendering dunks out of pick-and-roll sets down the stretch of the game. They ended up losing by 10 points, after leading by 17 at one point, late in the first quarter. It was one of the team’s ugliest performances of the season.
Afterward, the wait for Coach Sam Mitchell was longer than usual. Chatting with fellow bloggers in the media room, I joked that someone should open with a question about Zach LaVine’s huge alley-oop dunk; it came late in the game, after the damage had been done, and if nothing else probably upset Mitchell even more. The spectacular dunk, in the context of a terrible performance, highlighted the apparent gulf between his young players’ physical potential and their realized basketball ability.
Nobody asked that question, and that was certainly for the best. Not only because it would have been silly and ruined the presser, but because Mitchell was ready to talk last night, and get something off of his chest. Mitchell wanted to talk AAU basketball, and what it’s done to spoil the young players on his Timberwolves team. The bad habits that they have developed as a result of “coaching” from the likes of non-coaches such as “the guy who owns the hardware store” and “some dude that’s got some money for sneakers and gear.” William Bohl typed up the full quote at A Wolf Among Wolves, and I encourage you to check it out in full.
This quasi-ideological rant against The State of Basketball by Mitchell was met with a wide range of reactions on Twitter. I personally loved it, but that had more to do with the insight we were provided about How Sam Really Feels than any clear agreement with what he was saying. There are plenty of old school, former players willing to denounce modern basketball. The high-profile examples of late usually involve the Golden State Warriors championship-winning style of play. Charles Barkley focuses on their lack of interior size, and how (he believes) they would lose to teams from his era. Mark Jackson believes that Steph Curry is “hurting the game” because of how young kids are shooting too many long jumpers before rounding out their complete skill sets. When these people say these things, the NBA blog engines heat up with reaction pieces, and Twitter arguments ensue.
This AAU thing of Mitchell’s is common, it’s not new, and it blends in with the related discussion about college basketball as training for the pros, as opposed to allowing and encouraging the most talented players to enter the NBA as early as they possibly can. But the general discussion about how 18, 19 and 20 year olds prepare for their futures in basketball is not usually as specific as Mitchell’s was, so let’s think about What He is Saying when he says these things after a bad loss to the Bucks.
First, Mitchell is focusing on “stance.” He’s focusing on the stance that his young players are [not] in, on both ends of the floor. Instead of having their knees bent at all times, he’s noticing that they stand up, which is more of a resting position than a basketball-ready one. On defense, he mentioned how they had to do “slide drills” in training camp, an unanticipated degree of basic that Mitchell felt should have been better coached to these guys when they were younger. On offense, he mentioned how they catch the ball “standing up” and bring the ball up over their head, as opposed to clearing through in a real triple-threat position.
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The Punch-Drunk Podcast, Episode 13
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Punch-Drunk Wolves 