Punch Drunk Wolves

There are two good rules to follow when freaking out about the struggles of your favorite professional basketball team.

First is to avoid getting so entrenched in your own opinions that you lose sight of everything else.

Second is to avoid believing that you know the game or the team better than the coach does.

Over many years of developing and sharing my own takes online, I’ve struggled to follow each of these. To varying degrees, so have many of my Wolves Twitter friends. Recognizing these rules helps, however, so before I double down on my most recent take about point guards, and quadruple down on past criticisms of Chris Finch, I’d first like to acknowledge some other potential issues with this team besides point guard, and offer some defenses of Chris Finch before I proceed to rip the job he’s doing as Wolves head coach.

Anyone who reads this site or follows my tweets knows that I’m currently obsessed with the notion that these Timberwolves need to stop spending a great deal of each game without a point guard on the floor. That’s my issue, my obsession. Last night’s loss to the Rockets has only reinforced it, as the game was played two different ways: With Rob Dillingham, and Without Rob Dillingham. That Finch failed to appreciate the difference when the game went to overtime, and we had to watch stagnant isolation death ball was incredibly aggravating.

But there are other issues with this team, too. First, the defense is much worse than last year’s. They’re 12th in defense, whereas last year they were 1st with some cushion between 1 and 2. If their defense was dominant, they’d be near the top of the West, but it’s not. Second, and related, it seems as if the Karl-Anthony Towns trade, at least insofar as it removed the backup center without replacement, is a contributor to the worsened defense. Julius Randle individually is not impressing anyone as a defender, and the team as a whole is missing a backup 5 with the size and ability that Towns had, in that spot. Third, Jaden McDaniels is an extremely unreliable shooter who is increasingly being invited by opponents to make open shots. He’s missing them, which hurts, but the spacing implications of that proceed to hurt everyone else, too. Fourth, as much as I’ve personally loved having Rudy Gobert on this team and continue to believe he’s a big difference maker in (Thibs voice) “what goes into winning,” it has to always be acknowledged that he’s just horrific with the basketball in his hands when asked to do anything but immediately dunk the ball. That compromises what a team can do on that side of the floor. Fifth, as his rabid supporters on Twitter make clear each day and night, it is possible that Naz Reid should be playing more minutes over Julius Randle. While I’m not personally convinced that’s “the problem,” or even *a* problem — Randle’s been consistently productive on a team that’s often unable to generate quality shots — I certainly could be wrong and the hypothesis has yet to be tested in a meaningful way. Sixth and I’ll stop here: Donte DiVincenzo has been a great deal worse than I think anyone expected, barely shooting 35 percent from the floor through 17 games of action, and showing next to nothing as a viable “combo guard” that alleviates the dearth of classic point guards on the roster.

There, that’s a bunch of things that are going wrong or might be going wrong that have little to nothing to do with my point guard obsession. These games are multifactorial, some things go right even as the ultimate score of a game goes wrong, and vice versa.

Now, about Chris Finch. I don’t need to write out his entire career resume to persuade readers that Finch is a qualified NBA head coach. I’ll just say that his succession of Ryan Saunders brought an immediate bump in team seriousness and quality that reflected that he knows how to get performance and respect from players. His job turning a heavily-flawed 2021-22 Wolves roster into a 46-win, scary first round opponent remains one of the better ones in team history. His job last year making Twin Towers Happen for the most part and getting that exceptional defense paired with “good enough” offense, earned him third place in Coach of the Year voting. Finch’s relationship with Anthony Edwards and Jaden McDaniels and his stewardship over their development into the players they are today — while maintaining a focus on winning — has been exemplary. Furthermore and beyond the accomplishments and credentials, Finch has a case that his front office screwed this team up. As mentioned above, the Towns trade so far is not working out. They miss their backup center, and DDV has not played well despite a reasonably big role and a lot of rope to make his own decisions on the floor.

More importantly, and apropos of the point guard issue that might cost Finch his job, the team let two veteran point guards depart (Jordan McLaughlin and Monte Morris) along with de facto point guard Kyle Anderson, and really only replaced them with 19-year old rookie Rob Dillingham. In my preseason “biggest questions” piece, I more or less staked out the claim that Rob was not gonna play this year, and I was not saying that as a criticism of Chris Finch. Rookies are usually bad! Finch would have been forgiven for not expecting Rob to earn minutes on a team that had a veteran point guard, and multiple, high-level “combo guards,” whose size, defense, scoring, and veteran savvy would plausibly constitute a better option that Rob, even if they were not true point guards. Finch’s gut feeling about this can easily be forgiven — he thought that NAW, DDV, and Ant could handle the minutes where Conley went to the bench, for legitimate reasons.

But having said all of that stuff above, this point guard thing is the story right now and it is going to cost Chris Finch his job if he cannot see the reality in front of his face. Those “combo guards,” are not combo at all — not on offense, anyway. This team needs a point guard on the floor. Always.

The Wolves lost last night’s game because they played 29 of 53 available minutes without a point guard. In those minutes, their offense was as stagnant as ever. When they weren’t literally having the ball taken away from the “point guard,” on his way up the floor, they were mostly relying on isolation scoring efforts by Edwards or Randle, against a very strong Houston Rockets set of defenders. In those 29 minutes of Point Guardless Play, the Wolves were outscored by 32 points. In Dillingham’s 24 minutes, they won by 26. I’m a hypocrite for using single-game +/- when it favors Rob and brushing it aside when in recent games it hasn’t gone his way, but I don’t care. He’s had a few bad plus minuses in games where he himself did just fine. If you watch this team closely enough, you can see that the simple reality of having a fast point guard to handle pressure and break down the defense bumps this team from “bad, with no chance of being good,” to one that can at least possibly reach its extremely high roster potential.

Playing without a point guard (I guess somewhere in here I should’ve mentioned that Conley’s missed the last couple games with a toe injury — I assume anyone reading this site knows that already) is an absolute non-starter for a Chris Finch basketball team. Finch is low on structure and high on player freedom, and that freedom is counterproductive when handed to five guys none of whom can consistently initiate movement. There’s irony in Finch’s lack of trust of Rob because Finch is overly trusting of most players and overly forgiving of most turnovers. Listening to Rob in his postgame remarks, you can tell that he’s carrying some level of nervousness with him, fearing that mistakes will cost him opportunities. Take it from anyone who’s played a role that isn’t entirely stable before: that is not ideal. He’ll be better if and when he feels trusted. And even right now, relying on nerves and jets, he’s at worst the team’s second best point guard and has to play every minute possible that Conley is not on the floor. Will playing Rob Dillingham mean the Wolves win every single game? Of course not. But they’ll have a good chance to win every single game, which is not the case right now.

This Timberwolves team is 8-9 against a somewhat easy schedule, playing with much better health than most teams around the league. The roster has 3 bona fide All-Stars. The Ringer has an evolving “Top 100” players list on its site. It would stand to reason that an average roster would have players staggered 30 spots apart, starting with 15. (15, 45, 75, 105, etc.) The Wolves right now hold Numbers 10 (Ant), 44 (Rudy), 57 (Randle), 66 (Naz), 75 (Jaden) and 89 (DDV). An average roster should have 3 guys in the Top 100, and the Wolves have 6 in the Top 90. Whatever flaws or quirks it may have, that’s a very strong roster that justifies high expectations. If this team cannot win more than half its games despite good health and a soft schedule, it is grossly underachieving. That will fall on Chris Finch, sooner or later. That’s just how it works.

The good news for Finch is that his central coaching quality, a trust in playmakers and an eager acceptance of turnovers as part of the game, can serve him very well with the remedy needed to turn this thing around.

Hand Rob Dillingham the keys and enjoy the ride.