Power of the pack: Timberwolves putting it all together, especially on the defensive end

The back-of-the-envelope math made sense: After playing like the NBA’s best offense for four months of the 2021-22 season but falling short in the playoffs due largely to an inability to protect the paint and grab defensive rebounds, the Timberwolves would attempt to level up by bringing in the NBA’s premier paint protector and defensive rebounder. Sometimes, though, what sounds good when you’re sketching it out winds up looking anything but in practice … and for the first year, the Rudy Gobert equation in Minnesota seemed doomed by some confounding variables.

Gobert got a late start to training camp after helping lead France to silver at EuroBasket 2022. He came in nursing a number of dings and injuries from tournament play, looking stiffer and less potent than he had throughout his rise to defensive primacy in Utah. The Wolves’ incumbent All-NBA center, Karl-Anthony Towns, landed in the hospital with a preseason illness that cost him nearly 20 pounds. Later, a calf strain would cost him 51 games, wrecking Minnesota’s best-laid plans of allowing its mammoth tandem to develop the kind of chemistry it would need to make all that size matter — and to figure out how to keep from cramping the style (and driving lanes) of Anthony Edwards.

The numbers were ugly last season: The Wolves barely outscored opponents when Towns and Gobert played together, had a bottom-10 defense when Towns played without Gobert and had a bottom-five offense when Gobert played without Towns. The vibes, somehow, often seemed even worse: The regular-season finale featured Gobert and versatile veteran Kyle Anderson getting in a sideline scuffle, resulting in the center being suspended for the first game of the play-in tournament, and Jaden McDaniels breaking his hand by punching a wall in frustration, resulting in the defensive ace missing the entirety of Minnesota’s first-round playoff loss to Nikola Jokić’s Nuggets.

Wolves ownership had dangled a lucrative offer (including, reportedly, an equity stake in the franchise) to lure Tim Connelly from the championship-caliber team he’d built in Denver partly to make big, bold moves like the Gobert gambit in search of the organization’s first championship. Following the failure of the first year of the new era, Connelly chose a different, arguably even bolder encore: not panicking.

"I'm a pretty patient person,” Connelly recently told Michael Rand of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

A quarter of the way through the 2023-24 NBA season, the Wolves are reaping the rewards of that patience — and finally seeing the realization of the vision that Connelly and Co. had sketched out on the back of that envelope.

“We needed to form an identity,” Wolves head coach Chris Finch recently told reporters. “We didn’t have an identity last year. They were a little bit different every night.”

They have one now — and it’s the one Connelly pushed (nearly) all of his trade chips into the middle of the table to find two summers ago.

After going into Dallas and taking down Luka Dončić’s Mavericks on Thursday, the Timberwolves sit atop the West at 18-5, tied with the Celtics for the best record in the NBA. They’re outscoring opponents by 8.2 points per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass — third-best in the league, behind only Philadelphia and Boston Oklahoma City. If that holds, it’d be the best net rating of any Minnesota team in CtG’s database, which stretches back to 2003-04 — the year when a peak-of-his-powers, MVP-winning Kevin Garnett teamed with Latrell Sprewell and Sam Cassell to lead the Wolves to 58 wins and the Western Conference finals.

A skeptic might note that the Wolves have benefitted from one of the NBA’s softest opening slates, according to multiple strength-of-schedule metrics. They’ve been the recipient of some good fortune, too, facing a slew of teams missing a star: the Heat without Jimmy Butler, the Pelicans without Zion Williamson (twice), the 76ers without Joel Embiid, the Warriors without Stephen Curry, the injury-ravaged Grizzlies during Ja Morant’s suspension (twice), the Jazz without Lauri Markkanen, the Hornets without LaMelo Ball and, on Thursday, the Mavericks without Kyrie Irving.

But all you can do is play who’s in front of you, and the Wolves have taken advantage of that favorable stretch of road by doing what good teams do: namely, beating bad teams. Minnesota is 9-2 against teams under .500, 7-2 against teams in the bottom 10 in point differential, 6-1 against bottom-10 offenses and 5-1 against bottom-10 defenses. And it’s not as if the Wolves have shrunk against the better competition they’ve faced; they’re 9-3 against over-.500 teams, too, with impressive wins over the Nuggets, Thunder and East-leading Celtics.

“They beat us up,” Celtics star Jaylen Brown told reporters. “They made it tough for us to get to our spots, get to where we wanted to execute. They were the first team that put that kind of pressure on us.”

That’s the identity. Minnesota puts That Kind of Pressure on even the best of the best, rising on the strength of a defense that has looked precisely as monstrous and stingy as Wolves brass had hoped.

No matter whose stats you use — NBA Advanced Stats, Basketball-Reference.com, Cleaning the Glass (whose stats strip out garbage-time production), Dunks and Threes (whose ratings factor in the quality of the offenses you’ve faced), whatever — Minnesota leads the NBA in points allowed per possession. The Wolves have allowed a whopping 7.75 fewer points per 100 possessions than the league’s average defense this season, according to PBP Stats — the third-largest differential of any team since 2000, behind only Tim Duncan’s 57-win 2003-04 Spurs and the KG-led 2007-08 Celtics, who won 66 games and the NBA championship.

The Wolves are built to smother opponents with size, length and physicality. They aim to blot out the sun, enveloping opponents in the towering shadow of Gobert (7-foot-1, 7-foot-9 wingspan) and Towns (7-foot, 7-foot-4 wingspan) on the interior and erasing their space to operate outside by deploying the edge-rusher strength of Edwards (listed at 6-foot-4, reportedly a couple of inches taller than that now, 6-foot-9 wingspan) and the pterodactyl menace of McDaniels (listed at 6-foot-9, reportedly a couple of inches taller than that now, near 7-foot wingspan).

Managing to keep McDaniels out of the Gobert trade — perhaps at the cost of an extra first-round pick or two — now looks like a masterstroke for Minnesota. The 23-year-old, who just returned to the lineup after missing eight games with a sprained right ankle, has become one of the Wolves’ most important players by developing into one of the NBA’s most valuable commodities: an All-Defensive Team-caliber perimeter stopper with a burgeoning offensive game (68% on 2-pointers, 47% on corner 3s, more comfort and juice attacking closeouts and driving to the cup) who is capable of guarding the opponent’s best scorer across four positions … and who somehow, despite being damn near 7 feet tall, manages to never get screened:

The investment in size carries over to the second unit, too. Reserve bigs Anderson and Naz Reid (both 6-foot-9 with 7-foot-3 wingspans) fit neatly together or alongside either of the two star centers. Nickeil Alexander-Walker (6-foot-5, 6-foot-10 wingspan) — the less heralded import in the four-team February deal in which Minnesota remade its point guard position by exchanging D’Angelo Russell for Mike Conley — has earned his way into Finch’s rotation with disruptive on-ball defense (a combined 5.7 steals, blocks and deflections per 36 minutes) on some awfully tough backcourt covers.

Add in Troy Brown Jr. (6-foot-7, 6-foot-11 wingspan) and Shake Milton (6-foot-5, 7-foot wingspan), and the Wolves have great positional size across the board. (Even the exceptions, point guards Conley and Jordan McLaughlin, work their tails off at the point of attack.) At the risk of oversimplifying things: If you want to build an elite defense, being friggin’ huge is a pretty good place to start. And the Wolves have been a hell of a lot better than pretty good.

Like all that size, Minnesota’s statistical profile on defense is overwhelming. The Wolves sit in the top five in the NBA in blocked shots, points allowed in the paint, the share of their opponents’ shots that come at the rim and field-goal percentage allowed — at the rim, from midrange and from beyond the arc.

They’re also just outside the top five in fast-break points allowed and how often they allow opponents to get out in transition — an emphasis on getting your ass back after the shot goes up and forcing the opponent to play against what has been, very comfortably, the NBA’s most brutalizing first-shot defense. Minnesota’s allowing just 88.1 points per 100 possessions in the half-court; the gap between that mark and the second-place Clippers (92.3 points per 100) is larger than the gap between the No. 2 Clips and the No. 12 Trail Blazers (96.5 points per 100).

Committing to better floor balance is just one of the attention-to-detail improvements the Wolves have made this season. After routinely ranking in the bottom five in the league in how often they sent opponents to the free-throw line, they’re all the way up to tied for sixth in foul rate. They’re not elite on the glass, but they’re better — tied for 15th in defensive rebounding rate, up from the bottom five in each of the last three seasons, and tied for 14th in second-chance points allowed per game.

Add all that up, and you’ve got a recipe for a unit that can suffocate offenses. The Wolves held opponents at or below one point per possession 10 times in 87 combined regular- and postseason games in 2022-23. They’ve already done it nine times this season.

Your standard be-mindful-of-small-samples-and-variance caveats apply; Wolves opponents are shooting just 33.3% on “open” or “wide-open” 3-pointers, meaning there’s no defender within 4 feet of the shooter, according to NBA.com’s tracking data. But Minnesota’s defensive dominance feels less like the product of unsustainable luck and more like the natural outgrowth of a three-time Defensive Player of the Year rediscovering his best self.

Gobert looks healthier and lighter on his feet when defending in space than he did last season; opponents have managed a measly 0.65 points per possession against him in isolation, according to Synergy Sports Technology, shooting just 7-for-22 against him on those plays. He also might be — perhaps, just a tad — pissed off about getting zero Defensive Player of the Year or All-Defensive Team votes last season. And that has been bad, bad news for opposing offenses:

The three-time All-Star is tied for fifth in the NBA in blocks per game, sixth in block percentage and 11th in shots contested per game. When Minnesota opponents feel froggy enough to test the water in the paint, Jaws pops out: They’re shooting 60.8% on all attempts at the rim when Gobert’s on the floor, which would be the third-lowest mark in the league for the full season, and just 48.2% when they challenge him directly, according to Second Spectrum’s tracking. (That ranks him fourth out of 146 players who’ve guarded at least 50 up-close tries this season; it’s also nearly 10% lower than last season and on pace for his lowest mark since 2016-17.)

An awful lot of the time, though, those probing ball-handlers and would-be drivers just wind up deciding discretion is the better part of valor and looking elsewhere. When Gobert’s on the floor, only 25.4% of opponents’ shot attempts have come within 4 feet of the basket — in line with the best deterrence rate of his career:

“This year, [Gobert] is determined to get back to the player that he was, prove to himself, his teammates, the fans and everybody that he was worthy of the trade,” Finch recently said, according to Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic. “Which we all knew last year anyway.”

Ah, yes: the trade.

Plenty of pundits panned the Gobert deal as Minnesota essentially stripmining its future — unprotected first-round picks in 2023, 2025 and 2027, a top-five-protected 2029 first-rounder, the right to swap first-round picks in 2026, and five players, including 2022 first-round pick Walker Kessler — for an awkwardly fitting 30-year-old on a massive deal. But the move also represented a bet that the Wolves already had secured their future in the form of Edwards: a nuclear athlete and effervescent presence with the potential to be a top-shelf offensive engine, an All-Defensive Teamer on the wing and the megawatt-smiling face of a franchise.

The brightest silver lining of last year’s grim voyage came in Edwards’ explosion to All-Star status. He’s continued that climb in Year 4, averaging 23.6 points, 5.5 rebounds and 5.2 assists per game while getting to the free-throw line, finishing at the rim, cooking in the midrange, operating in the pick-and-roll, hitting catch-and-shoot 3s, dishing assists and grabbing rebounds all at career-high rates.

Hell, Ant has even set up Gobert 11 times in 494 minutes together — more than halfway to last year’s total of 27 in 1,639 shared minutes:

There are more levels for Edwards to hit: in mapping the floor and processing layers of defense (which he did brilliantly against Dallas), in striking the right balance between that buttery smooth in-between game and using his estimable physical gifts to get a little closer (just 24% of his shot attempts this season have come at the basket, a career low), in finding the best pathways to propel the Wolves to something better than a league-average half-court offense. Even so: Putting up 25-5-5 on above-average shooting efficiency (which he was doing before suffering a hip injury that has alternately sidelined and hampered him over the past couple of weeks) is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, the list of other dudes doing it is only eight names long and looks a lot like The MVP Conversation. Decent company for a guy who only turned 22 in August.

Accommodating both Edwards’ rise and Gobert’s presence has required Towns to make some space, literally and figuratively — slight reductions in his touches and time of possession, as well as a modest curtailing of his hunting ground on offense. (Check the heat map: more tightly contained in the middle of the floor than last year.) After a shaky start to the season, though, he’s found a way to get in where he fits in, catching a hellacious rhythm en route to 23.4 points, 9.9 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game over the last month on scorching 55/49/90 shooting splits.

He’s gotten in on the act when it comes to setting up his frontcourt counterpart, too. KAT’s tied with Conley for the team lead in assists on Gobert’s buckets, frequently looking for his fellow 7-footer on deep seals in the paint and high-low lobs and even running some giganto-ball 4-5 pick-and-rolls — one reason why Minnesota’s scoring nearly 12 more points per 100 in Towns-Gobert minutes this season than last year:

Crucially, Towns has gotten his offensive game untracked while more frequently and fluidly guarding opposing power forwards in two-big lineups that have grinded opposing offenses to dust. The Wolves are allowing a microscopic 106.8 points per 100 in Gobert-Towns minutes, lower than their league-best full-season mark. They’ve also defended at a top-three level when Towns plays alongside Reid, who has made his new three-year, $42 million deal look like a steal — and has looked like a legit Sixth Man of the Year candidate — with his ability to spread the floor, handle the ball and look to score on damn near any big he can find. Quoth the poet: “I’ve said it before: Everybody’s food.”

While the rest of the young Wolves eat, Conley sets the table, offering precisely what Minnesota’s braintrust hoped he would. The 17th-year veteran has been the sort of even-tempered stabilizing agent who can help incubate a new culture of professionalism — when he can get the kids to chill out with the video games, anyway — and integrate his former pick-and-roll partner into the flow of a new offense (22 of Gobert’s 114 makes this season, nearly 20%, have come off a Conley helper).

He’s also a low-key, high-efficiency complementary offensive player, perfectly content to get off the ball and let someone else finish the possessions he initiates (his 15.1% usage rate is a career low) and to space the floor and knock down the shots that do come his way (his 43% 3-point accuracy is a career high). Do all that while rarely turning the ball over, and you become a vital piece of a winning puzzle.

All the pieces matter when you’re trying to build something special, from the No. 1 picks expected to shoulder the load to the spot starters and midstream replacements expected to be ready when called upon to keep the machine humming. And right now, all the pieces are fitting together beautifully in Minnesota.

Big questions remain. How will the Towns-Gobert pairing and the sometimes-cramped half-court spacing that results from it hold up under postseason scrutiny? And how will those answers inform the way Connelly goes about managing a roster that’s already projected to be more than $10 million over the luxury tax line for 2024-25 with the futures of unrestricted free agents Conley and Anderson, as well as several other roster spots, still up in the air?

But while Connelly and Co. lose sleep over the answers to those questions, Twin Cities fans can content themselves with letting those be tomorrow’s problems. Today, right now, they’ve got a team worth celebrating — one that knows exactly what it is, that ensures opponents know it too, and that seems to be enjoying the product of all that back-of-the-envelope math finally checking out.