Deep Dive: Embracing Ball Movement In Part Three Of The Season
The Timberwolves are moving the ball more lately and it's yielding unsurprising results.
Over the last few weeks, it’s become easy to forget what has made the Minnesota Timberwolves fun and, conversely, what has made them frustrating throughout this up and down campaign. Over this strange and confusing period, the only thing that has mattered was what players could or couldn’t suit up that night. Schemes and tactics mean far less when the team trying to deploy them are cobbling together whatever lineup isn’t in the health and safety protocols. It’s been all about adjustments and all about surviving.
The Wolves survived. Only just. They clung to the leg of the Western Conference standings and refused to let it speed away. And, now that the reinforcements have returned and are restoring their match fitness, the Timberwolves can spur themselves into what will hopefully be a healthier and more productive portion of the season. They’ve lived the honeymoon period and watched it die off bloodily, they’ve crawled through the health and safety gunfight and come out with but a few scratches, and now they’re embarking on part three of the season. They are embarking into the exciting but, ultimately, the unknown.
In part three, however, those forgotten foibles and fortes are back to being a thing. Back to being the thing. It once again makes sense to ponder and pontificate on their scrappy, demoralizing defense and lament their peaks and valleys offense. It also means that they have more sample size and more situations to weave into their newest venture.
So far, in the games that have taken place since Anthony Edwards returned to the lineup and the ones after when Karl-Anthony Towns and D’Angelo Russell joined him, Minnesota has embraced the uptick in ball and body movement that the team’s offense was laced with when the trio was on the sidelines.
Without their big three, Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch and his infantry had no choice but to spray passes around, cut with verve, and constantly look to turn good shots into great ones. Even that didn’t always matter, with such a large talent discrepancy on most nights, but now the Wolves are whole again, and maintaining that mantra is yielding positive results on a number of fronts. The competition hasn’t been strong enough to warrant complete and utter buy-in, but the Wolves have posted a scorching 112.7 points per 100 possessions in the five games since Edwards returned and the Wolves began to feel like a roster capable of fulfilling their potential.
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