Deep Dive: How Rudy Gobert Is Helping Minnesota's Shooting
Without ever stepping foot beyond the arc, Rudy Gobert's presence is helping boost Minnesota's shooting profile.
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Everything is slotting back into a familiar place for Rudy Gobert. After a debut season with the Minnesota Timberwolves that had him reduced to a walking meme, the collective fan base of the Minnesota Timberwolves have spent all of this season gushing over him and rightly so.
He’s the most impactful defensive player in the league, it’s an inarguable fact that the entire league is rediscovering. It was easy to shrug off his former glories and label him as a fallen giant succumbing to the rigors of age when he was sludging through his underwhelming first season with the Wolves, but those fears are sufficiently alleviated now. He’s back defensively. He might even be a better version of his old self, at the very least he seems more malleable to today’s modern game.
He’s also found his rhythm again as the low-usage, high-efficiency paint-scoring force in recent weeks. In his last 10 games, Gobert’s holding a true shooting percentage of 72 percent, ranking 11th in the league among qualified players during that span. In the opening 12 games of the season, he ranked 169th in the league at just 56.5 percent, according to NBA Stats.
Nothing will ever trump his importance to the Timberwolves on the defensive side of the ball, and he needs to maintain that otherworldly offensive efficiency to offset the bouts of cumbersome turnovers and puzzling ball-handling displays he’s prone to. However, what the 31-year-old does to pry open beyond-the-arc shooting pockets for his teammates is surely Gobert’s most underappreciated trait.
Now 22 games into the season, the Timberwolves are shooting 41.3 percent from beyond the 3-point arc when Rudy Gobert is on the floor. Weaved within those numbers are a 40.1 percent clip on above the break triples and a scorching 44.4 percent on corner jumpers.
When he is off the floor, those numbers plummet. Minnesota is making just 30.1 percent of their long-looks when Gobert is on the bench. According to Cleaning The Glass, that 11.2 percent differential ranks in the 99th percentile for all players. The 11.1 percent differential (41.1% to 30%) on above the break 3-pointers also ranks in the 99th percentile, while the 12.1 percent differential (44.4% to 32.3%) from the corners ranks in the 95th percentile.
Put simply, the Wolves couldn’t toss a pebble in the Pacific when Gobert isn’t around and they’re raining hellfire from deep when he is on the hardwood. Those kinds of stark gulfs are usually reserved for the scoring stars around the league; those who generate a gravitational pull beyond the arc with their shooting or collapsed defenses as a driver.
This season, players like Paul George, Devin Booker and, of course, Stephen Curry are high on those same lists that Gobert is perched so prominently upon.
Gobert fabricates shooting success for his teammates in a different way, however. We know he doesn’t have defenders sprinting out to him to free up easy swing passes to open teammates in the way that Curry does. And we know that he isn’t going to manipulate defenses as a three-level scoring threat like Booker or George.
Gobert’s impact comes in two very different ways.
Supreme Screens
Gobert might be the best screen-setter in the league. A roving rampart capable of walling off defenders with his supreme technique and overbearing size. When you mix in his learned knowledge of where and when to screen — either on or off the ball — he becomes a legitimate 3-point-creating weapon.
When Gobert is setting picks, it takes an eternity for the defender to navigate and reattach himself to the his man with the ball. For a team like Minnesota, who don’t have an overflowing arsenal of self-creating shooters, those pockets of space are liquid gold.
Sometimes, Gobert’s value as a screener is as simple as his elite ability to pry open space with simple ball screens.
This often manifests itself when he is dovetailing with Mike Conley in their patented empty corner rendezvous. With Conley’s wriggling expertise alongside Gobert’s screening prowess, the pair can often create a wide-open shot from thin air.
There really isn’t anything Klay Thompson can do to any different in this situation. Gobert jams him between the hammer and the anvil. He breezes through the original screen, but when Conley shuffles around the rescreen, he gets tangled in Gobert’s web and ends up a few feet away in an instant, a flailing arm all he can manage to deter Conley’s arrow.
Amazingly, Conley has made just one 3-point shot in his (admittedly meager) 96 minutes on the floor without Gobert next to him. He is 1-of-12 on his 3-point shots in those minutes. When Gobert is on the floor, he is 49-of-105 (46.7%). We often sing the praises of Conley for his ability to accommodate and bolster Gobert’s impact within the offense, but it’s obvious that Gobert’s ability to entwine with Conley as a screen-setter is just as important for Conley’s own offensive efficacy.
So just as Gobert craves the nourishment that Conley’s pick-and-roll drip-feeding provides him, Conley requires these crushing screens to allow him to continue his sniping from deep.
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