Perusing The Positives: Naz Reid's Ball-Handling Brilliance
Dissecting one of the most joyous parts of Minnesota's season.
In a season of uniquely grueling challenges for the Minnesota Timberwolves roster, front office and fans, Naz Reid stood like a four-leaf clover surrounded by a sea of dying blades of grass. He was unique in his own way, a strange amalgamation of guard-like skills in a slimmed-down big man’s body who was jammed into every imaginable role as the season unfurled.
Plastered across the many faces of the 23-year-old’s fourth season as a pro were dizzying highs and wrenching lows, but it became apparent throughout his strong regular season and inescapable in his playoff absence how important Reid was to the fabric of this Wolves team. He wasn’t the pumping muscles of the team or the rigid bones that held them aloft, but he became the underappreciated tendons that helped bind a fragile body together.
So, before he heads into unrestricted free agency as an untethered balloon blown only by the winds of opportunity and cash bags, let’s take a moment to savor Reid’s ball-handling. Perhaps it’s not what one typically associates with a center, but in a league brimming with players bigger, stronger and more dominant than Reid, it’s exactly what set him apart this season.
The New Jersey native has metamorphized as a player in almost every discernable facet since entering the league as a pudgy, plodding and undersized ‘tweener, but strangely enough it’s been his ability to dazzle and dance with the ball in his hands that has become his point of difference as a player.
As he is the tendons for his team, his ball-on-a-string ingenuity is the tendon that moors the other parts of his game to each other, forming the cult hero and flawed-but-impactful scorer the Timberwolves ended up relying on so heavily.
Reid uses his craftiness in every aspect of his blossoming offensive game. When he is operating as a more traditional face-up big in the high post, that sleight of hand and shuffle of foot comes in more traditional ways. He has a never-ending supply of rabbits to pull from his offensive hat, but in the post he often relies on and expands upon the basics — that’s enough to entice the average post defender into a misstep.
For someone of Reid’s near-unrivaled level of shiftiness and artistry with the ball (for a big man), his post moves are bottom of the barrel stuff. Merely the lobby in his hotel of marvels.
Reid’s bag of tricks work on most defenders, but he’s at his most damaging when he is able to trap a smaller defender in the post. Sometimes, it’s as simple as a stutter rip move the likes of which have been perfected by wings like Jimmy Butler, Jayson Tatum, Kobe Bryant and many other supremely talented wings.
Again, this is lobby-level stuff. Things that are difficult to guard, even for twitchier wing defenders, but reasonably simple. As soon as Reid gets that morsel of space, he’s able to throw his weight around and move those defenders off their spot or simply rise up over them with a hook shot as he does to Klay Thompson in the example above.
Or, he can seal a smaller defender, pirouette into a face-up, threaten that shimmy, and then whip out the spinning drop step into a pocket of scoring space. Moves like this, ones that end up with the opponent reaching and prodding at a moving target, result in open looks and drawn fouls remarkably frequently.
In the end, all of the theatrics are nice, but this remains a results-base business. If Reid didn’t finagle his way into open space, he drew fouls on 39.6 percent (90th percentile) of his post-up scoring chances. He also finished around the rim at an elite level, converting 76.5 percent (95th percentile) of his looks around the cup on 6.8 total shots from that area per 75 possessions (89th percentile), per Basketball Index.
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