Straight Sets: Rolling With Rudy
Analyzing offensive actions to get Rudy Gobert rolling downhill.
There is still nothing more important for the Minnesota Timberwolves than integrating and maximizing Rudy Gobert. The price to get him was too steep, the commitment too heavy, the gutting of last season’s roster too chasmic. He isn’t going to be their best player and he won’t ever be their most important, but Minnesota’s front office delved to the deepest parts of the cap and trade underworld to acquire him, and that means he needs to work.
Up until recently, he hasn’t. But the NBA season moves rapidly. It twists and ripples like a pebble launched at a still lake. What was a problem at the start of the season can become an asset in the present. And lately — finally — Gobert has been showing his worth. All of a sudden, after he and the team as a whole were mired in the mud during a six-game losing skid, Gobert has found something. And his teammates have found something with him.
For the four seasons prior to joining the Wolves, Gobert had been the best high-volume roll-man in the Association. Among players who attempted more than 200 field goals as the roll-man, Gobert ranked first in points per possession in three of those four campaigns (and second in the other). Sure, his bag of tricks is more paper mâché than hard leather, and acting as a rim-diving lighthouse is the bulk of his offensive skill set, but he is fucking enormous and his catch-radius on lobs extends into next week. As long as his teammates can get him the ball in the right way, he can finish his dinner.
And that’s where things have devolved into a sloppy mess for most of this season. After spending his entire career in Salt Lake, Gobert doesn’t have any chemistry with his teammates and they don’t have any chemistry with him. As a result, Minnesota’s offense has been atrocious with the big man on the floor.
In games up until last week’s win over the Denver Nuggets — where Gobert really started to find his stride — the Wolves were 12.7 points per 100 possessions worse on offense when Gobert was on the floor. That ranked, almost unfathomably, in the first percentile for all players league-wide, per Cleaning The Glass. Since then, though, the Wolves have been 1.3 points per 100 possessions better on offense with Gobert’s oak tree frame rumbling around. If extrapolated, that would rank somewhere around the 60th percentile. That’s a mammoth turnaround.
He has finished a little better, and it sure feels like his growing confidence has helped him monster the offensive glass a smidge more, but the key has been his teammates and coaches putting him in better positions to do his thing — the thing he has always done.
Running simple pick-and-roll just hasn’t worked. There are many variables that factor into that statement but the two biggest are ingrained problems (at least for now). D’Angelo Russell, Minnesota’s chief ball-handler, doesn’t get downhill with enough frequency or effectiveness to draw defenders and open up lob lanes for Gobert. And Anthony Edwards, the other high-volume ball-handler, doesn’t have the range of passing or the quick decision-making needed to complete pick-and-roll passes at a high rate. Throw in a lack of shooters and you have a team with a pick-and-roll finishing freak who doesn’t have the structure around him to tailor offense toward him.
So the coaching staff and the players need to pivot. Not away from Gobert. His long-established proficiency at finishing around the rim and creating buckets for others thanks to the gravity his rim-dives create is too sharp a sword to leave rusting in the scabbard. Instead, they have pivoted toward more intricate and structured ways to get the big man his pick-and-roll points.
One of the common ways has been to get Russell running off screens before he and Gobert arrive at the pick-and-roll. This UCLA Down DHO action is perhaps the best example of that.
After Russell slices through the paint with his UCLA cut — a vertical cut coming off a high screen that takes its name from the regularity it was used in John Wooden’s old UCLA offeneses — he rockets up off a down screen at the elbow and flows into a dribble handoff (DHO). Because Russell was able to lose his man on the cut and down screen, Gobert’s man (Moses Brown in this case) has to make a decision on whether to allow Russell an open look or stay glued to Gobert. He chooses the take a half-step toward the ball, and Gobert leaks to the rim for the finish.
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