The Final 16: Where Did The Offense Go Wrong?

Part two of The Final 16 offseason series is here, dissecting Minnesota's offensive failings over the final and most important portion of the season.

AP Photo/Bruce Kluckhohn

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Throughout all the violent twists and scaring turns of what will be remembered as a disappointing season, the Minnesota Timberwolves remained an unstable and unreliable offensive team last season. When you review their profile, that’s the thing one thing that acted as a constant in a campaign brimming with inconsistencies.

When the final buzzer clanged and put an end to what was often a nightmarish crusade, the Wolves ranked 23rd in offensive efficiency, despite possessing the league’s foremost offensive wunderkind and a gaggle of capable players on that end of the floor. While injuries and roster tinkering are ample excuses for their missteps, a sample size of 82 games, two play-in tournament outings and five playoff games can’t whisper falsehoods, that’s who they were.

Their final 16 games of the season were important, though. Above all the mini-segments of the season, that block of game was the most important of them all. With Karl-Anthony Towns back from injury and regaining some semblance of health each and every night, Mike Conley somewhat embedded and Rudy Gobert sufficiently immersed within the system, those nine regular season games and the postseason that followed it provided a blueprint of their successes and failures.

They were a better team offensively in that stretch— pushing their points per 100 possessions from 114.1 to 115.4 — and that was encouraging, but even that improved number would have seen them finish 15th leaguewide if extrapolated for the entire season. With two All-Star caliber scorers, one of the best rim-finishers in the league and Jaden McDaniels and Mike Conley supplementing them, that still feels underwhelming.

Things did go right, though, the first part of the Final 16 Series details the intricacies that bolstered their sloppy offense, but their flaws felt even easier to spot. Their empty corner actions were masterful, Kyle Anderson moonlighting as a ball-screening wizard greased the offense’s wheels, and they found success with their trailing big men, but they were mere wrinkles in a scheme and personnel partnership that often felt compromised.

As we narrow our vision onto the uglier side of Minnesota’s late-season offense, those systemic warts were harder to ignore. They weren’t mutually exclusive like the positives were, they mingled together in a concoction of misery, spitting and hissing like some sort of evil witches’ brew.

Everything stems from spacing.

These days, that’s a mantra that reverberates around the entire association, but it’s especially true in the Twin Cities. When the franchise decided to marry Karl-Anthony Towns to Rudy Gobert and live life as a walking monolith, they committed to battling with spacing more than most other teams. Unfortunately, be it through inexperience as a group or inept coaching, they were felled in that battle far too often.

When the Wolves got it right, they could murder teams with Gobert’s rim-rolling capabilities and Towns’ ability to spread the floor acting as flanking battalions to Anthony Edwards’ on-ball dynamism, McDaniels’ budding brilliance, and Conley’s sage wisdom, but when it went wrong they were a rudderless mess. And it went wrong more than anybody would like.

With two of Gobert, Towns and Anderson on the floor at all times, Minnesota found themselves clogging their own paint routinely, giving the defense an easy way out. That was as much a part of their identity as all the good things were.

Having a presence rolling toward the rim or stationed alongside the baseline in the dunker’s spot is no bad thing, but when multiple bodies end up camped inside the arc it crumbles effective offense. Not only are those frontcourt members easier to nullify, but the perimeter players are forced to operate in crowded phonebooths when they break past the first line of defense.

Too many possessions ended this way for the Wolves, with a paint pile-up hampering a driver and making what should be an open lane into a minefield. When the shot inevitably misses, the slow-footed Wolves are mince meat in transition since they’re already a step behind the play.

This was a problem at the beginning of the season when the team was still brand new to the two-big experiment and little changed when Towns returned and the team rekindled the mission.

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