17 January 2024
Basketball doesn’t get any better than what happened midway through the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game at Target Center between the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Los Angeles Clippers.
The game’s distinctively gritty ballet of brawn, brains, speed, sinew, teamwork, tenacity and competitive durability as the world’s best athletes match their mettle was in full resplendence over a 20-second span where the Wolves defense tried to stop the interplay of three Clippers whose careers have already guaranteed them entry into the Hall of Fame.
The Wolves were contending with more than James Harden, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. A fourth pre-certified Hall of Famer, Russell Westbrook, and ace sixth-man Norman Powell, who scored 24 points to finish second on the Clips in scoring that night, were also on the court.
But it was the aforementioned trio that, pushed to the brink by the scrambling Wolves, dazzled with brisk ball movement borne of chessboard connivance. There were six passes, a bevy of screens, a couple of up-fakes and three drive-and-kicks. The Wolves countered every maneuver with synchronized sweat equity, flying around with choreography crisp enough to make it seem as if they always knew where the ball was going.
The play ended with George catching a pass from Harden after Harden had drawn four defenders to him on his drive, then immediately shooting and making a three-pointer from the corner as Mike Conley chased out to him for a spirited contest of the bucket. It may well be the toughest three points the Clippers score all season.
For years, occasionally verging on decades, fans would go to Timberwolves games to watch the opposing stars in action, in the flesh, almost casually vanquishing the hapless home team. What happened on Sunday was another pinch-me reminder that these Timberwolves are different.
The Clippers came into Target Center as the best team in the NBA over the six weeks since the first of December. In winning 17 of 20 games, they had generated the league’s best offensive rating—124.2 points scored per 100 possessions—because all of those future Hall of Famers had set their enormous egos and histories as the alpha star over to the side and played with an unselfishness derived from the thirst to cement their legacies with a championship season. That’s why, despite owning a 15-2 record at home at the time, the Wolves were underdogs by tip-off on Sunday.
But I repeat: These Wolves are different. There is nothing casual about the way opponents have learned to regard this squad. Even Hall of Fame talents are taxed to their limit and, more often-than-not, come away losers anyway. On Sunday, the final was 109-105 Minnesota. The Clippers scored just 112.9 points per 100 possessions, double-digits fewer than their average since Dec. 1. But for what increasingly has to be considered an elite Wolves defense, it was a tad worse than business as usual.
That’s what is driving their remarkable success. Per the calculations at basketball-reference.com, they have played the toughest schedule in the NBA thus far, including 17 of their last 18 games against opponents with winning records. Yet we are two games away from the midpoint in the 2023-24 season and the Wolves have the second-best winning percentage in basketball at .718, derived from 28 wins versus 11 losses. Their next two contests are against teams with losing records and key players out with injuries. Win them both and they are on a 60-win pace at the halfway mark. If they happen to lose one, the pace is 58 wins, which would tie them for the best record in franchise history with the 2003-04 team that made it to the Western Conference Finals.
Offensive efficiency has been an obstacle. Minnesota currently ranks 20th in points scored per possession, largely because (again, per basketball-reference.com) they are tied for last with the Detroit Pistons, who have won four times in 40 games thus far, in their frequency of turnovers per play.
Ah, but the defense. As has been true for nearly the entire season, the Wolves allow the fewest points per possession of any team in the league. And if you drill a little deeper to look at their level of dominance relative to other teams this season, their performance is even more impressive.
Granted, the team has only played 39 of its 82-game slate, and a lot can happen over the next three months. But the Wolves are on pace to have, statistically at least, one of the three or four most dominant defenses of the past decade. As of Tuesday morning their defensive rating (points allowed per 100 possessions) was 2.2 points stingier than the next-best team. Only two teams over the past decade—the 2019-20 Milwaukee Bucks and the 2015-16 San Antonio Spurs—had a wider differential over every other team. Judging the Wolves defense against the NBA average, they are currently 7.1 points better. Only three teams—those Bucks and Spurs plus the 2013-14 Indiana Pacers—have a wider margin between their individual team excellence and the collective league average.
Rudy Gobert is the obvious catalyst for this defensive superiority. Having already earned three Defensive Player of the Year awards playing drop coverage during his nine seasons with the Utah Jazz, Gobert has combined that rigor for protecting the rim with a willingness and capability to roam outside the painted area and confront ball-handlers in the midrange spaces just inside the perimeter. Utah rarely, if ever, ran schemes that expanded his range, and his flexibility in broadening his palette of skills at the expense of relying on his forte, rim protection, has been the skeleton key that has unlocked an entire new identity for the Wolves.
More importantly, Gobert’s ability to guard in space rebuts the notion that opponents who feature a “space and pace” attack on offense can play him off the floor. The Wolves cede 104.3 points per 100 possessions when he is on the floor, the best mark of any player in the regular rotation. Their robust won-lost record indicates that they can provide an effective counter to whatever the opponent likes to do among the panoply of offensive schemes deployed throughout the NBA.
On Sunday, half of his four blocks were out in the midrange area, he hauled down 18 rebounds and his overall activity impacted what the Clippers wanted to do in a variety of ways, including getting just 36 points in the paint.
Clippers coach Tyronn Lue noticed. “Ant (Anthony Edwards) was a monster. Rudy was huge for them. They played well.”
Lue is one of the few NBA voices that doesn’t allow Ant’s prolific and crowd-pleasing offensive skills to overshadow an appreciation for his defense. In his pregame remarks, he offered an anecdote on how Ant had made such an impression on the defensive side of the ball.
After Ant was chosen for the USA’s World Cup team this summer, he was originally expected to be simply a regular part of the rotation and perhaps not even a starter. Instead, he became the undisputed leader of the team. Lue, who was an assistant coach for the USA squad, was asked about that elevation by Law Murray from The Athletic.
“When he came into the gym, first day we had practice, he let everyone know he was an alpha and he was going to attack guys and be great defensively. And that’s what won him over with our staff and the USA people, just coming in and competing at a high level and attacking right away. That’s the way he tried to separate himself and he did that,” Lue said.
“People talk about offensively how good he is. They don’t talk about how high-grade his defense is…We talk about guys getting into the ball on pick and rolls; getting there before the screen hits you. He’s the best I’ve seen in terms of just getting into the ball and being physical.”
High praise indeed. But Ant backed up Lue’s raves from those press conferences before and after the game. He was in fact “a monster.” His 33 points led all scorers, but he stuffed other categories on the stat sheet with nine rebounds, six assists, and two steals (also, alas, five turnovers). The Wolves were +13 in the 38:13 Ant was on the court, which means they were -9 in the 9:47 he sat.
In addition, Ant’s defense was “high grade” to a level that deserves parity with his potent offense on Sunday. Points scored and allowed per possession in a single game is not generally a great barometer—the sample size is too small and there is potential for a lot of “noise” in the numbers—but when they pop like the totals produced by the Wolves when Ant was on and off the court, they are difficult to completely discount.
In the advanced box score of the game at nba.com, the Wolves scored 120.8 points per 100 possessions and allowed just 105.3 points per 100 possessions when Ant was on the court. When he sat, they managed just 94.1 points per 100 possessions and gave up bushels of baskets—147.1 points per 100 possessions.
It is not surprising that Ant would shine competing with the star-studded roster of the Clippers. Lue’s description of his alpha mindset with the USA team extends to the way he elevates his game to meet the challenge of guarding the premiere scorers in the NBA, a pattern that has been evident since he first came into the league.
The Clippers deep collection of stars may be unselfish, but each still possesses enough extraordinary talent to conquer most individual defenders in mano a mano isolation settings. According to nba.com, they lead the NBA in both the frequency of isolation plays and total points scored out of those plays.
Prompted by a question from Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic in the postgame locker room, Ant made no secret of his desire for the joust against the best the league can offer.
“It’s one of the best things in basketball, going against the Clippers,” he drawled, a big smile on his face. “I look forward to playing against them all the time, because regardless of whether I’m in front of Kawhi, PG, or James, they are going to try to ‘iso’ you. So you’ve got to take pride in that challenge and try to stand ‘em up.”
Earlier this week when I was on my regular podcast with host Dane Moore, he accurately observed that “Ant doesn’t really learn or adjust until there is failure.” There is a downside to that, of course: it forestalls apparent improvements that the evidence shows could and probably should be made.
But there is an upside, too. At the age of 22, Ant is proving to be a phenomenon mentally as well as physically. It is undeniable that he possesses “a healthy ego,” but the pejorative connotations that are often imbued in that phrase don’t apply to him. He thinks the world of himself and sets the bar incredibly high because of that unshakeable attitude. It takes him longer, and requires more tangible evidence, to convince him that something he is doing doesn’t work.
But his learning curve isn’t being stunted. He has made broad improvements across myriad aspects of his play every succeeding season he has been in the league. Along the way, evidence that might foretell ongoing failure for most players may simply be a speed-bump in his development.
Meanwhile, all the evidence indicates that a desire to win is Ant’s steadfast top priority. And on that count, failure isn’t happening to him and the Wolves thus far this season.