Can the Timberwolves Space the Floor?
The Minnesota Timberwolves had a great summer. They traded for one of the games best players, Jimmy Butler, for an extremely modest price, adding to an already impressive pool of top-end talent. The deal that netted Butler has been discussed plenty at this point, so we’ll focus today, instead, on how Minnesota might function on offense with him in the fold.
Defense is really the Wolves’ biggest concern. They finished third from the bottom in points allowed per 100 possessions last year (per Basketball Reference). The solution on that end of the court is clear enough though.
Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins need to find a way to make their immense physical gifts translate defensively. Both rated out as VERY bad defenders, despite having all the requisite athleticism to defend at an elite level. That shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. Playing NBA defense is really hard, and players as young as Minnesota’s two pups (see what I did there- it’s a play on wolves) are rarely pluses on d at this point in their careers.
The Wolves are betting that Butler and fellow offseason acquisition, Taj Gibson, can function as a pair of adults in the room, in a way that coach Tom Thibodeau was unable to do from the sideline last year. That’s the plan, and it seems a smart one. It doesn’t need much discussion beyond on that, but the tangential impacts certainly deserve closer inspection.
They come almost exclusively on offense. In prioritizing the addition of veteran defenders, particularly at the power forward spot, Minnesota opted not to add the kind of shooting that might make their offense completely unstoppable. Butler, Towns, and Wiggins are all more than capable of scoring the ball, but they each like to do so in isolation or from the post.
Getting buckets in the fashion each of them prefers is a lot easier with maxed out spacing. They can all shoot well enough to help create room for one another, but ultimately, to keep any of the three dotting the perimeter, waiting to catch and shoot, is something of a waste of their best skills.
Thibs can stagger their minutes to make sure everyone gets to eat, and no team has ever complained about having too much scoring. The point here is that because of the way the Wolves have constructed their roster, in adding Gibson and Jeff Teague as the pieces likely to surround their three core stars, they’ve given opponents less challenging decisions defensively.

That comes down to shooting. No one on Minnesota’s roster projects to be anything but an average three-point shooter, barring significant internal improvement. Take a look at their numbers from last year (per NBA.com). We’ve excluded Gibson and Gorgui Dieng from this analysis, as both are non-threats from beyond the arc. They figure to get a lot of playing time though, and that is the crux of the challenge facing the Wolves. They need to find a combination of five players that allows them to function effectively defensively, and unlock their incredible scoring potential on the other end of the court.
It will be challenging to do so with any permutation of available supporting players, and particularly difficult if Gibson or Dieng is playing. If Towns has the ball in the post, for example, doubling, rotating, and recovering becomes a lot more manageable without any elite threats spotting up outside the arc.
There are ways to help grease the skids. Simply pulling the trigger from deep more often would be a start. The Wolves ranked dead last in triples attempted per game last year (per Basketball Reference), and outside of Crawford, who probably shouldn’t be getting major minutes at this point, they didn’t bring in anyone that really loves to shoot it from deep.
Good defenders know when players are hesitant to shoot the rock. It makes them more eager to help, more balanced and measured in their closeouts, and generally less prone to making the type of split-second mistakes that great shooting often forces. But quality isn’t the only thing that’s important here. Volume really matters too.
Spacing the floor is about forcing defenses to defend you beyond the three-point line (this is an oversimplification, but it’s generally true). That’s as much about having players that are perceived as threats from deep as it is as having actual threats from deep. You need to be willing to shoot the ball in order to develop that perception.
And there is some hope that the Wolves could have success pulling from deep more often as well . Take a look at their numbers on catch and shoot threes (per NBA.com)

All of the team’s potential floor spacers, with the exception of Jamal Crawford, shoot the ball better off the catch than the dribble. That tends to be the case for most players, and shouldn’t be particularly surprising, but what’s of most importance is that the shooting percentage jumps up over forty percent for both Butler and Wiggins.
Teams have to respect that kind of marksmanship. There is still the challenge of convincing both players that standing around on the perimeter is a role that suits them, but at the very least, the potential for a relatively well-spaced floor is there.
It will be up to Thibs to cash in on that potential, and that’s where things get a little bit dicey. For all of his defensive brilliance and psychotic commitment to the game, Thibs has never put together the most beautiful or modern offensive systems. Maximizing Minnesota’s potential on that end is going to take a bit of finessing, and that could require a significant shift in philosophy from the team’s head coach.
It could also mean the type of small ball experimentation that Thibs has never shown a real fondness for. Just imagine what kind of secrets he might unearth with a few minutes of Butler or Wiggins playing power forward from time to time. That’s never really been his style though.
A world exists in which Thibs sticks to traditional positional definitions, and encourages an iso-heavy, defense-first, grind it out approach. In fact, that is probably the most likely outcome here. Minnesota will likely be very good if that’s the case, assuming that the defense comes a long way.
There’s another world where Thibs uses some of his screaming to modernize the Wolves’ offense, and finds ways to squeeze a bit of spacing out of his roster where it might not be readily apparent. That’s the world I want to live in. It’s one in which Minnesota could be one of the best team’s in the league.
Then again, that might happen either way. The Wolves have a ton of high-end talent. They might be so good at scoring in isolation that it doesn’t really matter if they can space the floor. At least in the regular season. A cramped offense will come back to bite them at the game’s highest level- in the playoffs.
That’s an issue they don’t necessarily have to deal with. There’s enough to work with to space the floor sufficiently.
This piece was written by High Off The Glass creator, contributor, and editor in chief Greg Cassoli. He has an unhealthy obsession with NBA basketball.

