Timberwolves

Are We Sure That Jaden McDaniels Is the Day 1 Starter?

Photo Credit: Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports

Tweets like this have flooded my timeline since the Minnesota Timberwolves acquired Rudy Gobert.

The excitement is well-founded. With Gobert, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Anthony Edwards, there is a legitimate argument that the Wolves could have three top-25 players on the roster by season’s end. Amid all this excitement and speculation about the upcoming season, there seems to be an assumption by the entire fanbase that Jaden McDaniels will be in the starting lineup.

But how sure can we be that he will be the starter on Day 1?

Let’s start with the case for McDaniels to be the starter. His defensive versatility gives the Wolves flexibility that they will desperately need on the defensive end. Gobert is the ultimate safety valve at the back end of a defense, but no one man can carry a defense by himself. With Towns sliding over to play the power forward position and D’Angelo Russell with his defensive baggage, the Wolves will need all the extra perimeter juice they can get.

In theory, McDaniels and Edwards can provide the Wolves with enough defensive prowess on the perimeter to guard most opponents. Jaden is long, wiry, and quick-footed, while Ant has the heft to contend with some of the bigger perimeter threats. Most teams don’t have more than two high-level perimeter creators on the floor at the same time, so it’s easy to imagine how Minnesota’s starting lineup with McDaniels could work.

But so much of the defensive potential we’ve seen from McDaniels has been just that: potential. He struggled at times to maintain discipline on the defensive end last season. He had one of the highest foul rates in the league last season, racking up a whopping 4.4 fouls per 75 possessions. Many of the players who have high foul rates are big men. Interior defenders are often put in compromising positions, having to clean up after their perimeter defenders, so to speak.

McDaniels’ primary defensive responsibilities last season seemed to be more perimeter-oriented, though he regularly toggles between defensive roles. Fouls per 75 don’t tell the entire story about a player’s ability to defend without fouling, but it indicates an issue. If McDaniels’ role increases, he’ll need to see his foul rate come down, especially if he is tasked with guarding the opponents’ best players.

The advanced numbers also don’t paint McDaniels as a very good player. Among those who played at least 1,800 minutes, McDaniels’ -2.9 BPM was fourth worst in the league. Fourth worst! While I am not beholden to BPM as an end-all-be-all measurement of ability, most of the time it’s a fairly good way to sort players. Certainly, anyone who watched McDaniels play probably thinks he’s better than his BPM, but he has a lot of growing to do before he is a shoo-in as a starter.

So, the question is, if McDaniels doesn’t start, is there a better option?

Taurean Prince got off to a rough start last season. In the first 24 games, he was in and out of the starting lineup. As Chris Finch played with his rotations, it looked like Prince struggled to catch his rhythm offensively. He only shot 30% in 2021. Then Prince missed time in late December due to health and safety protocols. He was a changed man when he returned in the new year. Well, on the court, at least. Quietly, he shot 40% from beyond the arc to finish the season and became a key contributor to the Wolves’ run to the playoffs.

If Prince can continue to shoot the ball at a high level and play decent defense, there is an argument that his spacing could be more valuable for the Wolves than McDaniels’ defensive versatility. Gobert is certainly used to playing with limited defenders. If Prince was on last year’s Utah Jazz team, he would be one of their best options to defend on the perimeter. Maybe stretching opposing defenses and giving Ant and DLo a little more room to operate is worth the defensive downgrade.

The idea of Kyle Anderson in the starting lineup has largely been written off by many in the media because of the fit issues between Gobert and him. Skeptics will point to Anderson’s lack of shooting as the primary reason. McDaniels took twice as many threes as Anderson last season, but the two shot the same percentage from the floor. Furthermore, Anderson has consistently shot better from the corner than anywhere else on the floor. Last season was a small sample size as he only took 45 corner threes, but he shot 42% on such attempts. In his career, he’s taken 322 corner threes (not including garbage time, as Cleaning the Glass filters that out) and converted nearly 37%.

Anderson is probably better suited to guard bigger wings than McDaniels at this point. Were he to start, that would mean that Ant would likely always be guarding the other team’s best guard. It remains to be seen if he is ready for that type of responsibility on a nightly basis, but he’s already shown that he can be a lockdown defender in important moments. Or he can risk it all.

While Anderson provides less defensive versatility than McDaniels, his ability to move the ball could be a huge boon for Minnesota’s offense. At a minimum, Slo-Mo could play a nearly identical role on offense as Patrick Beverley, acting as a secondary or tertiary playmaker and ball mover, who can exploit the right matchup and knock down threes at a reasonable rate. With him filling the Beverley role and Gobert acting as a souped-up Jarred Vanderbilt, the blueprint for a successful offense is already in place.

Whether McDaniels enters the season as Minnesota’s fifth starter or not, his growth will be a determining factor in the team’s long-term outlook. If he is ready to step into this role this season and complement the stars on this roster, the Wolves will have been proven right in bartering with the Jazz to keep him. But if he struggles to find his footing, how long will it be until questions will loom about whether he, not Gobert, was worth it?

Though some feel like his development is house money, he was the asset the Timberwolves opted to keep instead of additional draft equity. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a third-year player, but since the Wolves did load up on the wing, he may not feel that pressure immediately. We certainly don’t need to write him in as the starter from Day 1, but we should hope that he can fill that role sooner rather than later.

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