Now that Christmas is over, Minnesota Timberwolves fans are reverting to their usual state of paranoia and despair, and blaming as many people as they can for the team’s lackluster 16-19 record. Earlier this year, I wrote that we should blame Tim Connelly if things turn sour. But 35 games into the season, the ire of the fanbase has turned toward the other new addition, Rudy Gobert. The seven-foot Frenchman was supposed to come in, and singlehandedly fix Minnesota’s defense. He was supposed to push a promising young team into championship contention.
Safe to say, that hasn’t happened. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Timberwolves are wildly underperforming to start the season. They find themselves outside the play-in tournament as we near the season’s halfway point. The Wolves are bad for myriad reasons, but on the surface, the Gobert addition seems to be at the center of it all.
The man who prefers the nickname Gobzilla over the French Rejection and Stifle Tower is averaging his fewest points (13.9), rebounds (12.1), and field goal percentage (66.4) since the 2017-18 season. He also has his fewest blocks per game (1.2) since his rookie season, when he only played 9.6 minutes per game. Gobert had 22 points and 21 rebounds against the Los Angeles Lakers, two big performances against the Indiana Pacers, and 22 points and 13 rebounds in his return to Utah. However, apart from a few dominant games, Gobert has looked timid at times. He’s tried to tip balls instead of a monster dunk or bat rebounds instead of gripping them with his giant hands.
There’s no doubt the 30-year-old has taken a step back from his All-NBA peak in Utah when he won Defensive Player of the three times in four seasons. However, even B+ Gobert is still better than 90 percent of the NBA. Gobert may be on the back nine of his career a little earlier than we thought, but it’s not his fault that this team sucks. Yes, It’s true; he might not be the championship piece they traded for. Still, he’s not the problem that plagues this team.
The major complaint that fans and pundits have leveled at the Gobert acquisition is that the defense is still ass, even with the greatest defensive center of this generation patrolling the paint. They seem to have taken a step back from their swarming, all-out defense that made them so popular last season. However, the Wolves have the 16th-ranked defense this season, a few places behind where they finished last year, with a slightly worse defensive rating (112.7 this season compared to 111 last year).
Gobert is still the anchor of a great defense like he was in Utah for all those years when he was on the floor. He leads what would amount to the seventh-best defense in the NBA when he’s on the court, and the Timberwolves slip to the seventh-worst defense when Gobert rests or sits with foul trouble. On/off numbers are nowhere near an end-all statistic. But Gobert still provides high-level defensive metrics, even if it’s fallen off a bit from his peak.
It’s easy to blame Gobert for his total lack of offense throughout his career, but the Utah Jazz boasted the best offense in the league last year with Gobert as a focal point. The difference isn’t that Rudy forgot how to catch or dunk or forgot he was 7’1”; it’s that nobody around him can shoot the damn ball. For a guy with Gobert’s talent to be successful, he needs guys who can space the floor around him.
The Jazz were almost always a good to great shooting team with prime Gobert camped out in the lane. On the other hand, the Wolves couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat. They rank just 22nd in three-point percentage and 20th in attempts. Utah knew the only way to play with Gobert was to shoot the hell out of the ball and play passable perimeter defense in front of him.
Therein lies the real problem with the Timberwolves this season. They have no idea how to play with Gobert. From the front office down to the benchwarmers, they traded the future for Gobert and didn’t bother trying to build a team that could play with him. They traded away Malik Beasley, the team’s most consistent outside shooter, and another solid shooter and steady hand who knows how to run an offense and throw an entry pass in Patrick Beverley.
The players remaining include Karl-Anthony Towns, a center who is having the worst shooting season of his career; Anthony Edwards and D’Angelo Russell, two of the streakiest shooters in the league; and a smorgasbord of career 32 percent three-point shooters around them off the bench. It’s not Gobert’s fault that the roster is imbalanced. Sure, he could learn one of the most important skills in basketball, but he’s made hundreds of millions of dollars playing within five feet of the rim, so why change that now?
It’s a little unfair to proclaim that things haven’t worked out with Gobert so early. Towns strained his calf last month when he seemed to be finally finding some semblance of chemistry with Gobert. Edwards has shown flashes of figuring out how to throw a lob pass. But the overall returns have been less than stellar, and everyone has to take the blame for it.
Gobert is the easy target. He’s huge, he’s foreign, and he seems to be prickly at times. Fans probably still haven’t forgiven him for the whole COVID microphone thing at the beginning of the pandemic. Whatever it is, Gobert has become the fall guy, but Wolves fans should look past him and see the real issues at hand. This team was put together for Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns to take a bunch of overqualified but necessary role players to the playoffs. But Finch, Connelly, and the gang have to work with the roster they have created. There’s still time to salvage things, but there’s no time to blame Gobert for the mess that’s going on in Minnesota.
