Timberwolves

McDaniels Must Improve His Shooting To Open Up the Offense

Photo Credit: Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports

Minnesota Timberwolves fans are freaking out right now. Things are not going how the faithful had hoped across the first three weeks of the season. The Wolves are 5-7 on a light early-season schedule. The fit between Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert looks wonky at best. Anthony Edwards is playing full possessions with his hands on his hips, and they’re about to make you pay $120 for these. It’s scary hours in the Twin Cities, and that’s before the sun sets at 4:50 p.m.

A giant part of the early struggles is that the Wolves went from a pretty good shooting team in 2021-22 to one of the worst-shooting teams in the league through 12 games this year. Taurean Prince is the only player on the roster shooting a better percentage from three this season than his career average. (Kyle Anderson is 3/6, so it doesn’t count.) Towns is shooting his worst percentage from deep since his rookie year. D’Angelo Russell can’t even sub into the game correctly, let alone make a 3. And Gobert is 0/2 from deep and airballed one by one million feet. Things aren’t going well for Chris Finch and the brain trust, but things can turn around.

Jaden McDaniels is the man to do it and open up the offense.

The third-year forward has had a love-hate relationship with the basket to start his career. McDaniels hit 36.4% of his threes during his rookie season. Then it dropped to 31.7% last year and is slightly creeping back to 33.3% so far this season. For the Wolves to unclog the lane and start playing a more appetizing brand of basketball, McDaniels needs to step up and become a floor spacer. He needs to give Edwards, Nowell, and Co. room to attack the rim and open up the scoring moving forward.

The best place to start for McDaniels is to improve his shooting from the corners. McDaniels is just 3 for his first 14 (21.4%) from there this season. It’s a small sample size, and it’s heartening that he shot 35.7% from the corners last year. He also shot 40.3% from the same spot in his rookie campaign. But for a guy who claims to have put in a lot of work on his shot in the offseason, things aren’t looking good at the moment.

The most annoying thing is that McDaniels is showing that he can be a good shooter from other areas of the court. He’s developed a feathery touch from the free throw line, sinking 17 of his first 21 foul shots this year (81%). He’s 46.7% on his above-the-break threes. The guy can shoot the ball. He’s not Gobert, but he needs to become more consistent in his third season to help alleviate the spacing issues when Gobert is on the floor.

McDaniels and Edwards are the only significant players on the roster with the physical tools to be menacing on both ends of the floor. The Wolves will need both to become two-way monsters if they want to offset Gobert’s offensive limitations and Russell and KAT’s failure on defense. McDaniels is already one of the most versatile defenders in the NBA, using his length and quickness to hound ball-handlers and bust up passing lanes.

If McDaniels has any doubts that he’ll ever become a knockdown shooter, he needn’t look any further for encouragement than Mikal Bridges, the guy who just cooked the Wolves for 31 points on Wednesday. The Phoenix Suns’ fifth-year spark plug wasn’t always the deadeye shooter he’s morphed into. Bridges struggled to find his shot early in his NBA career. He shot 33.5% from three in his rookie season but kept improving every season. Bridges is lighting the 3-point line on fire this season, shooting a blistering 46.4% in the season’s early goings, including a pedestrian for his standards 2/6 against McDaniels and the Wolves.

Bridges was older during his rookie season than McDaniels is in Year 3, so there’s plenty of time for him to get things right. Comparing McDaniels to a potential defensive player of the year is probably unfair. Bridges is the high water mark for how his career plays out. But McDaniels has shown the skillset to impact the game on every level. It’s just a matter of time until he puts it all together.

Nobody is asking McDaniels to become a 40% 3-point shooter overnight. But bumping up to a league-average 3-point shooter would be a massive help to the offense that is currently stuck in the mud. Since their 4-2 start to the season, the Wolves are 1-5 and own the 24th-best offense and 24th-best defense in that span. Hopefully, it’s just an early-season rut, as Edwards seems to think, but the Wolves need to click fast, and Jaden McDaniels needs to be one of the drivers of an improved offense.

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