The NBA Finals are in full swing, and two teams that were heavily doubted heading into the playoffs are now face to face in a battle for the Larry O’Brien trophy. Two players with incredible underdog turned superstar success stories, Nikola Jokic and Jimmy Butler, get to be the temporary faces of the league as they work toward their ultimate goal of winning a championship. Some folks with “untrained eyes,” may have looked at this series at its outset and thought No LeBron James, no Steph Curry, why bother? Just make Jokic into a scorer.
Still, many hoop heads have rejoiced over the new found parity in the NBA, and the fun new storylines that have come with it as we move closer to the post-LeBron era of the NBA. Beyond the many swirling storylines, including both superstars hoping to earn their first title, is an incredible display of intelligence and strategy from both teams and their coaches. Both teams employ creative offensive philosophies that stray away from the near constant pick-and-roll playsets that have been prominent in the NBA since Michael Jordan dominated the league with them. But while both teams stray from the traditional offenses of the past, they do it in different ways, and the Wolves have played in a similar style to both at different times.
Of course, all three teams are well coached. They are also well equipped with different offensive sets that they can play through in specific situations, like the Denver Nuggets do in Jokic’s bench minutes, or to keep their opponents guessing. However, they still have a preference of how they want to play to maximize the talents of their best players.
The Miami Heat are the ultimate grind it out and win the math team. They thrive on playing good defense, turning takeaways into fast breaks, outworking opponents, and most importantly, efficiently shooting threes.
Denver is all about playing within the flow of the game. They set up actions with Jokic, run off ball screens to keep the defense running, and encourage their players to read the defense and make improvised cuts so that Jokic can find them in opportune places for open shots.
For Wolves fans, this is an interesting dynamic. It somewhat represents a parallel to the visions that their past and present GMs attempted to emulate. Gersson Rosas cut his teeth with the analytics-focused Huston Rockets, who focused their offense on spacing and shooting threes while removing inefficient shots from the midrange, in a similar way that Miami does. Rosas acquired players like Malik Beasley and D’Angelo Russell to bolster the team’s three-point shooting capabilities and lean into an analytics-based offensive model. That seemed to make sense at the time given that the team was built around the best shooting big man in NBA history, Karl-Anthony Towns. The Wolves defense never made it to the level of this current Miami team, but they effectively pace and spaced their way to a playoff berth last year using this analytic-focused framework.
Tim Connelly, one of the main architects of the current Nuggets roster, had a different view of how to build the Wolves for success when he arrived in Minnesota. While Connelly almost certainly implements analytics in his process, he traded away Beasley and Russell, signaling a change in team design. Connelly has been here for less than a year, but so far it seems like he prioritizes players who bring ball movement, consistency, and defensive versatility to the team, as evidenced by his acquisition of Mike Conley and Rudy Gobert.
Throughout his time in Minnesota, Chris Finch has maintained that he wants his players to play within the flow of the offense to create a randomness that is harder to guard. Even though Rosas hired him, Finch seems to lean more towards the Denver model of offense. It makes total sense, given he used to be a part of the Nuggets coaching staff as an assistant, and he has been credited as contributing to Denver’s offensive schemes in Jokic’s early years.
Both offensive strategies are incredibly effective and have become more prominent in the past several years due to the success of teams like the Golden State Warriors, who attempt to lean into flow and away from heavy pick-and-roll offense to help keep their role players engaged and get them easier shots. Both strategies have their strengths and weaknesses, so it’s hard to say which model is the “right one” to build around.
The Heat are emblematic of the ups and downs of being a heavy three-point shooting team. Miami lit it up from three-point range during the 2021-22 regular season, shooting a league-leading 37.9%. This, along with their stellar defense, earned them the 1-seed in the Eastern Conference. But their whole team went cold this season despite having mostly the same roster. They only shot 34.4% from downtown and slipped to the seventh-best record in the East. They almost lost their way out of the play-in tournament altogether, and were trailing the Chicago Bulls in the 4th quarter before a storybook comeback. Now the Heat are on their run to the NBA Finals as an 8th seed, and their best shooters have returned to their normal form. Once again, they lead all teams that were in the playoffs in three-point efficiency at 39.2%.
There is a cliché that circulates at various points every season that says “it’s a make or miss league.” Like almost every other basketball cliché, it is annoying in both how much of an oversimplification it is, and how often it remains true in the face of nuance. Analytics have changed basketball in many ways However, the primary change is that teams take way more threes than they used to, and take significantly fewer mid-range shots.
In an attempt to explain this phenomenon succinctly, the most efficient offense in basketball comes on shots at the rim and the free throw line. While the three-pointers are harder to make and the best shooters only hit around 40%, the one-point difference in value makes up for the fact that the three-point shot is somewhere around 15% less likely to go in for most players than a shot at the rim. The midrange shot has been mostly phased out because statistics tell us it’s only slightly easier to hit than a three-pointer. Since it’s still only worth two points, you might as well skip it all together unless you’re Kevin Durant or Devin Booker.
Shooting a high volume of threes at an efficient rate is how you effectively win the “math equation” that Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla referred to several times during the playoffs. However, the downside to this strategy is that it forces a team further into the “make or miss league” cliche, often to the detriment of the team — as we saw with the Celtics.
If you shoot a high volume of threes and make them (while playing defense), you can blow the doors off almost any team on the right night. However, you are still relying on a difficult diet of shots to win. Therefore, if you aren’t hitting your threes, and your team doesn’t have many other strategies to succeed on offense, it can make your team look inefficient and bad — like Miami and Boston have at different points this season. The Celtics only lost a handful of games this season when they shot over 40%, but were only a .500 team when they shot below 40%.
Meanwhile the Nuggets don’t rely so much on one form of offense. Instead, they can implement many different strategies through their flow-based offense and rolled through the competition in the Western Conference. Therefore, Denver seems much less likely to “beat themselves” by over-focusing on threes and missing them. However, the flow based offense has its own weakness, namely that you need the right personnel to properly utilize it. The Nuggets have a bunch of incredibly smart veterans who know how to read what the defense is giving them and react to it quickly by making smart passes and cuts. Because the best passing big man of all-time leads Denver’s offense, they execute it to perfection and rarely look like they have weaknesses on that end.
When a young team like the Timberwolves attempt to implement a more difficult, improvised offense like this, it can fall apart. We saw the Wolves lose several games this season because their offense became stagnant in the 4th quarter. Some of the younger players reverted to playing iso ball instead of continuing to move it, including in the play-in tournament game against the Lakers. Perhaps they could have benefited from more structure and less flow in those situations. On the other hand, after Conley’s arrival, we saw a handful of games where Minnesota achieved some truly beautiful ball movement and thrived as a team because of it.
Only time will tell what offensive strategy works best for the Wolves, and for the league as a whole. Of course, every offensive scheme is slightly different depending on its personnel and should be tailored to specific players. Not every team can shoot and defend as well as the Heat, or read and react with creativity as well as the Nuggets. However, I believe if the Wolves continue to learn Finch’s version of the flow offense, it will ultimately provide them with a higher ceiling because it will be less predictable and more difficult to scheme against. Additionally, team chemistry is at its best, and role players are most engaged when they have an opportunity to contribute to the offense, even if it’s in a limited capacity.
