Naz Reid is having my dream summer. He re-upped with the Minnesota Timberwolves for $42 million over the next three years. He got to enjoy himself at a lakeside City Edition jersey reveal party and hang out with Yung Gravy. And he got the ultimate shoutout on Jeopardy after a contestant named their cat after him. Not a bad way to spend the offseason for the undrafted 24-year-old who, when we last saw him on a basketball court, broke his wrist and missed the playoffs.
Now, Naz Reid (we’re not allowed to call him anything but Naz Reid anymore) is entering his fifth season in the NBA and second year behind the Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert frontcourt duo. He clearly has the ability to be a starting center on half the teams in the NBA, but Naz Reid will be the building block of a Wolves bench unit that struggled to keep up last season. While he’s never averaged more than 20 minutes per game as a pro, and he’s in one of the deepest frontcourts in the league, potential circumstances for the 2023-24 season have Naz Reid as a stealth candidate to be named the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year this season.
As good as Naz Reid is, the odds are literally stacked against him to become the NBA’s next Sixth Man of the Year. New York Knicks guard Immanuel Quickley is the odds-on favorite to win the award this season at +700 according to DraftKings Sportsbook followed closely by Malcolm Brogdon, Norman Powell, Bobby Portis, and Malik Monk rounding out the top five at +1500. Naz Reid is all the way down the list at +5500, according to FanDuel Sportsbook, which is the same odds FanDuel is giving the Minnesota Timberwolves to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy at the end of the season.
Four of the top five favorites for the award have much in common with most of the sixth men of the past. The award is overwhelmingly presented to guards who score a lot of points off the bench. Think of Jamal Crawford, Lou Williams, and J.R. Smith as the prototypical sixth man that NBA voters will vote for year after year. Montrezl Harrell was the last big to win the award during the 2019-20 season when he averaged 18.6 points and seven rebounds per game off the bench for the Los Angeles Clippers. It’s a small man’s award, and when it doesn’t go to a small, it’s a big who can score in bunches off the bench.
As good as Naz Reid was last year, he averaged 11.5 points and nearly five rebounds in just over 18 minutes per game. Good numbers for a backup, but not quite enough to catapult him into the 6-MOTY conversation. Not when the favorites are slated to play 25 to 30 minutes a game and score more than 15 points for their respective playoff-bound teams.
Playing time is the key to Naz Reid’s candidacy. When compared to the five odds-on favorites, only Malik Monk averaged fewer than 25 minutes per game last season. But when you factor out playing time and look at the numbers on a per-possession basis, Naz Reid compares favorably to the leading candidates. Last season, Naz Reid averaged more points per 100 possessions than any of the top five candidates except for Norman Powell and more rebounds than anyone but Bobby Portis. He’s also the only one to make more than 50 percent of his shots.
So how do the Wolves get Naz Reid the boost in playing time that would vault him into the conversation this season? It’s going to be tough for Chris Finch to play KAT, Rudy, and Naz Reid as much as anyone would like. Still, the Timberwolves are determined to make the two and three-big rotations work if it kills them. Chris Finch just said Naz Reid is going to be playing heavy minutes at power forward to get all three into the rotation when asked about it during his media day press conference on Thursday.
Towns averaged 33 minutes in the 29 games he played last season and Gobert was still over 30 minutes per game in his first season protecting the rim in Minnesota. Both former All-NBA players are poised to resume similar roles this season with one change that could potentially be the key for Naz Reid to get more regular playing time. The NBA will implement the Player Participation Policy this season with major penalties for teams that rest their star players. That policy should leave Naz Reid with fewer opportunities to start games in which KAT and Rudy are resting but should increase his game-to-game playing time while Finch finds ways to keep the starters fresh while being restricted in who he can hold out of certain games.
If Naz Reid can increase his minutes from 18 a game to somewhere near 25, he has the talent to add his name to the shortlist for Sixth Man of the Year. The Wolves will need to give him regular opportunities to show he’s worthy of making the KAT-Rudy pairing a triangle. But if he plays well and the Wolves take a leap in the West, Naz Reid could be taking home some hardware at the end of the season.
