Eleven months ago Anthony Edwards pleaded to his fellow stars during the all star break, “Just play, man. If you’re 80%, you’ve got to play.” Mike Conley, responded saying “Oh shoot, I took a few games off here and there,” then added smiling “but I’m 35.” Monday night happened to be one of those games for Conley, now thirty six, to take off. His off day resulted in a puzzling loss to the 10-31 Charlotte Hornets. Edwards was brutally honest in his assessment of the team, “We wasn’t focused from the jump,” he said. “Immature as f*** tonight.”
Chris Finch was equally disappointed, saying: “We totally disrespected the game, ourselves, and we got exactly what we deserved.”
It was a similar message to the one Chris Finch relayed after an overtime loss January 10th to the Boston Celtics. “Lots of mental errors on both ends,” he said. “This is how we closed games last year, and it didn’t really work for us. We have been good because we have been able to mix in a lot of different things to close games, at the heart of it obviously is Mike and Rudy.”
By Mike, he’s referencing Minnesota’s 36-year-old point guard. Mike Conley missed the Boston and Charlotte games, the only two contests he has missed all year. But Conley will have to miss more games this season for rest. After playing 36,635 minutes in his career, Conley’s body has endured over 610 hours, or 25.4 days, of basketball.
Conley has rarely missed time since the Memphis Grizzlies drafted him in 2007-08. He’s played 50 or more games 13 times in his career. However, Conley is the eighth-oldest active NBA player, and he will have to take more time off to be fresh for the playoffs. That suggests there will be opportunities for the Wolves to prove they are able to win games without their starting point guard.
But the Wolves are 0-2 without Conley this season, and Finch has used the same words after each game: immature, young, unfocused. Given Conley’s advanced age, it’s concerning how much the Wolves rely on him to bring maturity and focus to a team that wants to contend. Immaturity is one thing, but several data points suggest the Wolves are not the same team without Conley.
The Timberwolves plummet defensively without Conley. Minnesota posted a defensive rating of 128.0 against Charlotte, their worst defensive rating since the Atlanta Hawks game on October 30, 2023 (130.9). The last time the Wolves posted a defensive rating over 120 was also the game Conley missed against the Boston Celtics (122.1). For context, the Hornets have the league’s worst defensive rating (120.8) this year, and Minnesota is in first place at 109.0. In the two games Conley has missed, the Wolves went from the top-ranked defense to the worst-ranked defense in the league.
It’s remarkable for a 36-year-old point guard to make that big of an impact. However, it’s not surprising. Conley’s defensive rating is 106.6, placing him 17th overall in the NBA. ESPN’s real plus/minus (RPM) attempts to isolate a player’s impact to one number, with 0.0 always being average. Conley’s 0.4 RPM confirms that he’s an above-average defender, putting him sixth in the league among all point guards who have played at least 10 minutes per game.
The individual numbers point to Conley being elite, but the drop off from the No. 1 defense to the league’s worst is still puzzling. Conley often doesn’t guard the opposing team’s best player or even the lead ball-handler. NBA.com’s tracking metrics report that the 6’1” Conley spends 27.6% of his time on the floor matched up against forwards versus 69.0% against guards.
With Conley’s individual defensive numbers coming from a more off-ball defensive role, it’s hard to empirically quantify why not having him in the game affects the defense so much. Even cleaningtheglass.com’s on/off doesn’t show a huge drop-off. The Wolves allow 5.8 points less per 100 possessions when Conley is on the floor, and opposing teams’ effective field goal percentage drops 1.7%.
While both are impressive, it doesn’t account for the nearly 20-point change in defensive rating the Wolves have suffered when Conley is sitting out. Finch put it best when responding to a post-game question after Minnesota’s win over the Orlando Magic on January 9. “We can not overstate,” he said, “how important Mike has been.”
Although Finch’s answer is illuminating, it still doesn’t exactly explain why Conley is so important on defense. However, watching game film shows more of the intangibles Conley brings that boosts Minnesota’s defense. Conley usually talks to his teammates while transitioning from offense to defense. It’s impossible to know for sure. But based on the improvements on the defense when Conley plays, we should assume that he’s telling other players where they should be or what rotations need to take place.
Also notable is Conley’s ability to rotate and consistently be in the right place defensively. Again, it’s impossible to know if this a product of scheme or if Conley is doing this on his own. While there are no stats to show how impactful a player’s intangibles are, it’s not far-fetched to assume that Conley brings something immeasurable that makes the team elite. Perhaps it’s just his maturity.
Fortunately for the Wolves, the two games they lost without him provided genuine learning experiences and opportunities for players to become more mature. Edwards showed that he understood the gravity of the situation after the game. “We gonna learn from it, though,” he said. “I don’t even know what to say, I let us down tonight.”
In the next game that Conley misses, it’s imperative that Edwards steps up in his absence, and we don’t see Minnesota’s defensive drop off without Conley.
