What Gorgui Dieng is doing for Karl-Anthony Towns

When the Minnesota Timberwolves paid out $64 million to Gorgui Dieng at the November 2 early extension deadline, it wasn’t as a commitment to making him the frontcourt partner of the future for Karl-Anthony Towns. It’s really early — we don’t know what a contention-ready Wolves team will look like, and honestly, $64 million over four years is really just borderline starter money. If you can get Dieng at that price, then you do it whether you think he’s your starter or your sixth man or even just a trade asset by the time years three and four of that contract come around.

Whoever it is that people would pick for Towns’ power forward, it sure isn’t somebody like Dieng. Dieng is unremarkable. He doesn’t shoot threes and he’s played primarily at center for most of his career. Towns, meanwhile, is a singular, does-it-all big man, and you can already hear league trends whispering in your ear, go small and play four-out and shoot threes and switch everything. Gorgui Dieng is just filler.

Well, here are the things that Dieng is doing: averages of 10.4 points, 8.3 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 1.1 steals and 1.7 blocks (per-36: 12.4, 9.8, 3.1, 1.4 and 2.0) are remarkable in the most unremarkable of ways. Dieng gives you a healthy bit of everything, but like, who’s noticing?

For shock value, Dieng is shooting 60 percent on jumpers past 16 feet, and those constitute nearly a third of his shot attempts overall. Regression, unsustainable, sure, but he’s been effective from midrange for a while now. Last season, he converted a perfectly fine 43.4 percent of those shots.

The one thing is that Dieng doesn’t shoot 3s, and the mid-range jumper is just a mid-range jumper if you aren’t also getting assists. You can’t discount Dieng’s passing stuff; with that, and with basketball know-how, he can make it work through tight spaces. He’ll call the right audibles at the elbow…

Maybe there’s a lesson, at least partly, about the Wolves’ current healthy starting lineup (Towns, Dieng, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine, Ricky Rubio), which was installed just before the All-Star break last season. From that point on, they played the most minutes of any lineup and scored 111.4 points per 100 possessions — for context, the Cleveland Cavaliers led all teams with 110.6 points. They got good 3-point shooting out of LaVine and Wiggins then, and they’re getting that now, but Rubio, Towns and Dieng are great passers for their position and that’s every bit as important. With talent, 3-pointers don’t have to be everything.

A player like Towns can only be as versatile as his frontcourt partner allows for. Anthony Davis has spent years trying to share the floor on the scoring end with Omer Asik, who sometimes has range past two feet, and having to cover for Ryan Anderson on the other end. To this day, the player that has looked like his best partner has been Robin Lopez from his rookie year — somebody who could accommodate Davis’ inside game as well as his outside game, and who could defend the rim when Davis wanted to chase pick-and-rolls.

This is Dieng’s age-27 season and the fourth year of a somewhat boring career. But he’s improved in little ways each season, and even though he came into the league as a college senior already billed as a rim protector, it was just last season that he really grew into one. You should know he’s got the juice now, though. Dieng, probably better than anybody on the Wolves other than Rubio, knows where to be on the floor and how to lead a team defense. The Wolves are generally a mess on that end of the floor and it’s going to take time for Tom Thibodeau to right the ship, but for now, Dieng is one of the steadier hands on board.

I think people like to look at the superstars on this team and get wild about the possibilities of the future, which, hey, I totally get it. Dieng shoots funny and he wasn’t even drafted in the lottery, so whose man is this? Dieng doesn’t do small ball for you, he doesn’t do modern NBA for you, but, you know, he’s just good. There’s no need to rush into the future, and besides, the Wolves are still bad right now.

(Bonus: the last sentence also applies to Ricky Rubio. HEY, MINNESOTA. KRIS DUNN IS SO BAD RIGHT NOW. DO NOT TRADE RICKY RUBIO.)

Who knows for how long that Dieng will be the starting 4, and who knows if he’s The Answer At Power Forward, but when the Wolves decide they have to make a change, then they’ll go do that. We know he can back up both big man positions, especially with Towns as his partner, and $64 million is fine sixth man money. If they decide to trade him to get Stanley Johnson in three years (name out of a hat, you get the idea), then they can do that. Really, Dieng just lets the Wolves do a whole lot.

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