What will the Minnesota Timberwolves offense look like under Tom Thibodeau?

What will the Minnesota Timberwolves offense look like under Tom Thibodeau?

The Minnesota Timberwolves have taken a step towards their future, hiring Tom Thibodeau to serve as their new head coach and team president. The roster is loaded with young talent but there is plenty of work to do.

Thibodeau was one of the most respected available head coaches and brings with him a very defined reputation. He is known as one of the best defensive coaches in recent memory and should bring immediate cohesion for a team that often struggled to stay consistent in their schemes last season.

Thibodeau’s reputation as an offensive coach is little more vague. In three of his five seasons in Chicago, the team’s offense was at least one point per 100 possessions better than the league average. In the other two seasons, they were 2.4 and 4.2 points per 100 possessions worse than the league average offense. Over the course of Thibodeau’s five year tenure in Chicago, the league as a whole has migrated towards pace-and-space offenses. We never really had the chance to see if Thibodeau could implement that style because his teams were always swimming upstream against injuries, just doing the best they could to keep their heads above water.

The Timberwolves were actually much better on offense this season — 11th in points scored per 100 possessions, 27th in points allowed per 100 possessions. If we assume that Thibodeau’s effect on the defense will be significant, his ability to also promote offensive growth may be what really determines the ceiling on his tenure in Minnesota.

In thinking about what Thibodeau might be able to do offensively with the young core of the Timberwolves, comparing offensive style is an interesting place to start. The graph below is a composite of the team offensive style graphs from Nylon Calculus. It shows the offense of the Timberwolves last year under Sam Mitchell, compared to the offense of the Chicago Bulls in 2014-15, Thibodeau’s last season.

Check out the original post at Nylon Calculus for more details on how each stylistic trait is measured.

Thibodeau’s last offense in Chicago was defined by moderation in all four stylistic categories. This probably speaks to context as much as guiding principles. Derrick Rose was still working his back into shape and both Aaron Brooks and Kirk Hinrich played more point guard minutes than Rose that season. Jimmy Butler and Joakim Noah had large offensive roles but missed a combined 32 games. A lot of the offense ended up being run through Pau Gasol in the low post.

Under Mitchell this season, Minnesota’s offense was really defined by two traits — an above-average pace and a generally inefficient shot selection. They attempted the second fewest three-pointers in the league this season and, conversely, the highest number of long two-pointers. Mitchell was pushed on issue by fans and media throughout the season and he explained the problem, as he saw it, to Britt Robson of MinnPost in a candid January interview:

"The toughest thing for me this year is that with our personnel, because we’re young and we don’t have shooters — or these guys haven’t developed into good shooters yet — is what can we run? I am constantly tweaking our offense, trying to figure out what can we do to get more scoring.The toughest thing is that our best defensive team is not very good at scoring. But our guys that can score a little bit better — but are not world-beaters at scoring — they make a lot of mistakes defensively. So if you look at the games that we’ve won and games where we’ve been close, it has been our defense that has done it."

It’s true that the Timberwolves did only have three players finish the season making three-pointers at an above average rate — Zach LaVine, Nemanja Bjelica, and Kevin Martin (who was bought out in March). However, as Seth Partnow pointed out at Nylon Calculus, Minnesota’s offense actually created a healthy number of high-quality catch-and-shoot jumpers. It just happened that their shooters were poorly spaced, stationed inside the three-point line. Better spacing and an appreciation of the value of the three-pointer might have manifested in higher shooting percentages.

Thibodeau’s teams were not obscenely reliant on three-pointers, but it was a much larger part of their offense. Although his sets were often vanilla in design, Thibodeau seems to have been more grounded in making a system that worked for his players than in trying to make players work in a system.

It’s also worth remembering that there is no ideal offensive style. The five-most efficient offenses this season all relied on different elements:

The key to building an efficient offense is building on the strengths of the roster. Asking Thibodeau to coach like Steve Kerr and the Timberwolves to play offense like the Warriors is unrealistic. This roster is young enough that they are growing into their own abilities and figuring out what their strengths are and how best to leverage them should be a process.

Thibodeau may not be the ideal candidate for helping Minnesota reach their offensive potential but there are some ways in which his track record are encouraging.

And, of course, transforming this team into an elite defensive unit removes a lot of the pressure to be perfect on offense.

For more NBA coverage, be sure to check out our NBA hub page.