When Tom Thibodeau signed on to be the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, the first thought many people in and around the league had was that it wouldn’t be long before Thibs whipped the T-Pups into an elite defensive unit.
Sure, the Timberwolves were starting from behind the 8-ball (they finished 27th in defensive efficiency the season prior to Thibs’ arrival and had finished in the top-10 exactly twice in the 27-year history of the franchise), but taking whatever personnel is on hand and getting elite defense out of it is simply what Thibs does. And it’s what he’s done for a long, long time.
"In the course of his 26 seasons as an assistant or head coach in the NBA, the average Thibodeau-coached squad finished eighth in defensive efficiency; 20 of those 26 teams finished in the league’s top 10, and 14 finished in the top five. Those rankings and percentages shot up even higher when the league banned hand-checking before the 2004-05 season. Since then, the average Thibodeau team has ranked 3.9th in defensive efficiency, with 10 of his 11 teams finishing in the NBA’s top 10, and eight of 11 ranking in the top five. In other words, he is good at this."
As mentioned, however, they had a long way to go to become even an average defense, let alone an elite one. You don’t go from 27th to top-five in one season without major personnel changes, and Minnesota’s most significant personnel changes heading into last season were the additions of free-agent center Cole Aldrich and rookie point guard Kris Dunn. Not exactly what you have in mind to get your team from the basement to the penthouse in defensive efficiency.
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And so it wasn’t necessarily all that surprising when a massive leap forward did not happen, but the near-total stagnation of the team’s defense progress definitely was. Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins each regressed on defense in their first season under Thibodeau, and the rest of the players on the team didn’t do all that much to make up for it. For the first time in years, Thibs was the coach of a bottom-five defense as the Timberwolves finished 26th in the NBA in defensive efficiency.
The 2017 offseason brought far more significant personnel changes in Minnesota, and with those changes brought not just hopes, but expectations of significant defensive improvement. Bringing in Jimmy Butler and Taj Gibson should push your defense to another level. Alas, that did not happen from the start of the year. Minnesota spent much of the season’s first month in last place in defensive efficiency, and until Dec. 15 ranked a dreadful 25th.
Since Dec. 16, however, the Timberwolves have the NBA’s 10th-best defensive efficiency. It might seem safe to say that’s a good sign, but dig deeper and it becomes somewhat unclear whether the defense has actually improved much at all during that time. Take a look at their performance in the four factors, for example.
Pretty much all of the improvement in the Timberwolves’ defensive efficiency has been driven by an uptick in opponent turnovers. Since Dec. 16, they’re allowing opponents almost exactly the same effective field goal percentage, they’re fouling more often and they’re allowing more offensive rebounds than they did through Dec. 15. Forcing more turnovers is as good a path as any toward better defense, but it’s not necessarily a sustainable one for a Thibodeau-coached squad since not a single one of his Bulls teams ranked in the top-10 in opponent’s turnover rate.
For his part, Thibs attributes the uptick to more than just forcing more turnovers. There’s a reason the players are taking the ball away from the other team more often.
“We had a tough early schedule in terms of travel. And a lot of new faces,” he told The Step Back after a loss to the Nets. “Getting everyone — we knew going into camp, with all the changes that we made, the biggest challenge would be how quickly could we get everyone onto the same page both offensively and defensively.”
A review of the Nylon Calculus calendar dashboard confirms Minnesota’s tough starting schedule. Only the Kings traveled more miles through Dec. 15 than the Timberwolves. Minnesota played seven games during that time where the travel distance between one game and the next was at least 1,000 miles — more than all but five teams. The Timberwolves also played nine games during that time where their opponent had at least one extra day of rest prior to the game, the eighth-highest figure in the league. Those factors may help explain their slow defensive start, but they don’t necessarily point us to a reason why they’ve seen such an uptick in turnovers of late.
Thibodeau sees a different reason his team has been locking down more of late: repetition.
“You start the season, you want to build habits. That’s what this is all about. You want to build habits. There’s not like any one day where you wake up and you go, ‘Ah! The magic is here.’ The magic is in what you do every day. If you’re building the right habits, you’ll get better.”
And while the start of the team’s defensive improvement is just on the turnover front, he still sees the elite defensive potential in players like Towns and Wiggins that was forecast at the beginning of their careers. They’re still just 22-years-old, Thibs likes to remind people, and things won’t happen for them all at once.
“You have two young guys that are 22-years-old and they’re learning. And you know they’re gonna get a lot better as they go along here. And then to have — Taj has been great for Karl and Jimmy has been great for Wig.”
It’s clear that Thibodeau envisioned his two former Chicago stalwarts imparting bits of wisdom on the team’s two young cornerstones, and that it’s part of the reason he sought to reunite with them both in his new digs. Butler is the team’s current best player and what he actually brings to the table right now is of the utmost importance to the team’s success, but what will make the success sustainable is if he’s able to hand down much of what he’s learned to Wiggins through some sort of osmosis. (Butler is basically the absolute best case scenario for Wiggins as a player.) Towns is nearly fully-formed as an offensive centerpiece, but picking up defensive tricks of the trade from Gibson — be it in terms of rotations or communication — will go a long way toward turning him from a potential superstar into an actualized one.
It’s just going to take some time for it all to come together, is all.
“The thing about Karl and Andrew is they’re both real young, and they’re learning. And so hopefully as they go through things and they play against somebody for a 40th or 50th time, they’ll have a much better understanding of who that person is. And I think that they’re going to get a lot better.”
“Like, we’ll take Golden State, for example. So, Golden State was a very good team and they went through steps. They won 23. Then, I don’t know, 40. Then, they got to 50. And they were very good offensively. And then when they changed — and I think Draymond [Green] had a lot to do with that, and I think Andre Iguodala as well, and then of course [Andrew] Bogut going there. But once they combined that offense with that great defense, they went to an entirely different level.”
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The Timberwolves have the scoring part down. Despite its ugly process, Minny’s offense ranks inside the league’s top five. It turns out an overwhelming breadth of talent can make up for a lot of things — especially when you have guys like Butler and Towns (and to a lesser extent, Wiggins) that excel at both creating for themselves and getting to the free-throw line. Defense takes a bit more cohesion, and it’s harder for young players to gel, even when they have Thibs teaching them the ropes. The team is confident that it’ll happen eventually, and that the recent uptick is just the start.