A point guard for Point Wiggins
The Minnesota Timberwolves have a Jeff Teague problem.
In fact, they have several of them. He doesn’t move the ball enough. He routinely passes up open shots. More than once, he’s explicitly ignored calls for the ball from his team’s best player. This stuff is not good for any player, but especially for a point guard.
But most problematic, Teague is directly interfering with the revitalization of Andrew Wiggins.
After two seasons of alarming decline at an outrageous salary led to many (including yours truly) calling for an official time of death on Wiggins’ career, Andrew has had a serious resurgence to start the 2019-2020 season.
More than just his numbers being up, Wiggins has significantly improved the way he plays the game. He’s no longer alternating between blindly charging into the paint and completely disengaging from the game altogether. He keeps his head up instead of looking at the floor, and keeps his dribble below the waist. He plans out his attack and times his steps. He protects the ball with his body and makes real passes that set his teammates up for buckets. And he’s drastically altered his shot selection.
Wiggins is shooting the fewest twos and the most threes of his career and his mid-range pt % is in the single digits. The shot value system Ryan Saunders has implemented is working, even with Andrew, who’s been a die hard mid-range chucker at the NBA level.
All of this has led to career highs for Wiggins basically across the board so far this season: points per game and eFG%, rebounds per game and reb%, assists per games and ast% (a massive spike of over 5%), PER and Win Shares/48.
The trick here is nearly all of this is tied to Wiggins dominating the ball. With Jimmy Butler gone and Saunders reformatting the offense as a modern 4-out system, Wiggins has been handed the keys to the system. Karl-Anthony Towns rightfully is the #1 option, but it’s Andrew who’s being tasked with most of the setup work now.
This naturally raises two massive questions for the team:
Is Andrew Wiggins good enough to do this full time?
Who should share the backcourt with him in this sort of role?
At a base level, the answer to #1 is no. Andrew Wiggins is not Ben Simmons or Luka Doncic or Giannis. He cannot and likely will not ever carry a team singlehandedly in a point guard role.
But he also plays far, far better - both individually, and as the engine for the team - when he’s in the point guard role. The difference in what Wiggins does when playing alongside Jarrett Culver or Shabazz Napier is a complete 180 from what he does (or more appropriately, doesn’t do) when next to Teague, who dominates the ball as a very traditional point guard and marginalizes Wiggins’ involvement and activity level. It’s the Wiggins/Jimmy problem redux, where, at best, they’re forced to take turns, with one trying to attack triple teams while the other does nothing.
So the question then becomes, can Wiggins drive the offense in the right circumstance with the right, non-Teague support cast around him? Based on the 7-4 start of the season, that’s at least worth exploring, and gives the Wolves a solid answer to question #2.
There are plenty of teams who don’t have a Luka or Giannis, but who still run their offense well through not a point guard: the Clippers with Kawhi Leonard; the Spurs with DeMar DeRozan; the Wizards with Bradley Beal; the Heat with Jimmy Butler. It’s not an unprecedented or unusable formula…it just takes a specific setup.
What the Wolves need is one of a specific but well-defined subset of combo guard: a point guard who is able to run basic sets in high pressure situations, but who nominally will just rove the three point line as a target for kickout passes.
Basically, if the Wolves want Wiggins to be DeRozan, they need a Patty Mills.
Mills is more than just a tiny shooting guard, because he actually calls and initiates plays on a regular basis. But he’s less than a full time point guard, because 3/4ths of his usage is giving the ball to someone else than looking for catch-and-shoot opportunities.
Lou Williams. JJ Redick. Spencer Dinwiddie. Kendrick Nunn. Players who are low cost versions of Kemba Walker and Jamal Murray and Malcolm Brogdon. That’s the player type the Wolves are looking for here. An attempt to grab a Devonte Graham without selling the farm.
Again, it is not clear if Wiggins is good enough to make Point Wiggins work. But the Wolves have an opportunity, I think, to give it a test flight without making a long term commitment. There is an avenue for them to explore the option and still be able to chase a D’Angelo Russell if it doesn’t work out. Given that this is far cheaper and simpler than trying to bring DLo in or send Wiggins out - and that, at least for a month, the KAT/Wiggins/Saunders thing worked spectacularly well - this seems like something worth pursuing.
