Blind reaction - Bucks 125, Wolves 107
1. Karl-Anthony Towns scored 33 points. No one else scored more than 12. This is the kind of thing I’d expect to write in 2006 when Kevin Garnett was leading a team of Marko Jaric, Mike James and Randy Foye. Towns has dominated so far this preseason. His teammates, meanwhile, have been shrinking violets, somehow already in seeming decline before the season has even begun. This has reached the point, in just four short games, of being officially alarming for the Wolves’ chances of being even respectably competitive this season, much less reaching for a playoff spot.
Maybe it’s a lack of chemistry. Maybe it’s the distractions being caused by the Jimmy Butler drama. Maybe the players have finally reached rope’s end with Thibs, as the fanbase has. (In reality, it’s probably a combination of all of the above) Whatever the case, the team has shown no energy and no heart these last three games. Normally, preseason is a time when everybody is dreaming wild, exciting, unachievable dreams of a season of glory. But the Wolves, instead, look like they’re already defeated. And the first real game hasn’t even been played yet.
2. Jeff Teague had some words about this.
“You can tell the teams that got together this summer. I think those guys spent a lot of time together over the summer, you can tell. We didn’t see each other until the season started.”
A reminder: Jimmy Butler did not fly home with the team after the playoff loss to the Rockets. He did not do the standard post-season medical exam and did not do any exit interviews. And did not set foot in Minnesota again until September, when he presumably did his physical in anticipation of a trade.
Apparently he was not the only one keeping his distance. While it’s not like NBA teammates live together in the offseason, they usually will see each other and work out together semi-regularly at a minimum. That the Wolves did not only reinforces the talk of deep chemistry issues within the locker room - that it was a generally unhappy place (as even Jamal Crawford, a guy normally goes way out of his way to avoid saying anything critical, alluded to in an interview with Howard Beck), and that there aren’t any really personal friendships between the players, like the one between KAT and Zach LaVine. Not good.
3. Wiggins looks like he’s toast.
I don’t know what else to say at this point. Andrew has been the poster boy of the uninspired, uninterested, no heart preseason Wolves. He looks like he’s ready for the season to be over and it hasn’t even actually started yet. And this is a guy now officially now making $30 million per year.
The Wolves are already facing disaster with the Butler situation. They need Wiggins to be worth his contract. They need him to at least partially fill Jimmy’s shoes and not be an anchor on the salary cap while he does it. Instead, Wiggins has sleepwalked out of the gate and performed like a sub-second round rookie (literally, since Keita is an actual second round pick and has played far better than Andrew so far). If Wiggins can’t get it together quickly, he’s going to find himself the target of a very irate fanbase one Jimmy is no longer around to take the arrows.
4. If Okogie can just fix his shot…. Okogie got the start in place of Derrick Rose and did everything except, well…..I’ll repeat what I said after the last game….
“His shooting form is WILD. All over the place. Sometimes he’s square to the hoop. Sometimes he’ completely sideways to it. Sometimes he’s so still only his wrists move. Sometimes he flings his whole body like a trebuchet. The number one key to shooting is consistent form. Okogie is the opposite of that.”
I’m not sure what it will take to fix his shot, but hopefully they figure it out, because everything else is there. Okogie has a nonstop motor. He rebounds, he sets up his teammates, and he defends. But without a shot, he’s a niche Tony Allen 2.0. The Wolves need him to be more. Get in the gym, young man. Work out the bugs in the system.
5. Thibs has utterly failed at the development part of his job. This has been an ongoing debate for 18 months or so: did the Wolves improve because their players improved, or did they improve because of Jimmy? If the preseason here is any indication (and it’s by no means the only one), it was definitely Jimmy.
Who on the roster looks better than he did two years ago? KAT looks the same-ish. His offense is progressing in the way you’d expect from him just gaining experience. It’s hard to argue Thibs has had anything to do with it when it’s well-documented that his offensive system runs directly counter to KAT’s shooting strengths. And the nuances of the game that take specific coaching - communication, defensive rotations, etc - are still absent from KAT’s game. Meanwhile, Wiggins and Dieng look worse than ever…worse than even their rookie years. Tyus is the only guy who looks genuinely better, but how much of that can we really attribute to Thibs when Thibs is the one not playing him?
The point of a coach is to develop the players he has. Like Brad Stevens has with Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, or like Brett Brown has with Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. Thibs, instead, just went out and grabbed all his old players. That’s great for getting a better win/loss record, but if that was substituted for the development of two #1 overall draft picks, then the long term consequences are going to be dire. And with the Jimmy Chronicles short circuiting the Timberbulls era after just one year, that bill has suddenly come due.
I have always believed, for years, since Thibs was still a consensus genius with the Bulls, that he is an atrocious development coach. This is all too apparent in 2018, with players entering the league as teenagers and the fundamental flow of basketball being quicker and more spaced out than ever. Thibs spends precious little time truly mentoring his young guys, and what they do pick up from him is, quite frankly, mostly useless: offensive sets outdated by about 15 years, and defensive sets that clearly are just flat out not working. But more than anything, he simply doesn’t have the temperment for it. His obsession with winning at all costs blinds him to everything beyond the next five minutes, so to speak.
Thibs gets credit for what people consider the development of the Bulls team he coached, but the truth was, they were already a playoff team when he inherited them. He didn’t have to set the foundation for them, he just had to build on top of it as high as possible. And the one player who did truly develop under him - Jimmy - was an anomaly in literally every sense. Older, unheralded, barely played until his third season, and largely got it on his own. This seems to have given Thibs the impression that development is just about sheer gym hours. All blood, sweat and tears. He’s the junior high teacher who just assigns 4 hours of homework every night, instead of taking 10 minutes to sit down with his students and walk them through it. His coaching is an exercise in memorization, not understanding.
This was a serious point of contention in Chicago after Thibs was fired, as Hoiberg and the front office lamented that his players didn’t know how to actually play basketball, they only knew how to execute Thibs’ specific sets. In the more open, freelancing offense Hoiberg prefers, many of Thibs’ favored players, Derrick Rose in particular, became lost.
Now Thibs is facing a future without Jimmy. The core of his team is going to be Towns, Wiggins, and whatever young gun they get back in trade (Josh Richardson? Justise Winslow?) The mismatch between coaching intent and roster need is the dark space between galaxies here. Thibs has already stalled the development of one of those players (while alienating him on a personal level) and has wildly failed at the development of the other. Does the team really want his hands on the future of a third?
