Summer League takeaways for the Timberwolves
Summer League is glorified rec center basketball. There’s not really any disputing that. It’s a week of undrafted players and career journeymen teaming up with top picks (sometimes….) for a 5 or so games of fairly disorganized, sometimes ugly basketball.
That said, nothing is throwaway if it’s not treated that way. There’s always something to take away from every experience, if that’s the intent.
Gersson Rosas has a long, long history of giving meaning to every opportunity. Nothing is to small. Nothing is treated as pointless. Before the G League was the developmental mechanism it’s becoming today, Rosas was already farming NBA talent from it, winning championships and even jump starting the career of Chris Finch, who has done wonders for the careers of Anthony Davis and Nikola Jokic, and will one day make an outstanding head coach himself.
Summer League this year was no different. The Timberwolves were perhaps 3 minutes away from winning the Summer League championship. And although they fell just shy of taking the trophy home, they still left Vegas with plenty of takeaways.
The new offense:
By far the biggest buzz the Summer Wolves created was from the test flight of Pablo Prigioni’s new offensive scheme. Prigioni is on Ryan Saunders’ staff as the offensive coordinator, and coached the Summer League team as a way to try out the playbook he’s crafting that has carried over a great deal of the pace, movement, shooting and general freedom that he picked up from Kenny Atkinson in Brooklyn.
This is a tremendously exciting development. The Wolves have been behind the curve of modern basketball for basically always. Rick Adelman’s first two years was the only time they’ve played at an above average pace and taken an above average number of threes.
With a historically great shooter in KAT, and now with a number of young athletes like Jordan Bell, Jake Layman, Jarrett Culver and (presumably) Jaylen Nowell, the Wolves are finally poised to run and gun with the rest of the league. What they’ll lack in talent relative to the NBA’s upper echelon, they can perhaps at least partially make up for with system. At the very least, they will play a fun brand of basketball, even if it won’t yet translate into wins.
But perhaps most importantly, it’s become clearer and clearer that the league’s top players are taking system into account when they’re choosing where to play. Most recently, Kevin Durant has outright said he chose Brooklyn because he likes the style Kenny Atkinson runs. A style, by the way, that Prigioni mimicked to a great degree in Vegas.
A real defense?:
The exciting, blitzkreig offense got the most attention, but maybe even more importantly in the long run, the Wolves also showed off a new look, highly effective defense.
Minnesota played one of the top defenses in Vegas, allowing just 81 points per game - third best of all the teams. They fully embraced modern basketball on this end of the floor as well, fighting over screens, running shooters off the three point line, and switching everything.
But more importantly, they did it in a way that gives some hope the actual Wolves can do the same thing during the actual season. One of the biggest criticisms of Karl-Anthony Towns is his seeming lack of defensive tenacity. He just doesn’t make the impact or have the intimidation factor of a Rudy Gobert or Myles Turner or Joel Embiid.
The good news is, even if that doesn’t ever improve (which, by the way, I’m supremely confident it will), what the Wolves showed in Vegas is a defensive system that can work despite that.
When David Vanterpool was with the Portland Trailblazers, he built a solid defense out of a roster of subpar defenders - including non-defending bigs like Jusuf Nurkic and Enes Kanter - by keying off of Al Farouq Aminu playing at power forward. Aminu would essentially be the defensive wall at the point of attack, and everyone else would space and rotate and switch based on his queues.
What the Wolves did at summer league was almost an exact mirror image of this. Naz Reid is, at least at this point, is largely a non-defender as well, having averaged less than a single steal and block at LSU. But the Wolves built a formidable (relative to summer league) defense with him by keying off of Keita Bates-Diop at the 4-spot the way the Blazers keyed off Aminu.
And the regular season Wolves? Already talking about starting legit defensive player of the year contender Robert Covington at power forward.
Ladies and gentlemen: Vanterpool.
Naz Reid is an en passant with the finality of a checkmate:
The biggest individual takeaway for the Summer Wolves was that Naz Reid is the real deal. To the point they actually voided his original two-way contract to sign him to a full main roster one.
After a slow start, Naz exploded in tournament play in Vegas, peaking with a dominant 20 point performance against Jarrett Allen. That’s a rookie in summer league puttin’ the hammer on a playoff starter. Not bad.
Yes, Reid has a long way to go to be a rotation NBA player. And that’s fine. What’s important for now is he proved he has the talent for it. As for the (legitimate) concerns about his motor and work ethic, well, I’d say that signing him to the main roster is in fact a benefit to him in that regard. He’ll now be working with Rosas’ hand picked coaching staff that’s been expressly built with player development in mind, rather than with the Iowa staff he inherited and has yet to really address in any way. It puts Naz in an environment crafted to enable him, and surrounds him with relentless workers like KAT and Jarrett Culver who can lead him by example. It’s 3-dimensional chess on Rosas’ part.
Filling out the rest of the roster:
In addition to Naz, the Wolves also came out of Vegas with several guys who could be (or already have been) tapped to complete the main roster and form the G League one.
Jordan McLaughlin has already signed a well-deserved two-way contract to play in Iowa this year.
He’ll be an excellent floor general (he lead the Long Island Nets to the championship game last year where they lost, not coincidently, to Rosas’ Rio Grande Vipers) He’ll also provide insurance for the main roster should some combination of trades and injuries suddenly leave them critically shorthanded at point guard, as what happened last season.
The Wolves have the G League rights to Tyus Battle, and are likely to exercise that if he chooses to stay in the states. Jordan Murphy also very much earned a spot in Iowa, should he choose to take it. With Naz now on the main roster, there’s wide open opportunity for Murphy if he’s offered the chance.
But the most important player the Wolves need to try and lock up is Kelan Martin, who’s eerily similar to Rockets G League gem Danuel House in both physical build and playing style. Martin turned into a flamethrower in tournament play, breaking the game against the Nets open in the second half, then singlehandedly getting them into the championship game against the Grizzlies.
The Wolves need to offer Martin every incentive they can to get him to sign their second two-way contract. Finding rotation 3-and-D players at the G League level - like the Rockets did with House - is invaluable, especially to teams above the salary cap - as the Wolves are now.
The Wolves came away from summer league with an overall haul of a successful demo of both a new offense and defense, proof their talent evaluation system is working with the performances they got from Naz, McLaughling and Martin, and massively good vibes from a deep tournament run led by a key main roster player, a likeable new assistant coach, and the enthusiasm of the main roster players all showing up to watch and cheer. The difference in culture and outlook this year compared to last could not be more opposite, and that’s a massively positive step for the Wolves to have taken.
