It's An Offensive League

[Duke13]

Most posters on here know the advanced stats more then I do but the wolves pace of play was near the bottom in the league. Which is mind blowing to me. I'm not sure if that's a Tibs thing or not. So while we may be efficient we aren't getting near the possessions we should.

What drives me nuts is that Rubio is the only guys who brings the ball up the court. We don't have a guy who gets a rebound who will dribble the ball up the court with any threat in mind. Zach would before he got hurt. The rebounder always wait for Rubio, annoys the hell out of me. Not that we had many guys capable after the injury to Zach.

I was watching Isaac highlights today, was really impressed with how confidently he dribbled the ball, he would start the break after a rebound and seemed fairly comfortable doing it.

[BloopOracle]

Sounds like all of you need to take another look at Markannen now, a prolific stretch four to put next to Towns. Lets get this team to have a modern NBA offensive philosophy

[Lipoli390]

Most posters on here know the advanced stats more then I do but the wolves pace of play was near the bottom in the league. Which is mind blowing to me. I'm not sure if that's a Tibs thing or not. So while we may be efficient we aren't getting near the possessions we should.

What drives me nuts is that Rubio is the only guys who brings the ball up the court. We don't have a guy who gets a rebound who will dribble the ball up the court with any threat in mind. Zach would before he got hurt. The rebounder always wait for Rubio, annoys the hell out of me. Not that we had many guys capable after the injury to Zach.

I was watching Isaac highlights today, was really impressed with how confidently he dribbled the ball, he would start the break after a rebound and seemed fairly comfortable doing it.

Good point, Duke. I think Thibs would like Wiggins to do what your suggesting. Of course, it's unlikely he'll be in a position very often to take the ball up the court after getting a rebound. :) Honestly, I can see KAT doing more of that and, as you pointed out, Zach can and did do it before he went down. Thibs needs to let Zach do it more often and give KAT and Belly more latitude to do it as well.

[Monster]

Most posters on here know the advanced stats more then I do but the wolves pace of play was near the bottom in the league. Which is mind blowing to me. I'm not sure if that's a Tibs thing or not. So while we may be efficient we aren't getting near the possessions we should.

What drives me nuts is that Rubio is the only guys who brings the ball up the court. We don't have a guy who gets a rebound who will dribble the ball up the court with any threat in mind. Zach would before he got hurt. The rebounder always wait for Rubio, annoys the hell out of me. Not that we had many guys capable after the injury to Zach.

I was watching Isaac highlights today, was really impressed with how confidently he dribbled the ball, he would start the break after a rebound and seemed fairly comfortable doing it.

Good point, Duke. I think Thibs would like Wiggins to do what your suggesting. Of course, it's unlikely he'll be in a position very often to take the ball up the court after getting a rebound. :) Honestly, I can see KAT doing more of that and, as you pointed out, Zach can and did do it before he went down. Thibs needs to let Zach do it more often and give KAT and Belly more latitude to do it as well.

I see that a little differently. I see more guys releasing down the floor to have opportunities to receive those passes. To some extent you want your bigs to outlet that ball up to someone. They changed from Having Rubio down the floor more to having him back after 20-30 games in because...that makes sense. Nobody wants to outlet to Rubio unless it's a wide open layup for him to make and he is a pretty god rebounder. I remember the season when Sam was coaching a number of times Rubio chewed Dieng out for not getting him the ball quickly. It was one thing that dieng oddly did poorly a lot that year. I didn't notice that as much this year.

To me the problem is more about guys not running their asses off down the floor or in some cases being disciplined.

Part of the issue with pace is the poor defense. I'm not letting Thibs totally off the hook or anything there but that's is PART of it.

I do think Thibs probably needs to let go some and the fact that he changed things up this year incorporating Rubio who had a career best year is encouraging.

Also when I was reading Lip's post about basically offense helps your defense or reminded me of Rick Adelman who tended to have a pretty solid defensive team partly because the offense was so good.

[Duke13]

Haha, as I was typing I was thinking the sane thing in regards to Wiggins!

All seriousness I agree with you in hoping Tibs loosens the reigns with the offense, in terms of yelling out every play.

[Q12543 [enjin:6621299]]

Believe me, I think Thibs absolutely wanted us to run off misses, and Rubio is probably one of the best players in the league at finding guys in the open court. But as Monster said, it's tough to run if you are always taking the ball out of your own basket and having to in bound! This is where good defense leads to good offense!

[Monster]

Pace isn't everything. the Wolves scored more points and had a higher offensive rating this season scoring fewer possessions. of course offense was up this year so its relative however look up the Wolves pace and offensive efficient and pace the last 2 years and there were instances where the Wolves actually were a better offensive team while having a slower pace than other months. Why? I'm sure their are a bunch of factors maybe one of them would be the stretch of time when the team was actually playing defense. If anyone wants to dig further into those numbers from the last 2 seasons I would be interested in what they find. for me the sample sizes are somewhat small I don't know if I want to spend that kind of time.

I'll say this for Thibs. After making an adjustment earlier in the year and having Rubio involved and Towns getting back on track for the most part I didn't see guys not get to show their game. Thibs seems to have looked to capitalize on various players giving them chances to succeed. It wan't like guys were hampered having to play within a system (think Rambis in the triangle etc which is hyperbole bad) guys were told to make plays. The problem people have is that too much of the time it was isolation plays instead fo the free flowing stuff that everyone wants to see Again the problem especially the 2nd half of the season was Rush was just a flow spacer that's it with Lavine out and it often ended up being the Wiggins Towns and Rubio show. To some extent its hard to argue with that based on who else was playing especially when Bazz started struggling and Belly was out. I don't think that type of flowing offense comes easy and with a young roster with limited shooting down the stretch I think it just was tough to get that to happen especially when they were rolling out players they had signed days earlier AND that were coming back off injuries so they hadn't played NBA games recently. it will take time to have the offensive system that we all want and the roster needs to have some more help too along with maturation of players. Again I am not letting Thibs off the hock here either, but I do think there are some reasons why we should give him a little more benefit of the doubt on the offensive end while having some healthy skepticism as well.