Minnesota Sports Forum

My fear is that Jaden is going to get the quickest 3 fouls in NBA history on Tuesday night. Luka had a nice scoring night, but Jaden really did a nice job when he was guarding him, and eventually slowed him down as Q said. I noticed Finch was careful not to let him get in foul trouble in either half, and I think that is crucial in this series. Sure we have other great defenders like NAW and Clark, but even Redick mentioned how much trouble Jaden and Gobert's length caused. We really need at least 30 minutes from him per game.

Yeah, it felt like Finch was doing some taste testing with Luka last night to see what worked defensively.

Jaden was the main guy, but they also put Julius on Luka, Ant a little bit, NAW a few times, and a surprising amount of switching leaving Rudy out there in space. Defense by committee. Zone D on out-of-bounds plays for them. And for the most part, it really worked well.

As for the fouls, yeah, that's something to watch out for. Luka is constantly fishing for contact. I remember one play in particular last night in which he went up for the jump shot, and just quickly kind of threw his head sideways into Julius' shoulder, fell down after the shot, and got the whistle. It wasn't obvious in real time as an unnatural shooting motion because he did it so quickly, and it was just his head, but on the replay, you could totally see Luka created the contact entirely with his head. It's the playoffs, and I like that they're typically letting the game be more physical in the postseason. That benefits us. But you're right, we need to be ready to rotate defenders to prevent Jaden or anyone from picking up too many fouls. Especially when Luka has the ball.

The thing is, overall, although Luka scored a bunch, he only had 1 assist. That's kind of amazing if you think about how he picked us apart with the Mavs last year. A lot of that just seems to be how much worse Jaxson Hayes is than Lively and Gafford. But I'd like to think that in part it's also because we were just doing a better job defensively of not biting on the help defense too soon and opening up assist opportunities for Luka. The switching also helped prevent those lob opportunities he killed us on last year too because he wasn't able to get past his defender and basically play 2 on 1 rolling to the basket. It was a gamble that Luka wouldn't just punish guys one on one, and he mostly didn't? I mean, he scored a ton, but it felt totally contained. If he's going to get 40 each game, but he's not getting into any kind of flow with his teammates, I'll take that. Ramp up the pressure and resentment on their side if other guys aren't seeing the ball.