Minnesota Sports Forum

This is in response to Hick's question on Rubio's ability to add value to an offense.

Ricky has already proven that he can quarterback a high-powered offense. Let's rewind two years ago to the starting lineup of Rubio-Martin-Brewer-Love-Pekovic. Their offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) that season was 112.4. Guess which other NBA starting lineups had a better offensive rating?

No one.

Now obviously Rubio had some weapons to work with, but the idea that somehow he's incapable of leading a high-performing offense has already been proven wrong over the course of a full season. Now let's turn to this season.....

Starting Lineup A: KG-Prince-Wiggins-Towns-Rubio - That is a unit built for defense and yes, it puts more pressure on Rubio to score. We all know that Mitchell created this starting group as a temporary unit to set the right tone defensively.

Starting Lineup B: KG-Wiggins-Towns-Martin-Rubio - This is a more balanced lineup, but it still isn't a running lineup and a triumvirate of factors have weighed it down offensively: 1) Martin's on going shooting slump; 2) Towns hitting a bit of a trough; and 3) Yes, Ricky shooting poorly for even his low standards and struggling to develop chemistry with this group.

Time will tell if Ricky can stay healthy and eventually develop the type of chemistry needed to maximize KAT and Wiggins' talents - they all need more reps together - but there is no question in my mind we have the potential to eventually become a potent offense again with Ricky at the helm.

Edit: One other thing I'll add here. Guess who, despite all of his problems, STILL leads the team in Net Rating this season? You guessed it - Ricky Rubio.

This thread reminds me of the "Wiggins is a bust" thread early last season. Except Q is coming down on the right side of the argument this time around! ;-)

CoolBreeze44 wrote:I'm a little confused. If Pork Chop himself isn't 100% Pork Chop, can anybody be? If he's married, I'm wondering if his wife is 100% Pork Chop. I would hope she's not 85% Pork Chop, and 15% Mail man. Things to ponder while we still have two days until the next game.

Porkchop is in denial. Mrs. Chop only receives mail from me, though for some reason most of it is wrapped in plain brown paper, wonder what that's all about?

60WinTim wrote:This thread reminds me of the "Wiggins is a bust" thread early last season. Except Q is coming down on the right side of the argument this time around! ;-)

Aaaaaah! Don't bring that up. Papal was the one that initiated that thread and I was making fact-based observations about his play up to that point. I certainly never agreed that he was going to be a bust! What's funny is that the point in time which that thread was initiated was the same point that Wiggins began turning things around. Perhaps we gave him some bulletin board material!

Q, speaking of Wiggins. Did you see McPherson's article about Wig and why advanced stats are un-Wig friendly? If you did see it, what's your take on the points he made?

CoolBreeze44 wrote:Q, speaking of Wiggins. Did you see McPherson's article about Wig and why advanced stats are un-Wig friendly? If you did see it, what's your take on the points he made?

Q can certainly answer your question here as well (he might have even more insight now that all that knowledge has marinated in his brain) but I posted the article in the "Wiggins rebounding" thread and Q and others chimed in some thoughts.

http://minnesotasports.enjin.com/mobile/forum/viewthread/m/15059925/id/25183945-wiggins-rebounding

monsterpile wrote:

CoolBreeze44 wrote:Q, speaking of Wiggins. Did you see McPherson's article about Wig and why advanced stats are un-Wig friendly? If you did see it, what's your take on the points he made?

Q can certainly answer your question here as well (he might have even more insight now that all that knowledge has marinated in his brain) but I posted the article in the "Wiggins rebounding" thread and Q and others chimed in some thoughts.

http://minnesotasports.enjin.com/mobile/forum/viewthread/m/15059925/id/25183945-wiggins-rebounding

Thanks I totally missed that discussion.

Q12543 wrote:
Ricky has already proven that he can quarterback a high-powered offense. Let's rewind two years ago to the starting lineup of Rubio-Martin-Brewer-Love-Pekovic. Their offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) that season was 112.4. Guess which other NBA starting lineups had a better offensive rating?

No one.

This is true, on the other hand at that season we were 1-13 in close games and Ricky was not playing 4th quarters for a reason, he was historically bad in 4th quarters so Adelman played J.J. instead. My take is that if you have severely limited player as a part of your core/starting five, there is always danger, that opponents will be able to exploit that too much. I am not saying he is bad player, i think of him as an average or even slightly above average starting PG at this point. But he does present similar issues centers who cannot shoot FTs do. Can Clippers win championship with DJs 40perc. FTs, not so sure about that.

For example now we play so much full clear out for ISO on one side it is not even funny. We basically play like all our players are prime Melo :-). If your PG shoot like .100 from 3pt land you do not have that many options left. Teams are going to exploit him even more if he will not be able to raise his 3pt shot back to some reasonable percentages. They even started to leave him wide open for corner threes without much effort for close outs, that is how bad he is as a shooter. That is one of reasons why we work so hard for points nowadays.

So my question is, is he worth being 14mil player as a long term PG solution for a team which wants to go further than first playoff round? Considering also his injury history and the fact that he is pretty much stale since he came as a 17yo kid to Barcelona? That is why i am 80 perc Pork chop, i still see a chance, but man i am skeptical.

m4gor wrote:

Q12543 wrote:
Ricky has already proven that he can quarterback a high-powered offense. Let's rewind two years ago to the starting lineup of Rubio-Martin-Brewer-Love-Pekovic. Their offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) that season was 112.4. Guess which other NBA starting lineups had a better offensive rating?

No one.

This is true, on the other hand at that season we were 1-13 in close games and Ricky was not playing 4th quarters for a reason, he was historically bad in 4th quarters so Adelman played J.J. instead. My take is that if you have severely limited player as a part of your core/starting five, there is always danger, that opponents will be able to exploit that too much. I am not saying he is bad player, i think of him as an average or even slightly above average starting PG at this point. But he does present similar issues centers who cannot shoot FTs do. Can Clippers win championship with DJs 40perc. FTs, not so sure about that.

For example now we play so much full clear out for ISO on one side it is not even funny. We basically play like all our players are prime Melo :-). If your PG shoot like .100 from 3pt land you do not have that many options left. Teams are going to exploit him even more if he will not be able to rise his 3pt shot back to some reasonable percentages. They even started to leave him wide open for corner threes without much effort for close outs, that is how bad he is as a shooter. That is one of reasons why we work so hard for points nowadays.

So my question is, is he worth being 14mil player as a long term PG solution for a team which wants to go further than first playoff round? Considering also his injury history and the fact that he is pretty much stale since he came as a 17yo kid to Barcelona? That is why i am 80 perc Pork chop, i still see a chance, but man i am skeptical.

Yeah, I already pointed out in this thread that the 2014 Wolves were one of the best/worst frontrunning teams I've ever seen. They had all those 30 point wins... but couldn't win a close game.

It evened out to an underachieving squad that went 40 - 42. We can't give Rubio all the credit for those blowout wins... without acknowledging he was at least part of the problem in so many close losses.

m4gor wrote:

Q12543 wrote:
Ricky has already proven that he can quarterback a high-powered offense. Let's rewind two years ago to the starting lineup of Rubio-Martin-Brewer-Love-Pekovic. Their offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) that season was 112.4. Guess which other NBA starting lineups had a better offensive rating?

No one.

This is true, on the other hand at that season we were 1-13 in close games and Ricky was not playing 4th quarters for a reason, he was historically bad in 4th quarters so Adelman played J.J. instead. My take is that if you have severely limited player as a part of your core/starting five, there is always danger, that opponents will be able to exploit that too much. I am not saying he is bad player, i think of him as an average or even slightly above average starting PG at this point. But he does present similar issues centers who cannot shoot FTs do. Can Clippers win championship with DJs 40perc. FTs, not so sure about that.

For example now we play so much full clear out for ISO on one side it is not even funny. We basically play like all our players are prime Melo :-). If your PG shoot like .100 from 3pt land you do not have that many options left. Teams are going to exploit him even more if he will not be able to rise his 3pt shot back to some reasonable percentages. They even started to leave him wide open for corner threes without much effort for close outs, that is how bad he is as a shooter. That is one of reasons why we work so hard for points nowadays.

So my question is, is he worth being 14mil player as a long term PG solution for a team which wants to go further than first playoff round? Considering also his injury history and the fact that he is pretty much stale since he came as a 17yo kid to Barcelona? That is why i am 80 perc Pork chop, i still see a chance, but man i am skeptical.

I don't blame Rubio's shooting on the Wolves bad offense that's more on Sam and his overwhelming focus on this team playing defense. Sam may have miscalculated the difficulty this team would have scoring at times but he probably didn't envision Martin not being able to hit shots. My guess is that Sam at some point (and maybe already has) will start putting more time in working on getting the offense flowing. Ricky isn't really a guy that's going to look good just feeding guys in ISO plays. He is a guy that's going to create or be someone who helps facilitate the free flowing offense everyone wants to run that looks like GS or the Spurs. I don't think we are going to see that type of stuff consistantly this year there is no way Sam can go from basically punting on working on an offense to getting this youngish team to by in to those offensive principals. As Cool has said a number of times about lack of fast break points it's systemic. I tend to give Sam a bit of a break because of what he has done on the other side of the ball and the general way this team seems to play like it has a bit of swagger like they can actually win.

As for Rubio not being able to be a championship PG it's not exactly optimal however Dallas won a championship with Jason Kidd who basically only jacked up 3 pointers to score. Q was ready for Rubio to go that route for maybe at least a year. I've always said Rubio was too young to settle for that. Rubio has some decent 3 point shooting percentages plus FT% and was good with catch and shoot 3's in Europe so him being able to be a reasonably good 3 point shooter and play a Kidd role is somewhat reasonable. The first issue is whether he can stay healthy enough to do anything. If Rubio has enough talent around him and stays healthy he may be just fine.

As for the money he is getting paid...the wolves can afford it right now and probably will be able to for the life of his contract if he can stay healthy even if they decided to limit his minutes and held him out a few games here and there. Lol I am really not that concerned about money right now. Would he be overpaid if that happens? Yeah sure but If things go well we will be seeing Glen pay all these guys nice chunks of cash and not just Towns Lavine Wiggins but the other guys too if they want to stay around. Glen hasn't just spent money to spend money he has wanted to spend the money if guys are really worth it. Guys like Bazz Dieng Bjelica could be guys that are worth it to pay up for.