Minnesota Sports Forum

Sure there has been plenty of chatter on this fourth about Teague but not really a whole lot of breakdown of what we are getting as a player. I'll admit to being a homer for whoever is on the team but the more I look into Teague the more I think I did truely undervalue him coming into the offseason for various reasons. I've watched him play in a couple random games (against good PGs) and watched some highlights. I've been impressed in my limited size sample.

I've also read from comment from Atlanta fans that praise his ability to lead and direct offense. Watching him I found he has a fun pretty diverse game. I thought he was more of a scoring PG with some ball hog tendencies. He may have some poor decisions as a scorer but he was also asked to do a lot more of that both with Atlanta and with the Pacers. I think people will end up recalling liking him.

Interestingly a bunch of Pacers players including Paul George had their most efficient seasons or some of their most efficient seasons playing with Teague last year. Paul George had his most efffiecrnt year despite taking fewer shots at the Rim and 3 pointers. Could Teague get some credit for these guys shooting the ball well? Is it Nate Mcmillen? That roster was a weird collection of players if you think about it.

Hopefully, he trends toward the past two seasons with three pointers.

I remember the fiasco of the 2015 ECFs... on first glance, it looks like he helped derail what was a beautiful passing team by shooting more in that series. It was by design... by Miami.

Miami went under most picks and dared him to shoot. He didn't seem completely comfortable being THE guy during that series.

AbeVigodaLive wrote:Hopefully, he trends toward the past two seasons with three pointers.

I remember the fiasco of the 2015 ECFs... on first glance, it looks like he helped derail what was a beautiful passing team by shooting more in that series. It was by design... by Miami.

Miami went under most picks and dared him to shoot. He didn't seem completely comfortable being THE guy during that series.

I liked how you framed and reframed this take. I just looked up that team. Offensively the top scorer in the regular season was Millsap at just under 17ppg. The leading scorer in the playoffs was Teague. I assume you meant it was against the Cavs. That Hawks team was a nice team but it certainly didn't have super dynamite offensive firepower players. Teague will be the 4th option here and will have arguably 3 other players that are much better offensively than anyone on those Hawks teams.

Just read a recent Steve Aschburner piece on Rubio. I found the following excerpt from that article to be interesting and highly relevant to the debate over whether we should have traded Ricky and replaced him with Teague:

"Problem was, Thibodeau spent most of last season looking off Rubio, to put it in point guard parlance. His first big act as Wolves coach and president of basketball operations was to draft Providence's Kris Dunn as Rubio's replacement. And Dunn, shipped to Chicago on draft night in the Jimmy Butler deal, would have been just that, if he hadn't shot even more shakily than Rubio.

So Thibodeau often used Andrew Wiggins to initiate offense, especially late in games, and figures to also use Butler in that role this season. Minnesota also ranked last in 3-point attempts and makes last season, with Rubio shooting just 30.6 percent.

Enter Jeff Teague, Rubio's actual replacement who is older (29 vs. 26), pricier and a more willing-and-able shooter. He's a solid floor organizer and his .574 true-shooting mark last season wasn't just better than Rubio's (.539), it was better than Thibodeau's guy Derrick Rose (.550) in his 2011 MVP season.

In a conference call with reporters Friday, Thibodeau was careful not to criticize Rubio when asked about his preference for Teague. He simply praised the new guy, with this one jumping out: "You can't go under on pick-and-rolls."

The Wolves still need shooters; the protected 2018 first-round pick they got for Rubio won't hit any shots this year. Teague is steady enough on defense, assuming the Wolves embrace their coach's renowned strategies at that end.

But there is one stat the Wolves might not have been aware of when they sent Rubio packing. He holds a special distinction for a woebegone franchise.

Consider that in the 10 seasons after Minnesota traded away Kevin Garnett in 2007, 101 different players appeared in a regular-season game for the team. Of those, 62 logged at least 500 minutes. Well, the Wolves outscored their foes with just two of them on the floor:

* Rubio, who was plus-345 in 11,216 minutes.

* Garnett, who was plus-72 in 654 minutes in a second stint (2015-2016) in Minnesota.

Everybody else - every other significant piece of each failed rebuilding effort - was in the red. From early presumed saviors such as Al Jefferson (minus-1,173), Jonny Flynn (minus-805) and Kevin Love (minus-380), to more recent poorly-fit pieces such as Andrew Wiggins (minus-634) and Zach LaVine (minus-951).

There is another way to slice those stats.

From the start of Minnesota's first "Garnett era" - beginning with the perennial All-Star's second season of 1996-97, when the front office truly committed to him - through 2016-17, only 19 Minnesota guys played at least 1,000 minutes and posted positive plus/minus ratings.

One was Garnett (33,982 minutes in 890 games, plus-2,525).

Seventeen were teammates of Garnett's from his first stay.

And one was Rubio.

Somehow, in spite of all his shooting limitations and how those impacted his teammtes, Rubio managed to be a positive - the biggest positive, by 345 points - for a team that went 173-303 and got outscored by 1,222 points during his six seasons in Minnesota.

You'd think that would matter as much as his 3-point percentage.

Utah certainly might appreciate it."

Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.

Yeah, Lip, it's gonna be very interesting to watch how both the Jazz and Wolves play this year.

I have pondered this topic a few times since the Rubio trade. Some thoughts:

- If Rubio is such a plus player, why couldn't the Wolves win more games?

- Why couldn't we ever get more production from our backup PGs?

- Is it possible teammates struggled more with other PGs because they became use to playing with Rubio's style?

- Or is Rubio's style productive during most of the game, but not so much in crunch time?

I didn't draw any conclusions. There was another comment Thibs made yesterday regarding the Rubio trade:

Jerry Zgoda?Verified account @JerryZgoda 16h16 hours ago
Thibs speaks to media, about Teague he likes: Has been on teams that won big, hard to stop in pick-n-roll, gets into lane & can finish.

Jerry Zgoda?Verified account @JerryZgoda 16h16 hours ago
Thibs wished Ricky well, "where we are, we had to get out of this hole" & took opp to improve team. "So that's why we did what we did."

A couple thoughts.

Teague is like 2 years 4 months older than Rubio and has been very durable.

All these stats about how good or whatever Rubio has been while the Wolves have been bad...where is the same energy into looking at Teague's stats? Teague's TS% was mentioned in that article but I get it was about Rubio. This thread is about Teague. :)

Thibs comment on getting out of a hole makes a lot of sense. It's not a rip on Rubio but if they wanted to make real progress having a player in Teague that's been there done that year after year in the playoffs is a pretty big deal.

People have had questions about whether we should have played out the youth of the roster at different points. The way the West is shaping up if you felt this team had to take a step forward making the playoffs this year...Thibs making the Butler trade looks even smarter now. Maybe it will be even harder to get to the top half of the playoff picture but the bottom half will be tough enough with basically only a couple teams out of it from the jump. Unless there are some significant injuries we will make the playoffs this year but the previous roster wouldn't have been a lock even if they had added some really solid FAs. Now if this team actually makes the playoffs they have a legit bunch of impactful players that make you think they can lead this team past another good team. Before it was basically hoping the youthful talent just does that and to be honest that group hadn't shown that type of step up ability consistently so far espcially when it comes to playing tough. Teague is gonna help here and people are seriously downplaying the aspect of his vet and playoff experience of adding him.

Thanks for excerpting that article Lip. Aschburner pretty much summed up what I've been arguing for years about Rubio: Teams play better when he is on the floor vs. on the bench. Utah supposedly will collapse in the West due to a lack of scorers. We'll see. I'm not counting them out of the playoff race, that's for sure.

That being said, I certainly don't consider Teague a downgrade. My issue is the extra $ spent to obtain him that could have otherwise been spent elsewhere. But what's done is done....I like his deal compared to what Jrue Holiday got - my goodness!

Q12543 wrote:Thanks for excerpting that article Lip. Aschburner pretty much summed up what I've been arguing for years about Rubio: Teams play better when he is on the floor vs. on the bench. Utah supposedly will collapse in the West due to a lack of scorers. We'll see. I'm not counting them out of the playoff race, that's for sure.

That being said, I certainly don't consider Teague a downgrade. My issue is the extra $ spent to obtain him that could have otherwise been spent elsewhere. But what's done is done....I like his deal compared to what Jrue Holiday got - my goodness!

I agree, Q. I consider the Rubio/Teague swap to be roughly a wash from a basketball perspective. Like you, I didn't think it was worth losing the extra $5 million in cap space. However, getting a 2018 1st round pick helps balance the deal overall, as long as we don't squander the pick by using it to trade for a FA like CJ Miles. So far, it looks like Thibs is appropriatedly saying no to Indiana on that deal. I applaud Thibs for holding firm on that.

That's a crazy stat about Ricky and KG and supports my statement that Ricky played with some real garbage rosters.

It also appears that Thibs was not impressed with Rickys second half surge and must not have really believed that he would improve his 3 ball, as he said. Its unfortunate that Thibs seems to be a guy that forms an opinion early and wont change it. Hopefully the team can still succeed despite that.

Phenom's_Revenge wrote:That's a crazy stat about Ricky and KG and supports my statement that Ricky played with some real garbage rosters.

It also appears that Thibs was not impressed with Rickys second half surge and must not have really believed that he would improve his 3 ball, as he said. Its unfortunate that Thibs seems to be a guy that forms an opinion early and wont change it. Hopefully the team can still succeed despite that.

So what is your opinion on Jeff Teague?