Wolves Sign Ryan Hollins

The Timberwolves signed restricted free agent center Ryan Hollins to a 3 year $7 million offer sheet. This means the Mavericks have 7 days to match the offer. With Mav owner Mark Cuban’s tweet today reading, “congrats to ryan hollins. wish him the best w twolves #fb” it’s looking highly likely that Hollins will be a Timberwolf next season.

Financially Hollins’ contract reportedly looks something like this: $2,165,000 in 2009-10; $2,335,000 in 2010-11; and $2,500,000 in 2011-12. Essentially his salary will be offset this season by waiving the partially guaranteed Chucky Atkins, though he will eat into some raw 2010 summer cap space. The merits of that are yet to be seen.

On the court, Hollins fits nicely in a front court lacking length and explosiveness. Seven feet tall and extremely athletic, Hollins will fill the role of weakside shot blocker that the Wolves have sorely lacked.

Just what kind of player is Hollins? Career averages of 2.7 points in 8.8 minutes on 51.8% shooting from the field are relatively consistent throughout his short career so far so offensively we probably don’t want to rely on him for anything outside of dunks.

His real value comes to the team in the defensive side as a shot blocker. This season Hollins averaged 3.44 blocks per 48 minutes, which would have tied him for fifth in the league with Samuel Dalembert had he played enough games to qualify (70 games minimum, Hollins played 45). However it becomes apparent that Hollins blocks as many shots as he does because he has no discipline in keeping in his feet and tries to swat everything as his foul rate is through the roof. Per 48 minutes he averaged 8.4 fouls, which would have placed him at fourth in the league just behind Greg Oden, who also didn’t make the minimum number of games played, but committed enough personal fouls to qualify anyway. That makes Hollins’ block-to-foul ratio a disappointing 0.41 compared to elite shot blockers Chris Andersen’s 1.00, Marcus Camby’s 1.00, and Dwight Howard’s 0.85. Even Samuel Dalembert, a top flight shot blocker with a notoriously low basketball IQ, outperformed Hollins’ meager 0.41 with a ratio of 0.59. However, Hollins did manage to outperform Greg Oden jaw-droppingly poor 0.28 block-to-foul ratio.

Clearly Hollins is a physically gifted athlete, but he needs to learn discipline. It’s unlikely that he ever gets to the same level as a shot blockers like Andersen and Camby, but with any luck he can at least match Dalembert.