Making sense of Sam Mitchell’s performance

The Timberwolves’ record stands at 9-13 under Sam Mitchell — a far cry from the 16-66 mark the franchise managed just last season.

But that hasn’t stopped Wolves fans from getting impatient. The glimpses that this squad has shown have been promising enough that Mitchell‘s coaching style, rotations, and philosophies have been broken down and torn apart to the nth degree.

Mitchell, winner of the 2006-07 NBA Coach of the Year award, is certainly not above reproach. But let’s be sure to parse the real from the fake and the overblown from any potentially deserved vitriol.

The Good

Let’s start by acknowledging that just because a team has lost a few big leads and lost some close games, it isn’t a clear indictment of the head coach and a sign that he’s the worst coach in the NBA. At least, as long as Byron Scott is around.

Remember: this is a 16-win team that has really only added a 20 year-old in Karl-Anthony Towns (a borderline star already, but still) and has a healthier Ricky Rubio, although he has missed four of the 22 contests so far this season. It isn’t like there has been a ton of roster turnover, so there needs to be some understanding of the role in player development that Mitchell and his assistants have played to this point.

More from Dunking with Wolves

• The dream starting 5 for Minnesota Timberwolves 5 years from now
• Anthony Edwards’ latest accolade is a great sign of things to come
• In an OT thriller, Team Canada snatches Bronze from Team USA
• Timberwolves start, bench, cut: Mike Conley, Shake Milton, Jordan McLaughlin
• Which Timberwolves roster additions have upgraded the bench?

And while it’s something that’s hard to quantify, it isn’t fair to ignore Mitchell’s role in something that has gone right. Sure, his assistants deserve credit too, but it’s impossible to know how much in comparison with Mitchell himself.

What was a 30th-ranked defense from a year ago is now 18th in defensive rating — not a modest improvement. Of course, the additions of Towns and Rubio and even more minutes from Kevin Garnett have improved that mark, but a huge part of team defense is the coaching philosophy and the attitude instilled by the coach.

Mitchell set the tone in training camp when the team worked almost entirely on the defensive end of the court for days. It would be irresponsible to ignore the massive improvement on that side of the ball.

Additionally, the Wolves are third in the NBA in free throw rate, which helps offset the huge disparity in three-point shooting, where Minnesota is 29th in three-point attempt rate.

The Bad

Only 20.1 percent of the Timberwolves’ field goal attempts as a team come from beyond the arc, more than only the Brooklyn Nets.

While that mark is hideous, it’s still better than last season’s 17.9 percent and 30th-place ranking in the league. In other words, it’s simply a continuation of the system that Flip Saunders ran in 2014-15 in many ways.

The other common criticism of Mitchell is his handling of the rotation. This is becoming a larger issue as the season continues — on Friday night in Denver, 35 year-old Tayshaun Prince played 34 minutes and shot zero-for-five from the field. Shabazz Muhammad, the promising third-year forward, played just 16 minutes.

The idea was that Prince could at least slow down the Nuggets’ Danilo Gallinari, but that’s not exactly what happened. But the refusal to make an adjustment when the Wolves’ offense was mired in a lengthy slump down the stretch was indefensible.

The minutes management of Karl-Anthony Towns makes sense on it’s face as well, but there have been a handful of games when Mitchell was late to pull the trigger and get his prized rookie back on the floor.

Overall

To this point, Mitchell has done an okay job. He’s not exactly a strategist or a master adjuster, but I’m not sure anyone thought he was to begin with.

Mitchell can’t take sole blame for the bad losses that the Wolves have endured to this point in the season. Additionally, the rotation issues haven’t been all bad: Towns’ minutes have been overall appropriately limited, although the distribution of minutes has been rough at times, the best three players on the team are leading in minutes (Towns, Andrew Wiggins, and Rubio), and Kevin Garnett‘s minutes have been kept in check.

Next: Trade Possibilities For Shabazz Muhammad

On the other hand, Prince has been relied upon far too often and it’s cut into minutes for Nemanja Bjelica, Muhammad, and even Zach LaVine. The archaic offensive system is an issue, and Mitchell has been glacial when it comes to making in-game adjustments.

We’re still only 22 games into Mitchell’s tenure as head coach, so we’ll be keeping an eye on all of the above items, both the good and the bad.