Timberwolves similar but different to ’08-’09 Thunder
By Ben Beecken
The comparisons between the 2015-16 Minnesota Timberwolves and 2008-09 Oklahoma City Thunder are starting to fly around at a fast and furious pace.
And while they are certainly warranted on some level, the teams are actually much more similar in many less-obvious ways.
The obvious comparisons? A second-year, scoring-minded shooting guard has improved his game after winning the rookie of the year award and has late-game heroics to suggest he could be the alpha dog on a playoff team in short order.
Additionally, there’s a 20 year-old former UCLA guard with all-world athleticism but seems to be a square peg in the round hole that is the point guard position in the NBA. He attacks the rim with reckless abandon but the fit with some of the other pieces seems dubious at times.
The Thunder franchise won just 20 games in 2007-08, the final year in Seattle, and 23 games in 2008-09, the first season in OKC. The 2014-15 Wolves won just 16 games in Wiggins’ rookie year and are on pace to win about 27 games this season.
That all seems easy enough, right?
But what if Wiggins isn’t Kevin Durant, despite the undeniable similarities between their respective rookie campaigns? And, as it turns out, Zach LaVine isn’t nearly as similar to Russell Westbrook as one might assume.
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I’ll posit that Karl-Anthony Towns is the Wolves’ Durant, and that Andrew Wiggins himself is much more in line with what Russell Westbrook brought to the table for Scott Brooks‘ young Thunder squads.
Towns is just 20 years old, and is better than Durant was as a rookie. He’s already a much better player than Wiggins, and if he had been playing heavy minutes all season would have been a borderline All-Star as a rookie big man.
Early in his career, Durant was a much better long-range marksman than Wiggins, shooting an impressive 42.2 percent from beyond the arc in his second season. He also passed the ball better, played better defense, and got to the basket much less often, preferring to stay on the perimeter and be a play-maker.
Wiggins’ strengths are getting to the free throw line and not turning the ball over, but he also doesn’t create for teammates or have the floor-spacing element to his game that Durant had as a second-year player.
And while Wiggins has obviously improved this season, he hasn’t quite made a Durant-sized leap. Durant’s rebounding and play-making improvements were inescapable, and while Wiggins’ aggressiveness and ability to draw fouls have certainly gotten better, it’s the periphery that hasn’t budged, and his rate-based statistics have even regressed in some cases.
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Towns, on the other hand, is starting at a higher level than Durant as a rookie. The sky is, quite literally, the limit for the Wolves’ current rookie sensation, and his versatile and complete game will only improve with seasoning. There aren’t components that need to be developed almost from scratch with KAT, whereas that is the case with Wiggins.
So what’s with the Wiggins-to-Westbrook comparison?
It’s simple, really. Sure, they play different positions, but neither shoots the three-ball well, both prefer to get to the rim or pull-up from mid-range, and neither is quite as efficient as they could be, largely due to their penchant for shooting contested shots in no-man’s land.
Both players struggled as rookies, despite the fact that Wiggins won Rookie of the Year last season, and they both made a leap as sophomores in the NBA.
And realistically, they’re both the sidekicks to each team’s respective best player. The versatile offensive games of Durant and Towns are perfect for today’s NBA, and the high-volume, three-point-shooting-challenged repertoires of Westbrook and Wiggins are antiquated if not combined with other play-making abilities.
Westbrook has figured out how to be a perennial All-Star and consensus top-10 player in the NBA. He rebounds his position extremely well, keeps his turnover rate relatively low for such a high-usage point guard, and has continued to have an impressively high free throw rate across the first six-plus seasons of his career.
Wiggins doesn’t rebound and has been a worse rebounder as a second-year player than he was as a rookie from, and he doesn’t pass much for a player that plays a lot at the two-guard spot. Not turning the ball over much is an outstanding quality, but it also illustrates Wiggins’ one-track mind when he has the ball.
No, Wiggins and Westbrook are not the same players, and Wiggins has a long way to go to match the Thunder superstar’s level of play.
And Towns certainly isn’t Durant, although the trajectory that he’s on puts him much closer to KD than anyone in their right mind would have expected just six months ago.
But perhaps the best thing about the comparison is this: Ricky Rubio is the other top-three player on the Wolves’ roster, and the 2008-09 Thunder didn’t have any pieces beyond Durant and Westbrook. And don’t forget about Zach LaVine, either. (Yes, James Harden was drafted in 2009, but it took him a year to get up to speed, too.)
If Towns and Wiggins develop at anything resembling the rate of Durant and Westbrook (and to this point, they are), the Wolves simply need to a better job than Oklahoma City at surrounding their stars with complementary talent.
Next: An Early Look at the Timberwolves Draft Board
The future is bright, and for the first time in a long time, Wolves fans can repeat that and believe in it with confidence.