Wolves Season in Review: Gorgui Dieng

This is Part Fourteen of the Wolves Season in Review player capsules. We’ll be looking at every player that finished the season on the Wolves roster, excluding ten-day contract signees. We’re starting with the players that played the fewest minutes and working our way up the roster to those that logged the most playing time. Today’s featured player is Gorgui Dieng.

Gorgui Dieng is one of the most difficult Wolves’ players to evaluate, especially in context with the rest of the team’s roster and the upcoming draft in June.

Dieng began his career with Rick Adelman as his head coach and was not allowed to play heavy minutes until midway through his rookie season. He played well, appearing in 60 games and ultimately starting 15 contests as a rookie due to ongoing injury problems with Nikola Pekovic and backup center Ronny Turiaf.

This season, Dieng started the year as Pekovic’s primary backup and played between 15 and 20 minutes per game consistently until the season was ten games old. At that point, Pekovic’s chronic foot problems flared up and Dieng was the starter by default.

From a box score standpoint, Dieng was a solid starting center. He had ups and downs, with some impressive high-assist totals and a couple of 20-10 games in November and December. His mid-range shot was solid, and the fall-away bank shot from 16 feet or so on the wing was absolutely deadly. The post game didn’t seem to be developed much beyond the underwhelming post game that he had as a rookie, but the overall activity on the offensive end was a definite positive.

In truth, however, Dieng struggled defensively. The blocked shots are gaudy (1.7 per game and a block rate of 4.5%), but came almost entirely in help-defense situations. His one-one-one defense continued to be mediocre at best, and heavier centers were able to do significant damage. The blocked shot numbers tended to hide this fact a bit, and Dieng still seems to carry the reputation as a solid defensive big man.

Even more troubling was perhaps Dieng’s dip in rebounding production. After pulling down 20% of total rebounds as a rookie, he grabbed just 15.9% of rebounds this season and saw his defensive rebounding rate fall from 26.9% to 20.8%. Curious, considering last year was the season that saw Dieng line up next to notorious rebound hog Kevin Love.

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In other words, one of the main reasons that Dieng was able to grab so many boards as a rookie was because the defense was preoccupied with Love and left Dieng free to gobble up rebounds. Without Love in the fold in 2014-15 and with Pekovic often sidelined while Dieng was on the floor, the second-year center was left to fend for himself in the paint and didn’t do quite as well as expected. His technique and instincts when it comes to rebounding need to improve if he wants to be a legitimate, full-time starting center in the league.

All things considered, however, Dieng was a solid contributor for the Wolves. He had an above-league-average Win Shares per 48 minutes of .108 and improved his assist rate to go along with an impressive free throw percentage of 78.3 and improving percentages from the floor, too.

Dieng is undoubtedly already one of the top backup centers in the entire NBA. The question is whether he’s a feasible starting center for a playoff team. At this point, it seems as though Dieng’s most significant weaknesses (one-on-one defense against true post centers and consistent defensive rebounding) are exposed when he’s forced to play much more than 25 minutes per game. Unless one or both of those things improves, Dieng will simply be a luxury — a very good backup center.

And that’s not a bad thing. But the Wolves are in a quandary, since they have Pekovic on a huge contract for the next few years and at best he’ll be able to play 20 minutes per game moving forward. They also will end up with a top pick in June’s draft and the top two prospects, Karl-Anthony Towns and Jahlil Okafor, are big men.

There remains a chance that Dieng will be dealt this summer as it seems possible that there are a handful of teams around the league that could overvalue him for the idea of what he brings to the table instead of what his actual on-court production has been to this point. If the Wolves indeed land either Towns or Okafor, Dieng could be on the block.

Most likely, of course, is that Dieng will be back next season and could even start on opening night, depending on Pekovic’s health and the direction that the Wolves go in the upcoming draft. The center situation is certainly one to keep a close eye on moving forward for the Wolves.

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