The Timberwolves’ peculiar defense

While the offense has thrived over these past two months, the Timberwolves’ defense has been nothing to write home about.

In terms of team defense, the Timberwolves have been consistently terrible over the past few months.

The odd thing is, this roster does feature some terrific defenders like Ricky Rubio, Karl-Anthony Towns, and even Gorgui Dieng. That is what makes this team’s defense such an oddity; despite having good individual defenders, they struggle as a team to defend.

Obviously, the Wolves miss the presence of Kevin Garnett, who is still the only player on the roster to have a defensive rating under 100. In fact, since the All-Star break, the Wolves have only one player that has a defensive rating under 106.2, which is the league average. (That player is Damjan Rudez at 99.9, but he has only played in seven games since the break.)

Even the premier individual defenders in Rubio and Towns have struggled on the defensive end since the breather. Rubio currently features a defensive rating of 111.7, compared to his 103.5 rating prior to the All-Star break.

As for Towns, his defensive rating has climbed roughly five points since the break as he’s currently sitting at a 112.7 rating since that point in the season.

The fact that even the best Timberwolves defenders are struggling really shows how poor this team is on that end of the floor. Part of it could be the fact that this team has had enough of this season, as they obviously cannot be pleased with what they see in the win-loss column.

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However, defense seemed to be the “calling card” of this team for the future, and playing so poorly now does not set the right tone going forward, especially since the team has been ghastly on defense over the past two months.

Throughout the month of February, the Wolves team had a team defensive rating of 114.4 which was second-worst in the league. As for this month, the Wolves have gotten better in the defensive rating column, but they are still above the league average at 109. Compare that to their average rating of 102 from October to January.

Now, obviously defensive rating is not the only statistic that measures team defense, although it is telling. We can also look at Minnesota’s Defensive Four Factors as well, which are stats that are directly related to a team’s success.

The first factor is the opponent’s effective field goal percentage. Since the All-Star break, the Wolves’ opponents effective field goal percentage is 53.9 percent, good for fifth-worst in the league in that span. To put it into some sort of perspective, the league average effective field goal percentage is roughly 50 percent.

Opponent free throw attempt rate is the second factor of success. The Timberwolves have a 0.234 opponent free throw rate, which is actually second-best in the league since the break. Although that is above the season league average, it is still one of the best since the All-Star break.

Turnover ratio is the third factor, and again the Wolves are not awful in this stat either. They feature a 14.7 opponent turnover rate since the break, which is 12th best. The Wolves are also above the league average in this stat since the February recess.