Ricky Rubio’s value to the Timberwolves

Another day, another disparaging article written about Timberwolves’ point guard Ricky Rubio — and another take that fails to capture the obvious worth that the Spaniard brings to his team.

In what’s become an ongoing battle, we’re here to bring balance to the conversation surrounding Ricky Rubio and his value as a player and fit with both the Wolves’ roster and today’s NBA game.

The Star Tribune’s Jim Souhan is a top offender when it comes to hot takes and lazy statements regarding the Timberwolves, and especially when it comes to Rubio. Sunday’s column is no different.

(If you’d like to dignify the article with a click, you can find it here. But I read the whole thing so you don’t have to, and you’ll find the article below in a series of excerpts.)

By now, we all know the negative narrative on Rubio: he can’t shoot and he’s not a good defender. Now, let’s turn it over to Jim.

"Ricky Rubio is a charming kid and a pretty good NBA point guard. Let’s all wish him well in his future endeavors. There is a place for him in the Association, and as a Spaniard he will probably enjoy the warmer weather.Rubio is one of those players who, in the modern era, divides observers along analytical lines. Those who rely on corneas and common sense think he’s a solid player marred by poor shooting. Those who rely on calculators think he’s an underappreciated, borderline star."

Yikes. Go ahead and re-read just how patronizing and flawed those final two sentences are. Are “corneas and common sense” and “calculators” mutually exclusive ways of evaluating basketball players? It’s a shockingly tone-deaf phrase that immediately disqualifies the remainder of the column.

But we press on. Later in the article, we find this gem:

"Thibs’ selection of Dunn is rife with meaning. It means he doesn’t want to rely on a point guard who never seemed to be as good as he was projected to be, and who never seemed to elevate his team. Let’s face it: Rubio has lost a lot of games in a league where good players are supposed to alter the standings.Last year, Rubio played alongside a historically good rookie in Towns, a rising star in Wiggins, productive role players in Shabazz Muhammad and Gorgui Dieng, the rapidly improving LaVine … and won 29 games.Scott Layden kept talking Friday about the importance of players who make others better. He wasn’t criticizing Rubio — he has done nothing but praise Rubio — but if Rubio lived up to that standard, wouldn’t the Wolves have won more than 29 games?"

From the first paragraph: “Rubio has lost a lot of games in a league where good players are supposed to alter the standings.” Okay. Well, put simply:

Pretty obvious, right? Isn’t that the definition of a player who is able to “alter the standings”?

Nobody is arguing that Rubio is LeBron James or Stephen Curry. If he was, that 114-164 record would be flipped, and likely be even better than that. But is it a coincidence that the Wolves’ best season in the past 12 years was the 40-win year that Rubio played in all 82 games?

The middle paragraph in the above excerpt is pure absurdity. What does “a historically good rookie”, “a rising star”, “productive role players” and “rapidly improving” mean? Nothing! It means nothing. They’re simply flowery words to describe a few exciting, young NBA players with extremely bright futures.

But what it doesn’t do is accurately describe the true on-court value of the players that received the majority of minutes for the 2015-16 Timberwolves.

Towns, Rubio, and Gorgui Dieng were the only three players on last year’s team team that played above league-average by virtually any measure. Use win shares or virtually any box-score plus-minus metric: the trio were the only starting-caliber NBA players on the roster.

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Wiggins could be a superstar one day. He was significantly better as a second-year player than a rookie, but that doesn’t mean he was a star. Muhammad regressed, and LaVine certainly made strides. But none of those three were anything resembling a legitimate difference-maker last season.

However, the Wolves were a legitimately good team with Rubio on the court. In fact, Minnesota had a net plus/minus of +8.3 points per 100 possessions with Rubio at the helm. That’s good.

The stupidity of the “they only won 29 games” argument is absurd. The 2006-07 Timberwolves won only 32 games with Kevin Garnett as their best player. The 2003-04 Cleveland Cavaliers only won 35 games with Rookie of the Year LeBron James on the team…he was a “historically good rookie” with a much better supporting cast than Towns/Rubio had in 2015-16.

There are myriad examples of why this is a lazy, ineffective, and irrelevant argument, and the fact that it continues to be propped up is beyond ridiculous.

Rubio is above-average at every single possible skill on the basketball court except for shooting. There’s value in that, to be sure. All players have a weakness on some level, but if they can impact the game in plenty of other ways, their value is obvious.

Not so with Rubio, apparently. Somehow the subtleties of the fifth-best point guard in Real Plus-Minus (ESPN’s take on a box score plus-minus measurable) is lost on folks like Souhan. The league-leading steal rate (again, see 2013-14) is too hard to understand. The 40th-best Value Over Replacement Player mark is over the head of many, too — and by the way, that’s not point guards, that’s the entire NBA.

On Twitter, Ben Schleuss compared Rubio with five starting point guards on Western Conference playoff teams. Here are the results:

It really isn’t hard to understand. Is Rubio a superstar? No. Could he be the best player on a championship team? No — at least not at his current production level.

Does that mean that he’s only “pretty good”? Does it mean that he doesn’t make his team better, as Souhan claims? No, and absolutely not. Does it mean that Rubio is not “worthy of leading Wolves’ resurgence” as the headline of Souhan’s piece suggests? Nope — an absurd statement.

Perhaps the most irresponsible throwaway statement by Souhan is as follows:

"He is still the same player he was when David Kahn drafted him — an intuitive, intelligent, competitive, incomplete point guard. And he is scheduled to be the NBA’s 14th-highest-paid guard in 2016-17."

Ricky Rubio is absolutely, unequivocally, without a doubt, a top-14 point guard in the NBA. I’m not even sure that top-10 is much of a debate at this point. And the idea that he’s the same player as he was five years ago is, simply put, insane.

It’s sad, and an indictment on mainstream reporting regarding today’s NBA, that a columnist at the prominent newspaper in the Twin Cities is so lost on such a key and divisive issue.

For a solid take on the pluses and minuses of Ricky Rubio, read ESPN’s Zach Lowe. Read this take from our friends at Punch-Drunk Wolves. Read any number of level-headed takes from A Wolf Among Wolves.

Next: What Is The Timberwolves' Post-Draft Plan?

But for the love of basketball, don’t let Souhan (or any other hot-take artist) fool you.