Evaluating Andrew Wiggins at the quarter pole

Andrew Wiggins has been subjected to an extreme amount of criticism for a player with his production throughout his career. Has he changed his ways at all so far this season?

When Jimmy Butler arrived through a draft day trade in late June, two assumptions were immediately made. First, that there were going to be a plethora of colorful sound bites and quotes throughout the season from the ex-Chicago Bull for Minnesota Timberwolves beat writers and media members to chew on.

The other, more importantly, was that Butler’s devotion to defense and overall rugged competitive nature would magnetize Andrew Wiggins out of his passive demeanor into two-way star that fully utilized all of his breathtaking gifts.

The results of this latter assumption have been mixed. Wiggins has showed an enhanced awareness on the less-glamorous end of the floor this season, slowly leaving behind the consistent focus-based blunders that helped allow opponents to score at will over his first three years in the league. The offensive side of the ball has also been intriguing, with Wiggins’ attempting to find his place among the pecking order with two other elite scoring players on the roster and a fresh point guard who, differing from his predecessor, enjoys putting the ball in the basket.

Let’s take a deeper dive into how he has faired now that we are just passed the season’s quarter mark.

The slow journey, using the eye test.

Evaluating Andrew Wiggins is a case of the stereotypical ‘good news, bad news’ information spreading technique. On the good news end of the spectrum, Wiggins always appears to be improving his game in various ways and seems to add another level to his skills every season. The bad news? This improvement comes in excruciatingly slow increments.

For every spring-loaded, jaw-dropping block on the defensive end, there is a blown assignment that leads to a layup. Every dart into a passing lane is offset by a loss of concentration in off-ball defense on the ensuing possession. The most frustrating part of this is that he shows us what could be without ever giving us enough to fully believe he has what it takes to make those flashes permanent. He is the king of turning groan-inducing laziness into mind-numbing athletic maneuvers in the span of just seconds.

However, this season the progressions have been palpable. Although there is still much work to be done, his glimpses of defensive competence have been much more consistent and easy to find. His offensive development is a much blurrier picture due to the aforementioned changes around him in the offseason, but he has seemed to relish the role of being a complementary option and taken advantage of Jimmy Butler usually being guarded by the opponent’s best wing defender.

He has also provided his fair share of incredible highlights so far this season. There aren’t many things scarier for a rim protector in the NBA than the game being close in the fourth quarter and Andrew Wiggins coming full speed at the hoop. It is during these times when Wiggins’ otherworldly athleticism is forcibly funneled into a desperate determination to put the ball in the basket at all costs. This is when an absolute athletic marvel takes place and the world ceases to exist:

It’s these moments that make fans crave that type of intensity all the time from Wiggins, and slips us hope that it could be possible.

Looking at the statistics

Perhaps the most primitive statistic when it comes to how a basketball player is doing within the context of a team is his net rating. Wiggins has steadily climbed in this category over his career, rising from putrid -10.1 his rookie year to an acceptable 5.2 in the current season (he was at -1 in the 2015-16 season and -.5 during 2016-17). Although reliability of this stat can be skewed depending on the talent on a roster, this still points to Wiggins contributing to a winning basketball team – something that he has not accomplished prior to this season.

Analyzing strictly defensive, Wiggins has put up the best defensive rating of his career thus far as well. His current mark of 105.2 would be the best rate he has had if he can stick with his current pace. This is assuredly positively impacted by having strong defenders around him in Taj Gibson and Jimmy Butler, but it is still promising that he has been able to make this a consistent trend over a decent sample size throughout the early portion of this season.

ESPN’s Defensive Real Plus Minus (DRPM) will forever seem to despise Andrew Wiggins contributions on that end. He currently ranks 80^th out of 87 small forwards listed with a -1.26 DRPM mark, which seems to be a gross undersell of his defensive performance. There are many reasons for this ranking, many of which have been touched on by numerous writers over the course of the last few seasons, but the most elementary solution to this issue would be for Wiggins to just give consistent effort on that end and let his physical gifts elevate him to the levels he is capable of reaching.

As frustrating and seemingly erroneous as this stat seems to be when analyzing Andrew Wiggins as a player, the positive news is it’s very much fixable.

What’s our conclusion?

In all honesty, this season for Andrew Wiggins has been much of the same when it comes to his polarizing reputation. It doesn’t take much research to find people who believe he is the most improved player on this year’s Timberwolves team. It takes an equal amount of research to find adamant fans that claim he persists to be one of the most overrated one-dimensional players in quite some time.

The answer probable lies somewhere in the middle, but closer to the positive opinions than the negative. As a player who averages 36.8 minutes per game and has a net rating of over five, on a team who currently resides in the fifth spot in the Western Conference, he is undoubtedly a very good player.

However, there is a real difference between being a ‘very good player’ and being a superstar. A very good player is someone who can impact a game with his own skill set. A superstar is someone who can impact a game by enhancing the performance of the collective group around him.

Next: The solution to the Wolves' fourth quarter problem

Wiggins is irrefutably closer to the ‘very good player’ definition, and maybe that’s why we all love to criticize him so much. The fascinating thing to follow will be if he can continue to evolve his game to become a superstar. And when it comes to that analysis, unfortunately the jury is still out.