The Great, Good, Bad and Ugly for the Timberwolves (so far)

Noah Vonleh

This one hurts. I was ecstatic with the Vonleh signing this summer after his promising season for the Knicks last year. Unfortunately, this season has been a far cry from the success he saw in the Big Apple.

Vonleh is playing just 12.6 minutes per game, averaging 4.1 points on 46.5/10.0/84.2 shooting splits, 3.6 rebounds, 1.1 assists, 0.3 steals and 0.2 blocks.

Noah has rebounded exceptionally well on both ends, but has struggled defensively and shooting from the perimeter on offense. He is a career 30.8 percent 3-point shooter, so he is not a anything to write home about, but he shot 33.6 percent on 3.8 attempts per game from deep last season and is shooting just 10 percent on 2.6 3s per game this season.

Defensively, Vonleh has shown a tendency to lose his sight of his matchup on scrambles and when guards drive to the basket, which has resulted in too many easy buckets for opposing bigs. If he can clean that up, I am confident that he will be a much more effective defender that can find his way back out onto the court in the near future.

But until he proves he can shoot better and take better care of the basketball in live practices, we likely will not see him receiving any sizable minutes before the New Year.

Team Free Throw Shooting

The Wolves are shooting just 74.4 percent from the free throw line, which ranks them 23rd in the NBA, while attempting 26.2 free throws per game, good for fourth in the league. When Minnesota shoots greater than 75.0 percent from the stripe, they are 6-1, but when they fail to hit that threshold, they are 3-7.

In three of those seven losses, the Wolves missed a higher number of free throws than points they lost by. It is crazy to think that through just 17 games, the Wolves’ record could be three wins better than it is. If they keep that pace, their record could be 14 games lower than it could have been if they just made free throws.

Ryan Saunders’s Third Quarter Rotations

While I am willing to give Ryan some slack because he has had two injured/sick point guards for a good chunk of the season, he still needs to be held accountable for questionable some questionable rotations.

When Jordan McLaughlin was with the Wolves during Jeff Teague’s aforementioned battle with an illness, Saunders kept throwing him out there when he was very clearly a liability on both ends of the floor. He played 14.3 minutes per game in the four contests he appeared in, which is an absurdly high number for a guy who registered a -8.3 BPM, higher turnover rate than usage rate, and -34 Net Rating.

One good example is Saunders’s decision to consistently deploy lineups featuring both Okogie and Graham. Lineups with both players have played a total of 115 minutes across 15 games this season, which has resulted in a Net Rating of -14.1. While both are good defenders, neither offers much on the offensive end, where the Wolves are already behind the 8-ball enough in terms their lack of scoring and shooting.

Another frequently-appearing lineup combination I have taken note of is the trio of Dieng, Okogie, and Culver. None of the three are reliable scorers, whether it be from deep or on the drive, yet they have shared the floor in 11 games for an average of four minutes per game. Lineups that include those three have shot an eFG of just 34.3 percent and turned in an offensive rating of 68.8, both of which are absolutely horrendous.

However, there is hope that Saunders will figure things out more as we get deeper into the season. Jeff Teague coming off the bench should give a huge boost to guys like Josh Okogie, Jake Layman, and Gorgui Dieng, while creating an interesting role for Shabazz Napier when he returns from a hamstring injury. Napier has a long history of playing extremely well as a 2-guard next to a true point guard. He was fantastic playing both with Damian Lillard in Portland and with D’Angelo Russell in Brooklyn.

Let’s give Saunders a ton of credit for the Point Wiggins experiment, which has taken Andrew’s game to a whole new level, but I would love to see less experimentation later on in games with lineups that have either very clearly struggled early in the game, or just flat out do not make sense on paper.

While there is a plenty for the Wolves to improve upon, the season is still in its first quarter and the early returns of the new-look squad are mostly positive and at the very least, far more fun to watch than last year’s team.

To continue the conversation, feel free to hit us up on Twitter @DunkingWolvesFS or hit me @jrborman13 with comments, complaints, or questions.