Minnesota Timberwolves: Naz Reid can stick as a rotation player

Defense

Reid has mostly struggled defensively at the NBA level. A lot of it has to do with his propensity to commit personal fouls, averaging a staggering six personal fouls per 36 minutes.

While Reid has good size for a modern NBA center and impressive length with decent athleticism, his defensive instincts aren’t quite there.

Recent games against Dallas and Miami were perfect examples of the Wolves taking on teams with head coaches who knew exactly how to take advantage of Reid defensively.

Rick Carlisle and Erik Spoelstra each managed to get Reid caught in the pick-and-roll against dynamic ball-handlers and capable roll-men. Reid would be guessing, and too often was flat-footed and in a position to get beat to the rim, commit a bad foul, or both.

Here are a couple of clips from the game against the Heat, which the Timberwolves ultimately won. Neither happen to be in the pick-and-roll, but are examples of what can happen when Reid is on an island away from the rim.

First, the Heat clear-out for a Bam Adebayo face-up opportunity. Bam fakes to his weak hand and Reid bites, allowing Adebayo to waltz to the rim with his strong hand and draw the foul on Naz.

In this clip, Reid is simply caught flat-footed in Miami’s secondary break as Adebayo catches a pass and takes him to the rim for an and-one.

Both are examples of Reid not studying and applying opponent tendencies and not getting into a true defensive stance. He’s far from the only guy on the Wolves who struggles with this — Towns does sometimes, too — but it’s frustrating because it’s plays like this that lead to cheap fouls and less playing time for Reid.

Reid’s big enough and a good enough athlete to be a solid defender. Overall, he’s been decent on that end of the floor, in large part due to his long arms and adequate rebounding numbers. But there isn’t much in the way of consistency, at least not yet.

Reid’s 13.2 percent rebounding rate with the Timberwolves isn’t great, but his 16.5 percent rebounding rate in heavier minutes with the Iowa Wolves of the G League is passable. However, if he’s going to be the lone big man on the floor for the Wolves with an undersized second unit trotting out the Jake Layman or James Johnson at the 4, the rebounding rate will need to improve a bit as well.