Minnesota Timberwolves: Assigning blame for an already lost season

Assigning blame for the Timberwolves’ lost season: Ryan Saunders

Ryan Saunders: 30 percent

It is a coach’s responsibility to maximize the pieces he/she is given to work with, and Ryan Saunders ultimately has not done that, leaving him with the final 30 percent of the blame.

All too often, players seemingly not know their assignments on either end of the floor, and this becomes a glaring issue late in games. The Wolves have lost four games this season during which the team’s ESPN Win Probability was over 90 percent in the fourth quarter. These meltdown losses are a clear sign of poor game management by the coaching staff

Then again, there has been a high frequency of complete blowout losses that the Wolves have experienced. The number of blowout losses and late-game meltdowns are a huge indictment on Ryan Saunders and his staff, regardless of missing their best player.

Additionally, Saunders has been slow in his ability to adjust mid-game this season. As of right now, there are simply combinations of players that cannot play together, and Saunders does everything he can to keep certain players together/away from each other.

While this is certainly a product of certain players’ game styles, it is ultimately up to the coaching staff to find ways for players to effectively play together rather than completely separating them throughout games. We have seen this during this season with the failure of the Rubio-Russell combo, but we also saw it last year with the failure of the Jeff Teague-Wiggins combo, which ultimately led to Teague coming off the bench for the Wolves in order to avoid playing with Wiggins.

This was following a season when Teague and Wiggins shared the floor during a playoff run under Tom Thibodeau’s leadership. The lack of cohesion among the players in this system is another failure of Saunders to this point, despite how broken his roster currently is.

This failure of cohesion is reflected in the team’s current offensive and defensive rankings. The Wolves currently rank in the bottom-five in the league in both offense and defense, and while the current roster was always going to struggle defensively given its construction, this Wolves roster shouldn’t be that bad, regardless of whether or not KAT plays.

The team is filled with players whose values are mainly found in their offensive games, including D’Angelo Russell, Malik Beasley, Anthony Edwards, Naz Reid, and Juancho Hernangomez. The inability of Saunders to formulate an offensive that is even in the top half of the league with these types of players is a huge failure, and deserving of a large portion of the blame for this team’s shortcomings.

Ultimately, there is no single reason why this Timberwolves team has failed to meet expectations, no matter how high or low those expectations may have been pre-season. There is plenty of blame to go around, and if the Wolves can’t turn things around soon, plenty of change should be expected in the organization from top to bottom.