After their latest loss on Saturday night, the Minnesota Timberwolves sit just one game above .500, and have plenty of questions left unanswered. Trade talk surrounding Julius Randle only grows louder as he looks like more of a problem than a solution on both ends of the floor recently.
Even with their notable defensive improvements, the Timberwolves still look far off from the team that won 56 games and went to the Western Conference Finals a season ago. The Karl-Anthony Towns trade was always going to create problems, but hope that this team could still work as currently constructed was still there to begin the season.
Now, on the doorstep of Christmas, it is clear that something is going to have to change for Minnesota to reach their potential. Trades can certainly be made, and there are options that could make sense for the Wolves. But in terms of internal improvements that have not yet been tried, there are two fairly obvious ones.
Adjustment 1: Starting/finishing with Naz Reid
Since day one of the season, Chris Finch and his staff have rolled with Randle in the starting power forward spot, next to Rudy Gobert in the frontcourt. They wanted to use Randle as the de-facto replacement for Karl-Anthony Towns in the starting lineup, allowing all the bench players from the previous season to essentially remain in their previous roles.
This decision made sense from a couple of standpoints. Randle was always going to bring a strong interior presence that could punish opponents on the inside. As a previous All-NBA team selection, he had enough of a scoring and rebounding reputation to warrant starting him, especially given he was basically the centerpiece of the just-completed trade. Benching him immediately would have probably felt disrespectful.
But now that we have enough of a sample size of what it looks like with him starting, it could be worth swapping out Randle for Naz Reid in both the starting and closing lineups, if for no other reason than to try something different. Reid was excellent in the second half against Golden State on Saturday, but he did not get the chance to close. Putting him on the floor next to Gobert and letting Randle get buckets against the opposition's second unit could be a tactic worth implementing.
Adjustment 2: Playing Rob Dillingham more
We first saw Rob Dillingham get significant playing time after Mike Conley was forced to miss a few games due to injury. In two contests against the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets at the end of November, Dillingham's talent shined as he went for averages of 13.0 points on 49% shooting and 45% from three against two of the best teams in the association.
But since then, Rob has mostly gone back to playing sparingly, only appearing in four games and averaging just 10 minutes each time out. This is a frustrating development given the success he was having, but it is also simply confusing. It is not like the Timberwolves are rolling and Finch does not want to mess up the flow of his typical rotation. The team is having serious struggles with inconsistency, particularly on the offensive side of the ball.
What, then, would be the risk in letting your lottery pick rookie get some reps and show what kind of impact he can make on a team having trouble putting points on the board? There is not a world in which Dillingham solves all of Minnesota's problems on offense by himself. But there would seem to be little problem with giving him a longer leash at a time where the team is going through prolonged scoring droughts.