Can a coaching change help the Minnesota Timberwolves salvage another lost season?
After Sunday's 103-99 defeat at the New York Knicks dropped the Timberwolves to an NBA-worst 7-24, Minnesota fired head coach Ryan Saunders after a little more than two years at the helm.
With their first-round pick headed to the Golden State Warriors unless it lands in the top three, the Timberwolves have little incentive to tank the rest of the season. What can Saunders' replacement -- reported by ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski to be current Toronto Raptors assistant coach Chris Finch -- do to help Minnesota make progress toward building a competitive team around star Karl-Anthony Towns?
Wolves yet to see full squad
Saunders has the right to protest he never got the chance to coach the squad that president of basketball operations Gersson Rosas envisioned when Minnesota dealt for D'Angelo Russell last February to join his friend Towns. Incredibly, Russell and Towns have played together just five times in the Wolves' 45 games since the trade.
Minnesota entered the season picked by statistical projections to be a factor in the Western Conference play-in race. My projections based on ESPN's real plus-minus pegged them to win between 35 and 36 games, on average, while FiveThirtyEight's projections had them at an expected 35 wins. That optimism looked reasonable when the Timberwolves started the season 2-0, including handing the Utah Jazz one of just two losses they've suffered in Salt Lake City this season.
During the fourth quarter of that game, Towns suffered a left wrist injury. Subsequent evaluation by a specialist revealed a subluxation of his perilunate, which sidelined him the next six games. He returned for two games before testing positive for COVID-19, a battle that kept him out nearly a month. By the time Minnesota finally got Towns back for good, the team had sunk to 6-18 and lost Russell to a left knee injury that required surgery.
With Towns in the lineup, the Timberwolves have been competitive. Minnesota hasn't lost a single game by double digits with Towns and has a respectable minus-2.7 differential in those games despite going just 3-8. In fact, the Timberwolves haven't lost by double digits in all of February while winning two of 12 games. Minnesota's difficulty finishing games likely played a key role in Saunders' dismissal.
Defense should be focus for Finch
Although the Timberwolves have rated better this season on the defensive end of the court (they're 23rd in defensive rating) than on offense (28th in per-possession scoring), I still think defense should be the priority if Finch becomes Saunders' replacement.
To his credit, Saunders had Minnesota taking the right type of shots over the past two seasons. In 2019-20, the Timberwolves ranked 10th in Second Spectrum's quantified shot quality (qSQ) metric, which estimates the expected effective field-goal percentage (eFG%) for average shooters based on the location and type of shots as well as the distance of nearby defenders. This season, Minnesota ranks 12th in qSQ. However, the Timberwolves actually finished 26th in eFG% in 2019-20, and they are in the same spot this season because their players aren't capable of making the shots they're getting at league-average levels.
That makes Finch an interesting fit, given his background as an "offensive coordinator" of sorts on NBA staffs. As head coach of the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in the G League (where Rosas served as general manager for the Houston Rockets' affiliate in addition to his role as executive VP of basketball operations for the NBA club), Finch oversaw the beginning of the Vipers' move to an unorthodox fast-paced style featuring heavy 3-point attempts -- a preview of what the Rockets would adopt in subsequent seasons.
I'm not sure how much more efficiency can be wrung out of a Minnesota team featuring several iffy shooters in key roles. No. 1 overall pick Anthony Edwards is attempting 5.8 3-pointers per game at a 31% clip, while Ricky Rubio (27%), Jarrett Culver (26%) and Josh Okogie (21%) are all south of the 3-point Mendoza line.
There are easier gains to be made on defensive, where the Timberwolves have been surprisingly competent in terms of shot defense (ranking 17th in opponent eFG%) but give away too many points by putting opponents on the free throw line (they're 24th in opponent free throw attempt rate) and allowing offensive rebounds (they're dead last in defensive rebound percentage).
Time to let young reserves play
It's hard to criticize Saunders for relying on veterans given Minnesota has put the youngest lineups on the court of any team in the NBA this season, weighted by minutes played -- more than six months younger on average than the next closest team, the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Nonetheless, I'd still recommend Finch give more opportunity to some of the Timberwolves' younger reserves -- specifically guards Jordan McLaughlin and Jaylen Nowell and rookie forward Jaden McDaniels. Minnesota has outscored opponents in McDaniels' 483 minutes this season, per NBA Advanced Stats; he is the only player on the roster for whom that's true. Nowell (minus-0.6) and McLaughlin (minus-3.5) are also alongside Towns (minus-1.2) among the team's top four on-court net ratings.
McDaniels had rapidly earned Saunders' trust with his promising two-way play at power forward, earning his first career start last week. McDaniels is shooting better from the NBA 3-point line (38%) than he did in his lone season at the University of Washington (34%) and has supplied secondary rim protection with his length.
The McLaughlin-Nowell duo has proved surprisingly capable as a second-unit backcourt. It's tough for Nowell to get more minutes given the Timberwolves have three recent first-round picks on the wing (Culver, Edwards and Okogie) plus Malik Beasley, who has been their most consistent contributor this season. But McLaughlin has earned a look finishing games instead of the more experienced Rubio, whose shortcomings as a shooter have been an issue in crunch time dating back to his first stint in Minnesota.
Even with the addition of the play-in tournament, it's surely too late for the Timberwolves to turn this season around. They are 7.5 games back of 10th in the West and would have to climb five other clubs to get there. If there's a benefit to Minnesota potentially being out this year's first-round pick, it's that the team doesn't have to worry about hurting its pick by winning games now. So Finch can use the rest of the season to try to identify winning combinations that can help the Timberwolves become competitive again in 2021-22 and beyond.