Rudy Gobert stood in front of his locker at Target Center after a win over the Phoenix Suns last month and discussed a Minnesota Timberwolves defense that had looked nothing like the wrecking crew that carried them to the Western Conference finals last season.
He pointed the finger at himself.
“There’s too many times when I feel like I let the team down a little bit, whether it’s one quarter or a few minutes,” Gobert said. “And I can’t have that if we want to be great as a team and if we want to be a championship team. Every minute that I’m on the floor, I have to be the best in the world at what I do.”
Slowly but surely, the Timberwolves are showing signs of the tenacity that was their hallmark last season, and the reigning NBA Defensive Player of the Year is leading the way.
On Wednesday night at the Intuit Dome, home of The Wall!, Gobert was the most imposing force in the building. He had eight points, nine rebounds and five steals, leading a swarming, nasty Wolves defense in a 108-80 victory over the LA Clippers.
Gobert set the tone from the opening minutes. Last week, Ivica Zubac took the ball right at him in the post for 16 points and 13 rebounds. This time around, Gobert was aggressively denying him the ball, and he poked away a pass early in the first quarter, took it down the court and then slipped a beauty of a dime to Jaden McDaniels for an easy bucket. It was one of seven assists by Gobert.
the steal + the dime @PaniniAmerica Prizm Performance of the Game pic.twitter.com/8lR8Ep2fq4
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) December 5, 2024
“We know who we are. We know what team we can be and we know our identity,” Gobert told FanDuel Sports after the game. “When we do that, good things happen.”
Gobert, Anthony Edwards and coach Chris Finch have been emphatic all season long that the identity lies in Minnesota’s defense. For most of this first quarter of the season, the Wolves just have not been able to recreate the suffocating performance on that end of the floor that had them atop the league in defensive efficiency by a wide margin.
Gobert has been caught in no-man’s-land more often than he planned while covering the rim and helping Julius Randle figure things out. The hesitation, coupled with Edwards and McDaniels not containing the ball on the perimeter, took all of the bite out of a defense that chewed up offenses and spit them out last season.
Over the last week, including their three straight victories, the Wolves are sinking their teeth once again. They are allowing 97.2 points per 100 possessions over their last five games, a gargantuan 8.0 points better than second-place Atlanta during that span. Grand conclusions cannot be drawn from such a small sample size, and some caveats have to be applied.
The Timberwolves (11-10) have benefited from a nice pocket in the schedule. The Clippers played both of their games without Norm Powell and Kawhi Leonard. On Friday night, the Clippers were playing the last game of a four-game road trip. Then the Wolves caught the Los Angeles Lakers on the back end of a tough back-to-back on Monday and got the Clippers on the second night of a back-to-back as well. When they go to Golden State on Friday, the Warriors will be playing the second night of a back-to-back, too.
The good news is the Wolves haven’t just won the last two games with a schedule advantage. They have obliterated their opponents. They drubbed the Lakers by 29 points and then were up by as many as 41 against the Clippers. Minnesota held James Harden without a field goal until midway through the third quarter and racked up 32 fastbreak points, an enormous number for a team that has been at the bottom of the league in transition frequency this season.
“This is two games in a row where we’ve played our most complete basketball on both sides of the ball,” Finch told the media in Los Angeles. “This is what we’ve got to do. We haven’t been doing that and we’re starting to figure it out and find a rhythm and understand how important defense is to us.”
The Clippers shot 35 percent from the field, turned the ball over 21 times and managed to score just 32 points in the first half, the fewest the Wolves have allowed in the opening half since 2015. But looking at the numbers against a tired and severely depleted team can be misleading. What is harder to discount is the noticeable shift in body language from the team on the court.
Through most of the first 15 games of the season, the Wolves looked slow, lazy and unsure of themselves. The version that has appeared in the last week gets into passing lanes for deflections.
things you love to see: pic.twitter.com/VBHuh5hGV7
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) December 5, 2024
The Randle-Naz Reid pairing in the frontcourt is enticing for opponents, but now both players are learning how to play with each other and provide some resistance.
DEFENSE ⏩ OFFENSE pic.twitter.com/sl2SV39rVj
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) December 5, 2024
The turnovers they are creating are leading to easy fastbreak points to juice their offense.
DONTE DIME TO ALEXANDER-SKYWALKER pic.twitter.com/oHuOjSIEWR
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) December 5, 2024
The Wolves have given up 252 points in the last three games, including the two lowest totals in the league this season by allowing 80 points a piece in the last two.
“I love that we kept our focus,” Gobert said. “We know that sometimes when things go well, we tend to relax. The next step for us is to not relax, stay locked in.”
Randle scored all 20 of his points in the first half, including four 3-pointers in the first quarter to get the Wolves off to a fast start, to help weather another erratic shooting night from Edwards, who missed eight of his first 10 shots before knocking a few down in the third quarter. Reid was running down Bones Hyland on the fastbreak and swatting his shot with a 39-point lead.
And in a season in which Finch has shown great reluctance to expand the rotation beyond eight players, he inserted Josh Minott toward the end of the first quarter. On several occasions, Minott would come in for a couple of minutes and then go back to the bench, never to see the court again. But Minott grabbed three rebounds in his first 90 seconds on the floor, so Finch decided to ride his energy and send him back out there to start the second quarter.
Minott finished with a career-high 13 points, eight rebounds and three assists in 21 minutes.
NEW CAREER-HIGH. WHYNOTT!!! pic.twitter.com/HmnIi6t2TK
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) December 5, 2024
“In a minute and a half, he did everything you could ask him to do,” Finch said. “It was great to see that.”
But his most impressive play didn’t show up in the box score.
Early in the second quarter with the Wolves up 35-14, the Clippers turned the ball over again in the half court. It was bouncing out of bounds, which would have given the Wolves the ball and a side out. Instead, Minott chased the ball down, leaped into the air, saved it from going out and flipped it back toward his team. It started a fastbreak that Gobert finished on the other end.
Those types of plays, and that type of defense, are what can dig the Timberwolves out of the hole they put themselves in. They now head to reeling Golden State (12-8), which has lost five straight games, for two games before a four-day break. When Minnesota walks into Chase Center on Friday night, it will do so with the outlines of last season’s captivating group starting to take shape.
“We’re chasing hard over and through screens; we’re getting to spots early and when we force them to make a pass, we’re flying around,” Finch said. “It’s not always perfect but it doesn’t have to be.”
(Photo of Naz Reid: Juan Ocampo / NBAE via Getty Images)
