Why the Timberwolves' start feels so rocky

Early in the third quarter of a loss in Toronto on Thursday night, Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert ducked in, sealed Raptors forward Scottie Barnes inside the charge circle, and called for an entry pass from Anthony Edwards.

But Edwards, who had drawn Raptors center Jakob Poeltl on a switch, decided against throwing the moderately risky pass over a 7-footer to his not-so-surehanded teammate. Instead, as Gobert begrudgingly vacated the paint, Edwards attacked Poeltl off the bounce, drew help off the strong-side corner, and kicked out to Julius Randle for a pretty good look at a three. Randle clanked it off the heel, part of a 1-for-6 shooting night from deep.

It was not the last nor nearly the most high-profile instance of Gobert being looked off on a deep seal that night. With five minutes to play and the game tied at 95, he once again had Barnes pinned underneath the basket. This time it was Randle handling up top with Poeltl defending him. And this time, when he didn't get the ball, Gobert decided to linger in the key out of protest, a la Kevin Love.

Gobert's frustration was understandable, and the by-the-book Right Play for Randle in that situation was throwing the entry feed, especially with the shot clock in single digits. But expressing his frustration the way he did, in crunch time of a tie game, earned him a much-deserved dressing-down from Edwards. To make matters worse, Randle's reticence was validated two possessions later when he drove, drew late help, and threw a nifty laydown pass to the dunker spot that Gobert promptly fumbled for a turnover.

Those plays on their own obviously don't fully capture everything that's happening with this season's Wolves, who are undergoing some stylistic shifts in the wake of the trade that swapped Karl-Anthony Towns for Randle and Donte DiVincenzo on the eve of preseason. They do, however, feel like microcosms of the tension that seems to be burbling beneath the surface of their underwhelming 8-7 start, which now includes four losses to sub-.500 teams.

Gobert's limitations are what they are, but there are still benefits to keeping him involved in the offense, and Towns served as a crucial conduit for that purpose. He would consistently feed Gobert in high-low actions, on the short roll, and out of 4-5 pick-and-rolls. Only Mike Conley threw more assists to Gobert last season, and on a per-game basis Towns actually set him up slightly more frequently. Randle is assisting him about half as often. Kyle Anderson was also an effective intermediary who helped guide the ball in Gobert's direction, and he too is playing elsewhere this season.

Meanwhile, Gobert and Randle are clearly still trying to figure out how best to complement each other. Randle's offensive output has been terrific in a vacuum; on a team that's increasingly jump-shot-heavy, his intention to get to the rim and free-throw line has been welcome. But between his different handedness, his less threatening 3-point stroke, and his greater proclivity for probing and driving, the shift to playing alongside him after sharing a frontcourt with Towns has required some adjustment for Gobert, just as teaming up with Towns did initially.

"They're different, but both really dominant in their own way," Gobert told me before Thursday's game. "KAT is obviously one of the best 3-point shooters in this league. Julius is a good 3-point shooter, but he prefers to put pressure on the rim and attack. He always tells me when he drives where he'd like me to be, for him to finish or to find me or find another teammate. It's been a great process, and I think we still have so much room to grow.

"Chemistry doesn't happen overnight. I know what Julius likes to do, but obviously going through it in a game, learning how to space for him, being able anticipate what he's gonna do with the ball, those things take time. ... It's a lot of communication, things that come with going through a lot of different situations together, and building the automatics in."

For now, the feeling-out period, coupled with a significant dip in Conley's effectiveness, is contributing to a career-low 12.9% usage rate for the Frenchman. What made the debacle in Toronto feel particularly disappointing was that it came directly on the heels of the most encouraging game Randle and Gobert have had as a tandem, a stirring comeback win over Phoenix in which Randle consistently linked up with his frontcourt mate on drives and short rolls. It felt like progress.

"It was the first time he threw me multiple lobs in the same game," Gobert said. "And they were great lobs."

The offensive adjustments involving the new frontcourt are just one small part of the Wolves' early-season malaise. For all the predictable choppiness that's come with mashing Randle and Gobert together at the 11th hour of the offseason, the team actually has a very healthy plus-8.4 net rating with the two of them on the floor. And Minnesota's offense on the whole has been better relative to the rest of the league than it was last year, up from 17th to 10th in efficiency.

Though there's been some hand-wringing over the team's - and specifically Edwards' - sky-high 3-point attempt rate, that uptick has generally served them well. Edwards has been the league's most effective high-volume pull-up 3-point shooter this side of Steph Curry. The change in shot profile has also partly been a natural byproduct of the Wolves' personnel changes - not just because there's less space to attack with Randle out there, but because Randle's a much more effective drive-and-kick creator than Towns was. To wit, he has almost triple the rate of 3-point assists that Towns had last season, with 37 in 15 games so far, compared to just 56 for Towns across 62 contests in 2023-24.

The problem is that the offense - which continues to be plagued by turnover issues that Randle and Gobert have both contributed to - hasn't improved by enough to offset a significant defensive downturn. The Wolves have slipped from first (by a considerable margin) to 12th on that end, some of which can be explained by the trade and some of which cannot.

Randle has undeniably been part of the problem on that front. Though the Wolves are more comfortable with him switching out on the perimeter than they were with Towns, he's been markedly less effective as a weak-side helper than his predecessor was. He's prone to bouts of inattentiveness, which result in him blowing box-outs, making late weak-side rotations, getting beat down the floor in transition, and especially giving up backdoor cuts.

Perhaps more importantly, exchanging Towns for Randle has just left the Wolves feeling very small when Gobert's on the bench, which helps explain why they're surrendering 13.4 more points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions without him on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass. For all of Towns' well-chronicled defensive struggles in New York, he was legitimately good on that end last season, not just as the four playing next to Gobert but as the center next to Naz Reid in mixed bench lineups.

"Rim protection hasn't been what it was last year, for a variety of reasons, not just Rudy," explained Wolves coach Chris Finch. "Foul rate is up a little bit, rebounding's down, leading to more second-chance opportunities.

"I think some of it (has to do with the trade) for sure, because last year when we had KAT playing at the four, we had found over a year-and-a-half the comfort level of doing a lot of different things there. Julius gives us a little bit more versatility in his ability to switch, but we lose size with our second unit, so second-unit rim-protection takes a hit. KAT had become pretty good in a lot of our schemes with our second unit as a rim-protector."

The Towns-Reid frontcourt had a 110.9 defensive rating and a 66th-percentile defensive rebound rate, per Cleaning the Glass. The Randle-Reid frontcourt has a 122.5 defensive rating and a third-percentile defensive rebound rate. Against those lineups, opponents recover 34% of their own misses, take 39% of their shots at the rim, and make 69% of those rim shots.

But to go back to Finch's assessment, the fact that he qualified it by saying the issue isn't just about Gobert is instructive, because it is partly about Gobert. His rim-protection clearly hasn't been as impactful as it was last season, when he won his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award. He's contesting a lower share of shots at the basket (though that owes somewhat to a schematic tweak) and is allowing opponents to shoot 58.9% on those rim shots, up from 52% a year ago, per NBA Advanced Stats.

Gobert's far from the only carryover Timberwolf who's experiencing a comedown on the defensive end, and many of the team's issues stem from what's happening in front of him. Apart from Nickeil Alexander-Walker, none of Minnesota's perimeter defenders have been at the level they were at in 2023-24. We haven't seen quite the same containment or rear-view pressure from Jaden McDaniels. Edwards has been less imposing at the point of attack. DiVincenzo's screen navigation has taken a step back from where it was with the Knicks. Conley is 37. Anderson's been missed here as well.

"Ball pressure's been good, but ball contain has been a bit leaky at times, it's been inconsistent," Finch said. "So when you add that up (with the diminished rim protection), it adds up to where we are."

In general, there's also just been a bit less connectivity and communication with the Wolves' coverages. Gobert's playing a higher drop in a lot of cases, and too often the back-side help hasn't been there to provide cover. On this play from Thursday's game, Gobert stepped out on an Ochai Ogbaji DHO (which is questionable enough on its own, given that Agbaji poses virtually zero threat from mid-range or floater range), and no one committed to tagging Poeltl behind him:

When Finch says "there are things that I see in our defense that we're just not as tight with now," that feels like the kind of thing he's referring to.

None of this is damning this early in the season, and a lot of these issues were to be expected; teams that make big roster shakeups almost always struggle out of the gate. The Wolves know that as well as anyone, having gone through something similar in their first season after acquiring Gobert, before coalescing into a powerhouse last year.

Even with all the aforementioned issues, Minnesota isn't far away from being top 10 on both sides of the ball. These mostly feel like things that can improve with more familiarity, more focus, and greater clarity of purpose.

Dumping the ball down to the big fella next time he has a guy sealed in the restricted area isn't going to magically solve all the Wolves' problems. But as a gesture of good faith to a player who, for better or worse, remains essential to what they do, it wouldn't be a bad place to start.