Minnesota Timberwolves: 2016-17 Season Outlook
Three Key Storylines: 3. Minnesota Thib-erwolves
Under Sam Mitchell, the Wolves got off the a surprising start before finishing the season on a 21-45 skid. Despite their 11th ranked offense, Minnesota was a bottom-five unit on defense that bled points at an alarmingly high rate for a team with so many players you’d think would be plus-defenders (i.e. Rubio, Wiggins, Towns).
Under Tom Thibodeau, you can bet that Minnesota will be a drastically improved defense. It may not happen overnight, but Thibs’ Bulls teams ranked first, first, fifth, second and 11th in defensive rating during his five seasons at the helm. The season before he arrived, Chicago ranked 10th. The season after he left, the Bulls dropped to 15th.
No one should be expecting Thibs to turn Minnesota into the league’s stingiest defense in his first season like he did in Chicago, but if he can even get the Wolves’ defense into the middle tier, they could have a puncher’s chance of making the playoffs.
However, defensive prowess isn’t the only stigma that comes attached to a Thibodeau-coached team, In Chi-town, Thibs was notorious for running starters like Jimmy Butler and Joakim Noah into the ground to win games.
The Bulls were a team competing for the Eastern Conference belt; the Wolves are a team trying to foster growth and build a championship culture from the ground up. Will Thibs turn Towns or Wiggins into his new Jimmy Butlers? Will he ride the injury-prone Rubio too hard?
Balance and utilizing his bench more will go a long way for this young team, which puts Thibs in an unfamiliar place on two fronts: 1) He typically doesn’t like to play younger players and 2) He doesn’t usually resort to his bench much. How will that shake out when his starters are all young and his bench consists of all the veterans?
Speaking of which, the biggest obstacle to Dunn’s Rookie of the Year campaign is evenly split between Rubio (the incumbent starter at the 1) and Thibodeau (the head coach notorious for sticking rookies on the bench).
None of this is meant to rain on Wolves fans’ parades, but from the defense to the minutes toll to Dunn’s playing time, it will be interesting to see not only what Thibs can extract from this young group, but how he goes about coaching a completely different kind of team in its rebuilding stage.
Next: Best, Worst Case Scenarios