With Robert Williams sitting out and Deandre Ayton sidelined by a finger injury, Trail Blazers lottery pick Donovan Clingan had his best outing of the season in a win over Minnesota on Wednesday. In 31 minutes, Clingan racked up 17 points, 12 rebounds and eight blocks.
“I love defense,” Clingan told Sean Highkin of The Rose Garden Report. “It brings energy to the team. That’s how you win ballgames.”
Shaedon Sharpe also had a big night with 33 points in 36 minutes. Coach Chauncey Billups was thrilled with Sharpe’s assertiveness.
“Shae is such a teammate and he doesn’t want to step on anybody’s toes and wants to just kind of fit in,” Billups said. “And I’m telling him, ‘No, you need to go.’ I’ve got to force him. But he’ll get used to it. He loves that we depend on him to do some of those things. The more that happens, the more he’ll get used to it.”
Sharpe is eligible for a rookie scale extension next summer.
We have more from the Northwest Division:
- Deni Avdija, who is now coming off the bench for the Trail Blazers, had a notable outing against Minnesota on Tuesday. He accumulated 17 points, four rebounds and five assists in 25 minutes. In Wednesday’s win, Avdija added seven points and six rebounds in 18 minutes. Billups believes Avdija is well suited for a bench role, according to Aaron Fentress of Oregonlive.com. “Deni is tough,” Billups said. “He plays with a lot of fire. And we need that. We got a lot of kind of easy-going chill guys out there, and his mentality, we need it.”
- The Timberwolves have a 6-6 record after those back-to-back losses to Portland. Rudy Gobert told Chris Hine of the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he blames himself for the latest defeats. “Those two games are mostly on me defensively,” Gobert said. “I need to set the tone for the team, and I haven’t done it these last two games.”
- Jazz center Walker Kessler hasn’t played since Saturday and he’ll miss Thursday’s game against the Mavericks, Andy Larsen of the Salt Lake Tribune tweets. The team is labelling the ailment as right hip bursitis. Kessler is averaging 9.2 points, 10.7 rebounds and 2.8 blocks.
Bursitis is unusual and pretty bad. Tends to recur again and again. That’s not a condition young athletes get very often.
That Blazers-Wolves game was almost like an early 2000’s game. Faster pace, but almost all the scoring was interior or midrange. 16 combined three-pointers made in 48 minutes is kind of wild.
Clingan firmly establishing himself as the frontrunner for the best player of the draft, at least to this point. That seventh block with 6:52 in the 4Q, he made Gobert look like a kid trying to score on his older brother. His wingspan and lateral range in drop coverage is tough to handle, especially since he can set up in the midrange and then just reach the restricted area in one step. And driving into his chest is doomed to failure unless you can get past him; Randle tried it with a running start while airborne and Clingan just stuck with him and smothered the ball one-handed. His offense is kind of limited, but he’s big, strong, and lengthy enough to make guys work on that end anyway.
Banton looks good, shoutout to him. He’s only just turned 25 a week ago, and he finally looks to have a comfortable role on both ends. Seven of his last eight games, he’s had at least ten points and at least one good defensive play in each, typically more.
I’m pretty sure the early 2000s (and late 90s) had the slowest pace in the history of the NBA
EonADS, good report.
I’m curious what you think is wrong with Minnesota? Losing 2 straight to Portland, and neither game was close…
Combination of reduced defense and a less diverse offense than last year, combined with absolutely abysmal team-play and distribution of actions. They’re trying to adjust their minutes and playstyle to a new system and there are serious growing pains.
The Wolves are taking tons of 3pt shots (6th in 3PA, 3rd in 3p attempt rate [48% of their shots are threes, ten points higher than last year!]), which is fine on the surface at their 37.5% clip, but when the shots don’t fall, they have nothing to fall back on. And Edwards is taking the lion’s share of those attempts when he’s not an elite shooter, just a good one (35.3% to open the year). That’s not sustainable. On top of that, outside of Edwards shooting like a demon to begin the year, NAW, Naz Reid, and Julius Randle are the only shooters above the 36% NBA Average, and Randle will never sustain that, with Reid and NAW likely to cool off even if they remain good shooters.
Outside of 3pt shooting, they’re running too many isolations and spot-up plays (7th and 6th in the league, respectively), when they should be moving the ball more. Bottom half of the league for cuts, handoff actions, and Pick & Roll actions, while dead-last in transition. About the only team-play they’re doing is coming off screens. Dead last in Assist-to-Pass rate at 5.1% and Adjusted Assist-to-Pass rate at 7.0%.
Conley looks to finally, *finally* be running out of gas. He’s averaging 31% from the field and 30% from 3, which is utterly untenable. Your primary playmaker cannot be a bad shooter, it does not work in the modern game. McDaniels is shooting 27% from 3 and has minimal room to operate in the offense. And DDV is just a non-factor so far. Just ice cold on both ends.
Then we come to the rotation changes that come from the KAT trade. Randle can score and rebound, but he’s not the diverse finisher that KAT is. Gobert can only finish in the pick-and-roll, and the P&R is predictable. Only three players this year are scoring more than 10 points per game, to six last season, and the bench is also worse behind Naz Reid. No Jordan McLaughlin, no Monte Morris, no Troy Brown Jr., no Shake Milton. Dillingham and Minott are trying, but they can’t do enough and aren’t getting enough minutes anyway. NAW is having to play more and more to make up for Conley, and the whole rotation has shortened to just eight guys total. Not enough.
Then there’s the defense. This is why I’m not all-in on Rudy Gobert as some generational defender. While he can handle any of rim protection, drop coverage, team defense, and switch defense, he can only handle two at a time at *most*, and usually only when filling one role does he excel. He can change a game by being in the right role at the right time and dominating that role, but he *cannot* hold a team’s defense together by himself the way true generational defenders can. However, with KAT and McDaniels alongside him last year, the Wolves had enough length and versatility to switch onto and contest most shots, and Edwards and NAW are good defenders in the backcourt. But with Randle, who mostly is only good as an on-ball defender and rebounder and is just average in other defensive roles, the defense is smaller and less versatile. On top of that, Edwards is having to run the entire offense himself, which means he runs out of gas on the other end. While he can still make good plays, he doesn’t have the room to do it consistently. Reid is the only one largely unchanged on defense, but he can’t fix the issues himself.
So where do they go from here? In my opinion, they first need to run NAW as the full-time starter at the point just to open up the spacing and take some of the defensive burden in the backcourt and on the wings off Edwards/McDaniels. Conley can take the time to fix his shot in a lower-pressure role and work to facilitate the bench players, most of whom outside of Reid don’t do well with generating their own shot.
Second, they need ANT to do more passing and play-running instead of scoring, as his gravity on offense is not being taken advantage of. Use him and Randle and him and NAW in 2-man games to open up the spacing and start actions. Get DDV and Reid involved in those actions off the bench as well. Team play, team play, team play. Iso-ball cannot win games.
Thirdly, expand the bench a bit. Ingles belongs in the bench rotation as well; he proved last year with the Magic that he can still give you 10-15 solid minutes per game as a 3&D wing. Leonard Miller has done enough in the G-League and his limited minutes last season to warrant a longer look; forget the Tip-off Tournament and get him into the rotation. And Dillingham has promise.
They’re also sucking at rebounding and are bottom-5 in turnover rate. So, y’know, there’s that too. They just look utterly broken under the hood; their hot shooting has kept them afloat and that’s starting to fail them.