With two days off between their games against Phoenix and Milwaukee, the Timberwolves were able to get in a practice Thursday, and coach Chris Finch said the Wolves' primary focus was in one area.
"Ball movement," Finch said. "... Pretty much all we did was ball movement stuff."
Anyone who has watched the Wolves over the last week can see this is one of the biggest issues they have. There is plenty of standing around, dribbling and isolation offense.
Their hope to improve on offense won't get any easier on Friday night when unbeaten Milwaukee visits Minnesota and brings to town the No. 1 most-efficient defense in the league. The Bucks are allowing 101.3 points per 100 possessions, three points better than the next best team — the Lakers — entering Thursday.
The Wolves have the 23rd-rated offense (109.9).
For Finch, the offense begins and ends with ball movement. Everything else comes along with it.
This sounds like a simple concept — just pass the ball and move when you don't have it. But the Wolves, who have lost their last two games, have been trying to find cures in isolation to what ails them offensively, and this is where they can get into trouble.
"Because you got a lot of guys who could score, and you come in with that mentality," said guard Jaylen Nowell when asked why ball movement has been so difficult for the Wolves. "It's nothing personal, we're just all trying to be the guy to fix everything. When the offense is down, we got a lot of guys that can score and be like, 'I need to make something happen.' That just comes with how young we are."
Nowell said the team has spent a lot of time watching film together of late and is still adjusting to playing alongside Rudy Gobert on the offensive end of the floor.
"It's just learning him," Nowell said. "We've been playing against him for a long time. This is our first time really scouting him as a teammate rather than an opponent. So, I think the more games we have, the more we're going to know certain spots he likes to get to."
Finch addressed a few more issues Thursday. He said the Wolves need to do a better job of generating quality three-point looks. With Gobert in tow, they likely won't shoot the same volume they did last season, when they took the most three-pointers per game (41.3). That number is down to 34.1 so far this season, 14th in the league.
"I don't think we'll be as high volume of a three-point shooting team as we have been in the past, certainly not right now," Finch said. "A lot of the ways you get threes, in transition, we're not very good right now. So we're not getting transition threes, offensive rebound kickout threes, we're not getting those. Paint threes are the ones we want to generate more of and we're not really doing a good job there."
The Wolves also aren't doing as good of a job as they can be punishing teams inside with their big lineup when opponents go with smaller looks against them.
"The first handful of games, I thought we'd been really good in the post of taking advantage of mismatches and doubles," Finch said. "But we gotta find Karl [Anthony Towns] more in the flow."
All those issues relate back to the same problem: ball movement. The Wolves know what the problem is, it's on them to correct it.
"With a lot of scorers, that's kind of tough when you have that mindset of, 'OK, I could make this shot, but there's a better shot right here.' I'm a victim of doing that, too," Nowell said. "I think once we see it on film and we see that there's better shots available, it's helping us process the game a lot more and a lot faster."
