One thing is certain: Jaden McDaniels won’t be talking about any “bad defenders” on the San Antonio Spurs.
The unanimous NBA Defensive Player of the Year, Victor Wembanyam, plays for San Antonio. Wemby is a human praying mantis, seven-and-a-third feet tall with silk in his tentacles and a calm, lithe quickness that doesn’t belong to anyone else his size. His spectacular presence necessarily overshadows the other above-average defenders on the Spurs.
The two first-round draft picks they have taken since Wemby are rugged guards, each 215 pounds. Starter Stephen Castle is six-foot six-inches, and rookie disrupter off the bench Dylan Harper is six-foot five. Veteran De’Aaron Fox is more notorious on offense, having averaged more than 21 points per game over his ten-year career and closing games well enough to capture the NBA’s first Jerry West Trophy as “Clutch Player of the Year” in the 2022-23. But a year after that, the aptly-named Fox, at six-foot, three-inches, and 185 pounds, led the NBA in steals.
The other two starters, the forwards, are capable glue. Devin Vassell was the team’s best defender until Wemby and Castle came along (and Harper may have already caught up to him), and has the instinctual wisdom to inflate his now-suppressed ego in moments of need on either side of the ball. Julian Champagnie is your prototypical “3 and D” guy who splashes 38.1% of his treys, usually from the corner, and 84.4% of his free throws.
Off the bench, the Spurs merely boast the newly crowned Sixth Man of the Year in Keldon Johnson, who, like Vassell, makes a larger impact with a lesser role now that superior talent is aboard. Harper, who would start for most teams, also bolsters the second unit. Backup center Luke Kornet is vital, given that Wemby’s outrageous physique and outsize importance have the Spurs brain trust continually monitoring, and husbanding, his playing time. Kornet is woefully underrated because he is the teammate who subs in for Wemby rather than partaking of his magic.
Then there is Harrison Barnes, who started hundreds of games in a row for four different teams, including the dynastic Golden State Warriors for four years when he was aged 20 to 23, who was replaced in the starting lineup by Vassell more than 50 games into this season and has produced even better numbers coming off the bench.
There really isn’t a “bad defender” in that bunch, which is why the Spurs had the NBA’s third best defense in terms of points allowed per possession to go with their third-best offense in terms of points scored per possession. They are the only team in the league to rank that highly on both sides of the ball.
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I’m spending a lot of time lauding the Spurs because they have had a special season. For Wolves fans impatient with my dwelling, remember back two seasons ago when Minnesota quickened from 42 wins into a beastly 56 victories, the giddiness of it, with Gobert winning Defensive Player of the Year and Naz Reid capturing Sixth Man of the Year? Well, the Spurs just leaped from 38 wins to 62, with Wemby as Johnson winning the same honors, respectively.
They are universally regarded as the only NBA opponent with a semi-realistic chance of denying the Oklahoma City Thunder a second straight championship.
The Minnesota Timberwolves are not afraid. Nor should they be.
They just dominated a Denver Nuggets team that had won 12 in a row to finish the regular season, had beaten them three-out-of-four in head-to-head matchups and were led by Nikola Jokic, who figures to get more MVP votes than Wemby as results are announced later this month. They lost their superstar and their ace role player halfway through their first-round matchup, then lost their ace substitute for those players and an important playmaker just before the sixth game. Didn’t matter. They dug deeper.
And so here they are, playing a Spurs juggernaut who they’ve beaten two-out-of-three in the regular season. It is undeniably a step up in class from the Nuggets and the Wolves are undeniably huge underdogs – as they were versus Denver. If they are to have any chance of pulling another stunning upset, they need to be fearless about it. They can’t beat themselves – physically, strategically or mentally.
Fortunately, the Wolves come by this attitude honestly. Their haughtiness – highlighted by McDaniels’ trash talk, but ultimately proven in the bold, crisp thoroughness in which they held themselves the majority of time after a Game One loss – unnerved the Nuggets, who simply couldn’t mentally sustain their own self-fulfilling prophecy.
If the Wolves are going to make this interesting, the Spurs have to be similarly tested. The Wolves have to believe, with a depth that sharpens joyful focus and promotes quick decision-making and spectacular teamwork, that they are the superior team. All three regular-season games against the Spurs were close and they won twice as many of them. They’ve been deep in the playoff grind the past two springtimes while San Antonio was mulling lottery luck and teenaged talent.
They can’t dwell on missing Ant; they have to be encouraged by the thought of his eventual return, be it Game Two or Game Six – the more the merrier. Donte DiVincenzo is gone for this year, but look what Ayo Dosunmu and TJ Shannon Jr. have done in his stead – next man up, indeed.
Stealing one of the first two games would help electrify this process, as it did against Denver. Otherwise you are waiting until at least Game Five to get past the “everybody is just holding serve” narrative.
In terms of more practical, strategic, grappling for advantage, the Wolves need Shannon and Ayo to push the pace. Thanks mostly to Wemby but also to his active supporting cast, the Spurs are ridiculously stingy when playing half-court defense, allowing an absurd 81 points per 100 possessions according to Cleaning the Glass, the website with the most authority over that statistical measure. Bones Hyland can also be a factor here, but he doesn’t have the gristle along with the gumption required to outrace and then absorb the closing in transitions after turnovers and great outlet passes.
The Spurs will be girded against this. Coach Mitch Johnson is a marvelous motivator and tactician who is less likely to be in over his head in his first full season, as opposed to David Adelman of the Nuggets, or JJ Redick of the Lakers last year. Plus, Johnson hired Corliss Williamson for his staff, the coach successfully put in charge of transition defense for the Wolves in Minnesota recently. He’s thus a specialist not only in that discipline, but in knowing the personnel testing the veracity of his methods in San Antonio.
No matter. The Wolves have consistently proven they are better when playing faster. Now they face a team that will choke you out if you play slower. Can’t happen.
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The Wolves also need all three members of their starting frontcourt to have elevated and variegated games in this series; to be both resilient in quality and flexible in approach.
Begin with Julius Randle. The Spurs defense is built around Wemby (and when he’s out, Kornet) and a phalanx of wing players who are rugged and adept in rotation, but none of them come closer than 25 pounds to Randle’s 250. Bully ball against Wemby is a fool’s errand unless the ball is flying around the half court and shooting decisions waste no time in the flow. Peak Randle is capable of that, just as peak Randle memorably did a great job defending Wemby in their second matchup of the season, giving the mantis’ gangly frame no space to even get his appendages positioned to shoot over him the way he shoots over everybody.
That said, Rudy Gobert deserves the first chance at trying to cut Wemby down to mortal size. Gobert was less of a positive factor against the Spurs than he was against other teams this season. The Wolves outscored the Spurs 108-67 in the fourth quarter of their three meetings and yet Rudy logged a grand total of 4:25 in those final stanzas.
In the first matchup, Wemby was injured and didn’t play. The Wolves engineered a massive comeback, outscoring San Antonio 36-19 in the fourth quarter, when Finch benched Gobert and went with a zone that had Jaden McDaniels in the middle, alternately guarding the jitterbug Fox and protecting the rim as the “big” man. In the second game, Wemby was back but Gobert played only that 4:25 in a 33-18 Wolves fourth quarter due to Randle’s defense on him, among other factors. And in the third game, Gobert was out with a bruised hip, as the Wolves 39-30 fourth-quarter edge was the culmination of a shootout between Ant (55 points) and Wemby (39 points) – still not enough to gain a season sweep, as the Spurs gained the win.
Even so, the comprehensive mastery by which Gobert limited Jokic’s peak production in the first round of these playoffs – and many games where Jokic had embarrassed him in prior seasons – earns him the nod. But Minnesota’s successful experiments, in games where Wemby did and didn’t play, provides a plethora of backup options. It is a mantra of Wolves coach Chris Finch that you have to give great players different looks. Wemby has rapidly qualified.
Even if and when he returns, a fully healthy Ant will be missed. He scored more than twice as many points as any of his teammates in the three regular-season matchups. As mentioned, Ayo and Shannon on the go and Randle in a gyroscopic half-court passing affair as perhaps the best plausible substitutes. But, as with Gobert’s defense, shouldn’t Finch allow some recency bias to see if Jaden McDaniels really is making serious progress on those Scottie Pippen comps?
Game Six was so Peak Jaden that you have to see how much of it is sustainable. (Ditto Ayo’s 43-point masterpiece in Game Four.) Those rocking-chair floaters that are McDaniels’ signature shot from the midrange would likely be devoured by Wemby as efficiently as the spousal heads become the “signature” breakfast of the praying mantis after procreation. But this may be the perfect time to see if the delightfully successful feeds, footwork, finesse and fury the McDaniels flexed on offense can be at least somewhat repeatable against an elite team in a high-stakes game.
Who Jaden guards in this series is less fraught, although somewhat complicated. It is probably Fox, but then where is the matchup on the Spurs roster for Bones or Mike Conley? How Finch decides to weaponize his defense against what is indeed the third-rated offense in the NBA – and best of anyone, after the All-Star break – is a compelling subplot here.
How will it turn out? If the Wolves win one of the first two in San Antonio, I’d guess the Spurs in seven. If San Antonio sweeps the first two, Spurs in five. If the Wolves win the first two, Wolves in six.
Then again, I called the Nuggets in 6 for my first-round prediction and we saw how that turned out.
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