Minnesota T’Wolves “tall ball” experiment
Ever since the Minnesota T’Wolves staff decided to trade for Rudy Gobert last summer, big question marks have begun to raise around the league. The organization seemed to want to revolutionize the game by playing with two big guys, just as the Warriors did years ago with the small-ball lineups. The “only” problem for them was Rudy Gobert’s shooting ability, which is down to none, so now we have two bigs at the same time on the floor, one who cannot space the floor and one who plays like he is a 2,13m shooting guard – and that sounds just as it looked for the whole season until now… awkward and inefficient.
From the very first time I saw the Rudy Gobert trade news, I first thought that it is a joke, then I said this will never going to work… and I don’t think that you need to be some kind of a basketball genius to realize it. That’s why we don’t know what was going through Tim Connelly (the Timberwolves General Manager) and the entire organization staff’s head when he thought of it, went to his owners/ staff, sat down, and showed them his idea and they all agreed to it as the well-needed strategy for Minnesota’s success.
Now they are stuck with a big who cannot space the floor and a huge contract that goes until 2026. This season they will pay him $38,172,414. The Minnesota T’Wolves are currently in 11th place with a 13-15 record and the signs show that it will be a complete failure again for the Wolves organization. Another problem that seems to bother the team is his teammates’ lack of trust when it comes to offense. It could be seen numerous times already this season when Gobert got frustrated on a possession in which his teammates didn’t pass him the ball. The same talk was going on during his time spent with Donovan Mitchell on the Utah Jazz, but if we take a deeper look at that, we see that Mitchell passed to Gobert 4.4 times per game in Utah. Anthony Edwards has passed to Gobert only 1.7 times per game in Minnesota. They’ve run 125 pick-and-rolls, and Gobert received the ball only four times.
Besides being a defense tower under the rim, Rudy Gobert is unreliable in every other aspect of the game. To think that somebody thought he deserved his 5-year $205 million contract is crazy.
