Yesterday you could read on the TrashTalk site that Wolves still wanted trust Rudy Gobert and Chris Finch, the team coach. Every day is different, and that’s Brian Windhorst from home ESPN which adds this Tuesday a new spoon of oil on the fire of the Roudi file in Minnesota. On the menu ? Teammates apparently overwhelmed by the too many ball losses of their new pivot.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to watch the Nuggets-Wolves game tonight, either live or on replay, let us tell you briefly, to set the context. Rudy Gobert is in the major five, offers a good defensive part by containing quite well the centerpiece of Denver aka Nikola Jokic. Everything is going well so far, but let’s now talk about his offensive contribution.
Fed by his teammates during the first possessions of the match, he was very quickly completely erased from the game of the Wolves, who strangely ignored him despite numerous pick & rolls towards the basket and other interesting positions taken. The reason behind this “oversight” when scoring points? This is according to Brian Windhorst, insider ESPNthe repercussion of a frustration of the rest of the workforce towards Gobert’s multiple ball losses since the start of the season.
“[Les Wolves] knew that Gobert had limits. They weren’t expecting him to arrive and have everything immediately perfect. They knew it was going to take a little while. But he really frustrated the fans there as well as his teammates because earlier in the season he was losing balls. They were running the systems, the pick & rolls for him and the ball was slipping out of his hands. I don’t have the number of his ball losses in front of me, but for Wolves and their fans it was like he lost 100. There was frustration in that and even though his defense is good, it didn’t have the impact they expected.”
Wow, okay. So, let’s take out the stats sheets from our huge sorter stamped “season 2022-2023”. Rudy Gobert is 53 ball losses in 32 games, or 1.7 per game. That is certainly a possibly high figure in Wolves’ eyes, but it is their lowest tally since the 2018-19 season.
The regular is not over, but it would seem that the national Roudi’s ball losses may be a way for fans and some players to vent frustration linked to the poor results of the franchise since the resumption. For information – and not comparison, the player in question having much more balls in attack – Karl-Anthony Towns compiles him 3.1 loss of balls per match.
Ignoring Rudy Gobert offensively should not help solve the damage to Wolves. All the more so in a context of prolonged absence of the offensive pivot. After only two months of competition, the pack will probably have more to gain by trying to resolve offensive chemistry concerns rather than by isolating an important element on paper of his group.
Source : Brian Windhorst via Hoopshype