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Roster - Minnesota Timberwolves News · Roster · Patch · Statistics · Units · Ratings · Schedule · Transactions · NBA Stats · TbT

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It's Over:(

Well the regular season is wrapping up, and the Wolves have finished all 82 games.  What was the result?  We finished 4^th in the West, with a record of 53-29.  This is also good for 8^th best in the league just ahead of Boston.  The stated goal from the beginning of the season was to get a top 4 seed in the West, mission accomplished.  We will host the Denver Nuggets in what will likely be a very competitive playoff series. 

The team finished with the following rankings:

Offense:

FG%    13       46%

3P%    23       35%

FT%    3          78%

Assists            17       25.6

TOs     12       9.1

Reb     13       49.4

PPG    16       106.3

OffEff 13       109.33

eFG% 13       50.4%

TS%    12       54.2%

So what does all this tell us, well basically that we were a middle of the road offense for much of the year.  The only thing that this team does well is shoot free throws.  Everything else is kinda what you would expect from a .500 team that struggles to make the playoffs.  Despite having some good offensive players in Jeff Teague, Paul George, and Brook Lopez early on, we just struggled to consistently score.  This would be an issue if it wasn’t for the defensive effort put out every night.

Defense:

FG%    8          45%

3P%    15       35%

Reb     11       48.0

TOs     15       9.3

STLs    13       6.4

BLKs   9          5.1

Fouls  11       14.1

PPG    6          102.9

DefEff 6          105.93

Reb% 12       50.7%

So looking at these numbers, we are a top 10 defensive team on most nights, the team doesn’t do anything great except forcing bad shots which leads to a lower FG%.  For many weeks in the season we had one of the top 3 defenses, but with Bradley missing almost have the season, the defense faltered a lot at the shooting guard spot.  We hope that a fully healthy roster with Tyson Chandler, Paul George, and Avery Bradley will stifle teams during the playoffs.

One spot that hurt us all year was our bench, we had the 4^th worst bench in the league scoring only 29.6 ppg.  The only thing that countered this was that opponents benches scored the 2^nd least against us at only 30.9 ppg.  So the bench was only a Net -1.3 ppg.  That’s not as bad as it could be.  This is a big function of the fact that we like Paul George to play with the 2^nd unit a lot, so he gets a lot of his points with them.  If we can get the bench to be a net positive in the playoffs, with both Deron Williams and Wes Matthews playing together, we will be much better off.

I was thinking about doing the awards for the individuals at the end of the regular season, but I want to see how the playoffs work out before I access the individuals.  As it is, the team ended great despite many trades and injuries throughout the year.  If you look at expected winning %, which is a pretty good indicator of how the team will do, we outperformed expectations.  Our predicted % was 10^th at 60.9% and we ended 8^th at 64.6%.  This is a great job by the team to do better than expected throughout the year.