Are Tom Thibodeau’s Minnesota Timberwolves Too Fatigued During 4th Quarters?

by Matt Chin in Team Breakdowns

Tom Thibodeau’s willingness to expose his best players to unmerciful workloads has become a common punchline for basketball jokes.

In his last five full seasons as a head coach, his teams have never finished higher than 25th in bench minutes. The bitter aftertaste of Thibodeau’s player misuse can be found scattered around NBA benches. Joakim Noah and Luol Deng’s production and health have fallen off cliffs in recent years. Not only did Derrick Rose’s Chicago Bulls tenure mentally exhaust him, but his excessive playing time between 2010 and 2015 has since usurped his superhuman physical skills.

Thibodeau’s initial campaign at the helm of the Minnesota Timberwolves ended with Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns finishing as the only two players in the league who played over 3,000 minutes. His methodology is clear: Identify the best players and maximize them to win tonight’s game at all costs.

This season is no different.

Once again, Thibs is asking his starters to tote an enormous workload. The lineup of Towns, Wiggins, Jimmy Butler, Taj Gibson and Jeff Teague have totaled 712 minutes together, which is the most of any five-man combination this season, per NBA.com. The next closest are the Oklahoma City Thunder’s starters at 440 minutes. The Wolves have three players inside the top 15 for total minutes played: Butler (No. 2), Wiggins (No. 8) and Towns (No. 15). Teague and Gibson are not far behind, ranking at 29th and 34th, respectively.

In his age-32 season, Gibson is playing a career-high 33.7 minutes per game. While the burly veteran has had a clean bill of health during his eight-year career, Thibodeau is playing with fire by ramping up the workload. Gibson hasn’t played a full season as a starter since 2009.  He sets the tone on both ends of the floor, and his experienced savviness is a crucial element for the Minnesota engine.

It’s almost January, and whether the Wolves starters can sustain this level of usage is an unsettling concern.  The Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers and San Antonio Spurs have blueprinted to treat the season as a marathon, and maintaining fresh legs throughout is paramount. Nearing the halfway mark, the Wolves are solidly positioned to earn home-court advantage.

But hidden beneath their early success is a glaring concern. Simply put, the Timberwolves disappear late in games.

Fatigue Can’t be Outcoached

Thibodeau employs a mind-over-matter approach. Feeling tired is just that: a feeling. There isn’t room for empathy in his locker room, so weariness can be eliminated with strong will and fortitude. He even has Jimmy Butler acting as his on-court preacher.

“The majority of it is mental, for me and for a lot of people. If you think that you’re tired, you will be tired” Butler told Reid Forgrave of CBS Sports. “Otherwise, just fight through. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot harder things that I’ve endured in my life than playing a couple extra minutes.”

For a Thibodeau team, pushing yourself to the physical limit is an everyday expectation. If unmet, it could result in becoming the next victim of one of his famous tongue-lashings. He once unleashed this gem just 58 seconds into a game:

But fatigue and exhaustion aren’t readily controllable emotions. Those “couple [of] extra minutes” that Butler willingly disregards can add up over an 82-game season, and the totality of the extra wear and tear poses legitimate physical limitations for the playoff push.

Maximizing floor time for your best players seems appealing, but when does the burden of their depleted energy levels outweigh the benefit of their utility? Thibodeau struggles to conceptualize the equilibrium, and the statistics reveal that Minnesota’s efficiency breaks down toward the end of games. From first to second halves, they undergo a Jekyll and Hyde-like transformation.

The Timberwolves produce the fourth-best net rating in first halves, outscoring their opponents by seven points per 100 possessions. That ranking drops to 13th in third quarters, and 29th in fourth quarters. Their general tendency to underachieve at the end of games dates back to last season. At this point, their second-half lethargic nature isn’t just a trend; it is an expectation. The hope was that the combined experience of Butler, Teague and Gibson would inject a motivational presence during the tensest moments, but the strategy has offered fruitless results.

The above chart from NBA Math says everything.

The Wolves are playing their starters significantly more than any other team, and their fourth-quarter net rating is at the bottom of the league. Their efficiency plummets as the game progresses, and Thibodeau would likely point toward execution and focus as primary rationales, but cogently, the correlation between fatigue and production shouldn’t be written off.

Thibodeau’s calling card is as a defensive savant, yet that genius hasn’t translated in Minneapolis. Their 26th-ranked defense is identical to last season. Their fourth-quarter defensive rating is dead last.

Towns are Wiggins have defensive ratings of 103.2 and 103.0 in the first half of games, respectively, but those figures balloon to 114.6 and 117.9 in fourth quarters. Each has a well-documented history of being defensively apathetic, but would you blame them if they referenced excessive playing time as a contributing element?

Their lack of defensive progress is perturbing given that they each have the physical tools to lock down opponents. KAT is a rangy and agile center who too often allows like-talent players to blow by him on drives or bully him near the rim. Wiggins is possibly the most athletic wing alive, yet he enigmatically dies on screens and fails to use his 7’0” wingspan to disrupt shooting space and passing lanes. If the energy possessed by both youngsters can be harnessed into 30-35 minutes per game, rather than 36-42, then sluggish effort late in games will become inexcusable.

Lessening the starters’ minutes won’t solve every defensive issue, but questioning Thibodeau’s systemic effectiveness is a reasonable inquiry at this point. Since being hired in April of 2016, he has had 108 games to incorporate his schemes. The Bulls had the league’s best defensive rating in Thibodeau’s second season with Chicago. The Wolves are nowhere close to that level.

At some point, Minnesota’s players will get tired of hearing his booming yells of “Ice! Ice!” in demands for preventing middle penetration. How can players be expected to buy into a militaristic perfectionism when the Wolves are nowhere close to being defensively faultless?

With most regular-season games remaining, dishing out an overabundance of minutes to the starters is downright reckless. Minnesota’s situation is akin to owning three luxury sports cars that are scheduled for a nationally televised race in April. But instead of preserving their shelf lives and managing their usage, Thibodeau is driving them into the ground months before the big competition.

Trusting the Bench

Resting and conserving star players has never been trendier. In seasons prior to 2011, the league leaders in minutes played more than 40 per game. Since then, that number has dropped into the high 30s. Adam Silver continues to clamp down on forward-thinking coaches resting frontline players, but Thibodeau is bred from a different basketball era, and the importance of preservation and recovery doesn’t resonate with some old-school coaches.

“We’re concerned with the wins,” he said in early December when asked by the Twin Cities Pioneer Press about allocating more minutes for the second unit. “That’s what we’re concerned with.”

One of the biggest priorities for Minnesota’s 2017 offseason was to overhaul the second unit. It finished dead last in bench scoring and minutes per game last season, which created a chicken vs. egg scenario: Was the second unit unproductive because Thibodeau didn’t give it a chance, or did it truly lack cohesiveness and talent?

Uniquely positioned as one of the few coaches with front-office control, Thibodeau built his own bench, so he has no excuse to resist a deeper rotation. And yet, the onus for the 27th-ranked scoring bench hinges on the fact that playing time hardly ever goes beyond eight or nine players, even in blowout games. Finding a few more short stints for certain bench players could catalyze Minnesota’s starters to perform at a higher efficiency at the end of games.

With Jeff Teague expected to miss the next two-to-four weeks, Tyus Jones will quarterback the starting unit. The third-year guard is posting a career-high 54.9 effective field-goal percentage and deserves more than the 17.1 minutes per game that he’s been afforded thus far. Jamal Crawford’s playing time is at its lowest level since his rookie season, but the 37-year-old provides the only dynamic shot-creation off of the Minnesota bench.

Crawford recently showed he still knows how to get hot:

Gorgui Dieng has assumed the sixth-man role and is finally being used as a dual-threat center who spaces out to 18 feet on offense and turns away shots at the rim on the defensive end. Gibson has seized most of his power forward minutes, but the fifth-year Louisville product is one of the more talented backup bigs around.

Nemanja Bjelica has been limited to only 21 games so far, but the talented Serbian native is finally healthy. Minnesota is 25th in three-pointers per game. The  6’10” forward is a stretchy sniper whose marksmanship is salient for the Wolves’ offensive flow. He is 21-of-43 (48.8 percent) from behind the arc so far this season, and he will likely hover around 20 minutes per game once he regains his wind.

The rest of the bench remains somewhat unknown. Shabazz Muhammad and his unsightly minus-17.3 net rating might be unplayable at this point. In a bizarre developmental tactic which falls squarely on Thibodeau’s shoulders, rookie Justin Patton has appeared in zero NBA games and only six G-League contests. Veterans Aaron Brooks and Cole Aldrich have barely played, so their usefulness is uncertain. Marcus Georges-Hunt has enjoyed a few cups of coffee, but none significant enough for us to get a real outlook on his potential.

These are the players who Thibodeau signed and drafted in the offseason. If the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario presents itself, he’ll have to know who on his bench can be utilized in specific scenarios. By failing to tweak lineups and experiment during the early months, Minnesota may be ill-prepared to make adjustments during the critical ones.

Balancing Style and Adaptivity

Thibodeau’s methods have a track record of success. Four of his five seasons heading the Bulls ended with Chicago finishing inside the top 10 in fourth-quarter net rating. His system is well-proven. Righting the ship isn’t unfathomable. But for a team comfortably sitting in playoff position, winning a few extra games is exponentially less important than guaranteeing fresh bodies as the postseason begins.

Thibodeau has recently shown a willingness to be more egalitarian with the workload. Over the past eight games, the starters are averaging between 33 and 38 minutes per night. Through this is a small sample size, the upshot of the extra added rest is that the Wolves are posting higher efficiency rates. During that time, they went 6-2 and posted the fourth-best fourth-quarter net rating. Before December, they were being outscored by 15.1 points per 100 possessions—by far the worst mark in the league. This month, they’re outscoring opponents by 8.4 points per 100 possessions.

On the surface level, everything appears joyful for the thriving Timberwolves. They’re 22-14, good enough for fourth place in the uber-competitive West (though a conference power shift may be coming). Butler’s added tenacity and leadership have been a boon.  The talented young duo of Towns and Wiggins are under team control for at least two more seasons.

The Wolves have taken meaningful steps to rid themselves of their decade-long skid. Minnesota last made the playoffs in 2004, back when Kevin Love looked like this and Sam Cassell was the Robin to Kevin Garnett’s Batman. For a small-market team with hopes of strengthening its national presence, the importance of preserving durability cannot be overstated.

Overall, Thibs’ unrelenting coaching style is as admirable as it is heedless. The early-2010s Bulls played with incessant effort, often feeding off their coach’s angered zest and contagious competitiveness. But in turn, over-relying on his starters reveals Thibodeau’s hasty short-sightedness and willingness to give into temptation—a side of him that makes it seem like he doesn’t care about longevity.

No evidence of an internal strife between the players and Thibodeau exists. The Wolves are finally building a winning culture, and that triumph probably supersedes any anxiety the players have toward logging a few extra minutes per night. But Minnesota’s dynamic trio is fully aware of the collection of ex-Thibodeau stars who abruptly burnt out, in part due to overuse.

In mid-December, Towns stated on The J.J. Redick Podcast that carrying a huge minutes load isn’t the “smartest thing” long term. Where smoke exists, a potential fire needs to be put out. If the immoderate workloads continue, the risk of the Wolves abandoning their head coach will quietly swell behind the scenes.

Follow Matt Chin on Twitter @MattChinNBA.

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Statistics are accurate as of all games headed into December 30, 2017. Non-cited statistics are from Basketball-Reference.com. Salary information is from Spotrac.com.

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