Minnesota at L.A. Clippers
Time: 9:30 PM (CT), NBA TV
Spread: MIN -2
Total: 221.5
Odds c/o 5dimes
MIN notes:
Minnesota, is building towards a meaningful future with two of the league’s brightest stars in Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns, alongside established veteran All-Star Jimmy Butler. The Wolves occupy the No. 4 spot in the West and would have
home court advantage if the playoffs began today.
Tom Thibodeau finally has the veteran leaders to lead his strong young core. Towns is averaging 20.5 points, 11.7 rebounds and 1.3 blocks pregame with a team-high PER of 23.0.
Butler has reduced his scoring load from a season ago with the pitiful Chicago Bulls, but is playing strong two-way basketball and still tallying 20 points per night.?Andrew Wiggins has made meaningful strides as a playmaker and defender, with the cost that he is averaging less points than last season, but the Wolves are a better more well-rounded team this season.
Credit some of that to unheralded additions Jeff Teague and Taj Gibson. Gibson has relegated the once-promising Gorgui Dieng to the bench, while Teague has seamlessly replaced Ricky Rubio at the point guard position. Jamal Crawford is not seeing a lot of minutes (17 per game), but is still a viable scorer off the bench and he can get hot at any time.
The Wolves have sufficient depth and leadership to finally cash in on its potential, and developing consistency on both ends of the court is next on Thibodeau’s checklist for his rising Wolves. The team is off to a great start for a young ball club and could be one of the most feared by the time the postseason finally arrives in 2018. The Wolves are hot and on the rise.
LAC notes:
The Clippers (23-22) are now a team built around Blake Griffin. It is a .500 team, for better or worse, L.A. had to say goodbye to the staple of its franchise.
Having already lost star point guard Chris Paul over the offseason, Los Angeles more or less handed the reigns of the team off to Griffin, who led it in assists at 4.9 per game prior to suffering the leg injury. Griffin is still out up to two months with what is being termed a sprained MCL, and the Clippers really have no offensive creators to step up in his stead.
To be sure, Austin Rivers (15.8 points per game) and Lou Williams (23.1 points per game) are both good bucket-getters, but neither offers much along the way of getting teammates involved, and Patrick Beverley is not known for that a lot either (2.9 assists per game), as the team’s floor general.
Really, the point-forward experiment with Griffin was all the Clippers had to muster a chance against more talented teams in the West, and for all that Danilo Gallinari spoke of the team having the league’s best frontcourt, it is almost devoid of playmakers to get those big men baskets.
Center DeAndre Jordan has suffered sans Paul, and Gallinari is finding it more difficult to get offense as a Clipper than he did during his tenure in Denver either. Between the two, they combine to average just 25.2 points per game, which makes Griffin’s 23.1 per game still not enough. The Clippers put up 107 points per game as a team, which is respectable in today’s NBA, but the team is being obliterated defensively and surrendering just as many (106.8) per game.
Even with a premier rim protector like Jordan and a disruptor in the backcourt like Beverley, the Clippers have not found a way to form a coherent team defense, with missing rotations and lazy swings accounting for teams continually hurting L.A. from the perimeter.
The Clippers may trail No. 8 Denver by just half a game at this juncture, but all of the teams ahead of Los Angeles (perhaps save cross-town rival Lakers) are better teams on the defensive end. Between not having a real formula for offensive success, but just a glut of talent and the team’s glaring defensive inadequacies make it difficult to envision much more than a first-round sweep at the hands of Houston or Golden State.
That actually sounds like just what a purist would expect, and only Griffin’s own fans?expected him to be able to carry the offensive load for an NBA team for a full season without serious injuries. He is an injury prone star, and the Clippers are now a strange collection of talents without his game-changing abilities on the court. It is not difficult to see why the team is six games below .500 with those woes clearly laid out before the reader.
