THUNDER-WOLVES REACTION: Anthony Edwards powers Timberwolves to BLOWOUT of SGA & OKC Thunder

THUNDER-WOLVES REACTION: Anthony Edwards powers Timberwolves to BLOWOUT of SGA & OKC Thunder

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Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use code hoops. That’s code hoops. H O Ps for new customers to get $300 in bonus bets if your bet wins when you bet just five bucks. Only on DraftKings. The crown is yours. [Music] All right, welcome to Hoops Tonight here at The Volume. Happy Saturday everybody. Hope all of you guys are having a great start to your weekend. Well, the Minnesota Timberwolves made a couple of key changes to their game plan tonight. rode some hot shooting and unbelievable shotmaking from Ant Julius Ed Julius Randall and beat the living out of the Oklahoma City Thunder in what was a very interesting game on a bunch of different levels. Some stuff that’s like classic game three down 200 buzzsaw stuff, but also some realities in terms of uh the ability of this Minnesota team to make Oklahoma City uncomfortable at stretches. Some growth from Minnesota shot creators as they had by far their most successful sustained offense in this particular game. So much interesting stuff to get into tonight. You guys know the drill. Before we get started, subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don’t miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at_jasonlt so you guys don’t miss show announcements. Don’t forget about our podcast feed wherever you get your podcast under Hoops Tonight. It’s also super helpful if you leave a rating and a review. On that front, check out our social media feeds on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok. We’re releasing content throughout the year. And then keep dropping questions in the chat so that we can hit them in our mailbags towards the uh uh towards the end of these shows. Now, tonight’s show in particular, Jackson’s out of town. So, if you guys want to get questions, we’re going to be taking chat questions from my Twitter feed. So, if you go to my Twitter feed at Jasonlt and you scroll down, you’ll see a tweet where I ask for questions. Feel free to drop the questions in there. And when I get done uh with the breakdown, we’ll head into that uh that kind of thread there and I’ll start grabbing questions from there. Also, when we finish tonight, we’re going to be moving over to playback. Again, that’s playback.tv/hoops tonight. There for, you know, another hour or so. We’re going to be taking callers. We’ll watch some film. It’s more informal. It’s a lot of fun. We just talk hoops and have fun for an extra hour at the tail end of the show. So, make sure you guys head over there. All right, let’s talk some basketball. So, at uh in the the playback session last night, we have a a Thunder fan, a Thunder fan named Will, who has graced us with his presence several times, some fun venting and some uh takes on his Thunder team. And I asked Will, I said, “What is Sha’s biggest weakness?” And I was trying to make a point with respect to his uh uh with the game plan. And Will mentioned three-point shooting. What I was trying to say was his playmaking specifically that if you pack the paint against him, he’s a a passer that can make reads and is a is a uh you know certainly good enough at the job to still be a top tier superstar in this league. But no one’s going to call out Shay’s playmaking as the strength of his game. And similarly to what Will was saying, no one’s going to call out Will the SGA’s three-point shooting as the strength of his game. the the two things there in his game that you would point to as like not like the like far down the list of what he’s great at is his three-point shooting and his processing in the half court. What would you consider to be his strengths? Well, he’s the best high volume ISO player in the league by a mile among any player who ran at least 300 ISOs this year. Shot out of 300 ISOs. He was far and away the most efficient and he’s far and away the best driver of the basketball in the league. He had like 200 more drives than anyone else in the NBA this year, which you know, you can do the math there on how many times that is per game. And so what I didn’t like about the game plan that Chris Finch used in the first two games was he was picking up Shay really far away from the basket with Jaden McDaniels, often right when he was crossing half court, and he was staying glued to shooters off the ball. And one of the things that did is it allowed Sheay to one not have to rely on his three-point shot because he’s beating ball pressure by driving. And so you’re playing into the strength of his game by giving him a much wider runway, a longer runway to drive past his man. And then two, he doesn’t have to rely on that three-point shot because he’s not being uh, you know, baited into it by a guy playing off of him. And then the third piece of it is if you stay home off the ball and you let Shay play a lot of one-on-one or a lot of twoon two, you’re accentuating his shot making, his foul grifting, his scoring ability, which is the kind of thing that made him the MVP of this league instead of forcing him to process tight space environments in the middle of the floor and show off his passing ability, which again he’s fine at, but it’s not his strength. And so I, you know, again, I I was immediately annoyed about this in game one. Game two, I it was defensible to run it back just because Minnesota shot so poorly in game one. You could talk yourself into thinking that maybe you just shoot better. Overall though, I’m a big believer and you you you spotted the Oklahoma City Thunder a two- lead. Now, they might have gone up 200 anyway, even with the right game plan, but you played an inferior game plan that allowed Oklahoma City to dominate you through the first two games when we had a clear example in the previous round from Denver of how to make this Oklahoma City team uncomfortable. I pulled the numbers yesterday. I can’t remember exactly off top of my head, but they had a offensive rating around like 113, I believe, against Denver. And in the first two games, they had an offensive rating of 120 against Minnesota. Minnesota is a sub substantially more talented defensive roster, bigger, longer athletes that are faster, deeper. They just have they probably have two and a half good defenders for every good defender on the Denver roster. There was no excuse for them to be getting cut to pieces the way that they did. Again, I’m not sitting here saying that m that Minnesota should be up 3 0. No, the Thunder are amazing, but you just played a game plan that allowed the Thunder to kick the out of you and score on you easily, which doesn’t match your specific personnel and how good they should be at stopping this team. In theory, they should be able to do a better job of what Denver did. The same game plan, but with better personnel should in theory lead to dramatic results. And we saw that tonight. Immediately, right out the gates, the specific ball pressure adjustment, Jaden was not meeting Shay outside the three-point line. He was meeting him inside the three-point line, not allowing him to get that head of steam against the ball pressure. But then against everybody else, and I thought this was the genius little tweak from Chris Finch. Against everyone else, he was pressuring because again, those guys aren’t the dribble drive threat that Shay Gildish Alexander is. And so what ended up happening is you were able to neutralize that initial problem, which was Shay. He goes four for 13 tonight, has four turnovers. He was one for four from three with four turnovers in the first half. So again, you accentuated his processing and his three-point shooting. He couldn’t knock down threes and he didn’t make the read. Simple example, there was like a play where uh they pinched in off the ball because that’s the other part of it. It’s not just the ball pressure piece. They were sinking in. You could see when Jaden is facing up against Shay, you know, he’s standing at the top of the key and Shay’s outside the three-point line. There’s a little bit of a gap. You were seeing guys digging down into the driving lanes. They were bringing doubles, not out at half court, but bringing the doubles inside the three-point line. And in that zone, they were able to force Shay to pass. There was a play in the third quarter where they brought a double team of Sheay inside the three-point line around the elbow. Isaiah Joe is wide open in the left corner and Shay just throws a bad pass to Isaiah Joe. And it’s like if he throws a good pass on time on target, that’s a three-point shot that’s probably going to go in. But again, you’re forcing Sheay to do the thing that he’s not as good at as the other things that he’s great at. And I just thought that worked. But then the second piece of it is pressuring the hell out of everyone else, which allows Minnesota to maintain their identity. This is a Minnesota team. You guys, you guys want to know why they were picking up, you know, picking up at half court and pressuring and staying home off ball? You want to know why they were doing all that stuff? They were doing all that stuff because that’s who they are as a basketball team. It’s it’s at their core. It’s their identity and so they wanted to, you know, and there’s a lot of basketball teams that’ll go about it this way, thinking like, you know, I want to beat the other team playing our style, you know, rather than immediately pivot and like surrender our identity right out the gates. You know, I I understand that thought process, but again, ultimately, when you get into a series like this against a team that’s better, Oklahoma City demonstrated themselves to be better. They won 19 more games than Minnesota this year. And so, the margins are thin and you need to play into what gives you the best chance to win this specific series. Very similarly, like I talk about it with coaching in the big picture, you don’t want to coach for the roster you want. you coach for the roster you have. So, if you’re not fast, don’t play a style of basketball that requires you to be fast and run. Play a slower, methodical matchup attacking type of of attack. If you’ve got a really fast team with a bunch of fast guards and you’re not pushing the ball in transition, you’re not accentuating what your roster is good at. But even in a very focused level in the postseason within one of these two week series, you got to coach for this matchup. I don’t care what your identity is. Shay torched you all season in that identity. And so one of the things that I liked about that specific tweak from Finch was by sagging off of Sheay, but by pressing up on everyone else, they were able to when they had the ball, meaning well, obviously when Shay had the ball, those guys were sinking in, but by pressuring up on everyone else when they had the ball, they were able to maintain some of that aggressive ball pressure identity that made Minnesota the basketball team that they’ve been over the course of the last two years. And ironically, they were able to actually fulfill, you know, something or or force something out of Oklahoma City that we very rarely see, which is them turning the basketball over. In that first half, they turned OKC over a bunch and got out in transition a bunch. Again, we when whenever whenever I talk about like bizarre outcomes, so this is a bizarre outcome, right? like you’re it’s 5 minutes left in the fourth quarter. You’re up 44 on the 68 win Thunder team that beat the out of you twice in Oklahoma City. What What causes you to flip the script that dramatically? Well, like I always say, it’s not one thing. Many things have to go your way to lead to a dynamic that dramatic. So, one, obviously, the shift in the game plan containing Shay. you’ve played him into his first bad game of the series, full game. You have obviously was bad in the first half of game one, but you played Shay into a bad game, right? Two, the ball pressure on the other Thunder players forcing turnovers and getting out in transition. Those are the two uh the two things that we’ve already discussed. The third thing, Ant and Julius making the corner kicks. We’ve talked about this non-stop through the first two games of the series. Minnesota for the first time tonight showed the ability to dislodge Oklahoma City from their base defensive scheme. The first time 34 in the first quarter, 38 in the second quarter, 35 in the third quarter. That that’s absurd. They were finally able to demonstrate, hey, your baseline scheme doesn’t work. In the first two games, they were unable to do that. A and Julius forcing the issue, taking bad shots, not making the corner kicks. When the corner kicks were made, not knocking them down. In the first two games of the series, the Wolves were 9 for 36 on corner threes. That’s 25%. That’s not going to get the job done. that the the turnovers that they were dealing with, all of those things that they had to do to successfully process against this defense wasn’t getting done. Tonight, as of 5 minutes left in the fourth quarter, only nine turnovers. Relentlessly in this game, A and Julius making the corner kickout passes over and over again, trusting their ability to capitalize on that advantage. And it wasn’t just corner threes. I thought Jaden McDaniels in particular did an incredible job tonight operating on that weak side corner as a guy who was hitting threes but also making like attacking closeouts making connective passing reads. There were a couple plays in the late first half that I thought perfectly uh demonstrated this one a corner kick from Julius. Another a corner kick from Ant. I have them both on my Twitter feed. You can find them at un_jasonlt. I put them in a little thread. But Julius drives, he draws Shay in and help because again all series long Oklahoma City has been packing the paint and conceding those corner kickouts. Julius makes the corner kick out. There’s a close out. That close out is an advantage, right? Got to capitalize on that advantage. Jaden racks to the baseline and on that rip through move because he beats the close out. He’s able to uh generate dribble penetration and it forces the big man to step up. Then Rudy Gobear very smartly tees up, meaning he just kind of relocates from the opposite dunker spot right in front of the rim and makes himself available. Jaden drops it off to him. Rudy catches then Lou Dort has to because he has no choice. Digging and also it’s just kind of part of the way the Thunder play basketball. Swoop in to try to steal it from Gobear and as a result Nquille Alexander Walker is wide open at the top of the key. Rudy, another connective pass. Pitches it to Nquille at the top of the key. Pump fakes on the closeout. Gets in the lane and gets an easy breezy floater in the lane where Oklahoma City typically is swarming but not attacking at the beginning of the possession, but kicking on the beginning of the possession, moving the ball, and suddenly things get loose. Suddenly, there’s an opportunity in the middle of the floor where you can look to be aggressive without having to deal with a swarm of Oklahoma City defenders. Very similar one. Ant drives, kicks to the corner to Jaden, draws an extra rotation from the top of the wing, uh, pitches it to Nas Reed. Another really aggressive closeout. Nas just shows the ball. Dude goes flying by, puts the ball on the floor, and then easy breezy settles into a wideopen three on the right wing that he knocks down. That’s advantage basketball. That’s how you have to break down this Oklahoma City defense. Get into the middle, make the corner kicks, knock them down when you’re wide open, drive closeouts, make the connective reads. Then you’re going to see opportunities for Ant and Julius to be aggressive on the backside. But again, there’s more to it than just that. Even the A and Julius over-the-top shotmaking. like Ant and Julius just did a better job of being a little more selective on the types of pull-up jump shots they were taking. I thought Ant took some really tough ones in the second half, but he got his rhythm first. He got it going with some easier looks against drop coverage or beating Gambles. And so when he got his jumper going, then in the second half, he went to some really tough bits of shot making, but it came in the flow after he already built his rhythm. Julius Randle, some over-the-top shot making in the short range and a to pull up three as well. Like you saw the shot making from the Stars meet the moment as well. Guys knocking down their catch and shoot threes. As of the time we started the show, there were seven uh Timberwolves players that hit multiple threes. I’m going there. Nazri two for three. Dante Devenenzo two for two. Nquille Alexander Walker two for four. Ant five for eight. Mike Connley two for six. JD McDaniels two for four. Julius Randall two for five. All those dudes hit multiple threes. All of them hit over 40% except for Mike Connley. So the shooting followed, right? Again, if you’re going to beat the out of a team that just previously blew you out, you need a bunch of factors to go your way. game plan shift, forcing turnovers and getting out in transition. A and Julius making the reads, guys knocking down corner threes, connective playmaking, attacking closeouts, A and Julius hitting shots over the top. And then what I thought was a really smart little move from Chris Finch to start uh in the I think it was right at the start of the second quarter if I remember correctly, but it’s in the first half. I thought he read the room right and was like, “Oh, we’re forcing turnovers. We’re getting out in transition. This is very much like a up and down the floor type of game. How about we throw Terrence Shannon in there? And Terrence Shannon, you know, in a league where it’s hard to stand out as an athlete, this guy pops off the screen every time I watch him as an athlete. And he got some opportunities to attack uh to slash off the wing, to slash in transition, and I thought he was great in his shift. I thought it was just a really smart move from Chris Finch in that spot. So, obviously, everything goes Minnesota’s way in this game, and they get a big win. The question is, can Minnesota still win this series? The problem is is you spotted Oklahoma City a 2- lead with a foolish game plan. Now, again, as I mentioned before, there’s no guarantee that you would have had uh an opportunity to win either of those games, which you probably have a better chance to win those games if you end up uh uh starting the series within an appropriate game plan. The problem is is now you still, even after tonight, you have to win three of the next four games. And at least one of those games needs to be won in Oklahoma City, maybe two if OKC manages to steal one game in your building. Oklahoma City will come out and play better in game two. There are obvious things that will swing in or excuse me, in game four, I apologize, game two in Minnesota. Oklahoma City will play better in game four. There’s a couple of obvious things that will tilt back their way. They’re going to come out with a more desperate defensive effort with a ton of physicality. Like that’s just guaranteed right out the gates, which means Ant and Julius are going to have to be even more deliberate with protecting the ball, with making the appropriate reads. Guys are going to have to hit threes against tighter closeouts. Guys when they drive closeouts are going to have to deal with sharper closeouts uh containing the ball that they’re going to have to do a better job beating and making those uh you know subsequent reads out of it. Right. Oklahoma City turned the ball over a lot at the beginning of this game. I would expect Oklahoma City to turn the ball over less in game four, right? They’re going to be more methodical like they have seen this style of defense before. They saw it in the Denver series. So, we’re going to see them most likely try to bring back some of that methodical playmaking and and shot making that we saw in the Denver series at stretches, right? So, like Oklahoma City will play way better in game four and this margin will be way tighter. Now, the case, if you’re a Minnesota fan and you’re looking for a reason to feel optimistic about your chances to come back and win the series, the case is that you did some real damage tonight. This was not a win. This was an ass kicking. I thought you shook the Thunder to their core tonight. You had them looking disheveled and doing things they don’t normally do. Shay was awful. You played them into a bunch of turnovers. Look at how many times this year Shay was 4 for 13 tonight. Um, go look at how many times this year Shay shot that poorly from the field. That’s 31%. I pulled the numbers for the show the other day. He had singledigit games this year below 40% from the field. Guys like Jaylen Brunson, guys like Anthony Edwards, they had more than 20 such games. You played Shay into an uncharacteristically tough game. You played a team that doesn’t turn the basketball over into a bunch of turnovers. You took a 68- win team that I said last night, I would be shocked if they didn’t win the title at this point and you beat the out of them. So, if you’re looking for optimism, that’s what you cling to. You did some real damage. I I would be shocked if Oklahoma City blew you out in game four. Game four is going to most likely be a tight competitive game that will come down to some sort of sequence down the stretch. And if you can execute and you execute the game plan specifically and if Julius and Ant make the appropriate reads, the guys play smart off of those advantages and finish plays with shotmaking. There is a real chance here. But there’s a reason why in NBA history, I saw a stat the other day. I believe only six times in the conference finals a team has come back from down 20. There’s a reason why you’re not you’re not playing against bums anymore. This is the conference finals. Oklahoma City’s been the championship favorite since like the last third of the regular season. This is a real team and you got to beat them four out of five times. Took care one, but now you got to win three out of four. And it’s just really hard to do. It’s really hard to sustain. And so with that being the case, like I still feel like the Thunder are in a commanding position here, but you just got to take it one game at a time. We talked about this last night. You win if for New York, it’s the same kind of thing. Just win game three, it changes the series. Win game three, all of a sudden, game four becomes the pivot point. If you win game four, you go back to Oklahoma City in a 2-2 series with the appropriate game plan and you feel like you have a better chance to win the series at that point. Theoretically, at that point, you’re in a bet you’re in better shape than you are in game one 0 because now you know the way that you want to play and you only got to beat them twice. Same thing goes with the Knicks. Win game three, all of a sudden game four becomes the pivot point. You win game four, it’s 2-2, you’re going home for a best of three, and you figured out some stuff with the way you want to play. You just have to keep taking it one game at a time. All right, bear with me for just a second because Jackson’s gone. So, I’m going to pull up my uh the tweet here so I can get these questions um from you guys. All right. I know it’s the playoffs and adjustments that matter, but do you think that Finch not adjusting the base defensive scheme in the first two games is him just not wanting to overreact and having confidence in his players ability to execute? Absolutely. That’s what we talked about earlier. There’s a there’s a a kind of a push and pull that you see in every single like weird matchup that kind of leads to a blink like kind of a staring contest between the coaches. So for instance like let’s say a fast team and a slow team play against each other. Imagine like a lightning fast Golden State Warriors team with like Draymond Green at center in like 2022 and then like imagine a two big group. So, call it, you know, this year’s Minnesota Timberwolves versus the 2022 Warriors or uh another two big team like um like Houston or something like that. With those situations, it’s like who’s going to blink? Like, are is the small team going to be like, “Shit, we can’t outsmart these guys. Let’s go big.” Or is the big team going to go like, “Shit, we’re too slow for these guys. Let’s go small.” Like, and it’s like, who’s going to be the first team that blinks? And I think there’s a certain amount of like I think Chris Finch wanted to go out there with his base scheme and just be like let’s see if the Thunder can beat the Timberwolves. The problem is is like they beat you pretty good in game one and they cut you to pieces in that game and it was pretty clear right away in game two that they could score whenever they wanted to again. So they’re like there was no real point in game two where Minnesota took substantial control. And so they did, for the record, to Finch’s credit, like they did, the game was just already out of reach. They did start doing this like kind of meet and shay further back and pack in the paint thing on like some of the final possessions in the fourth quarter of game two. It just was one of those things where like maybe if you do it earlier, the series is 2-1 now instead of one two. But again, it’s it it is what it is. I’m more I’m generally of the opinion that in the postseason you cannot waste time. Ask the Knicks who just blew game one. Ask the Lakers who got punched in the face by the Wolves in game one. You know, there’s so many different examples like this um in all these different series. Like you cannot afford to spot teams wins in the postseason. So, I’m generally of the belief that you should attack right away with the method that gives you the best chance to win that series and make adjustments quicker rather than slower. We were talking about this with Jackson yesterday just in g or with I think it was Jake Isenberg uh yesterday like be quick to don’t be stubborn. Be quick to make the appropriate adjustment to give you the best chance to win a uh a playoff series. All right, let’s look at some other questions here. Hey Jason, question here. Something I noticed in these playoffs is the increased significance of elite team conditioning Allah the relentless Pacers and OKC defense. I know you mentioned attention to detail in the last video and I think there’s a correlation there. What are your thoughts? Um I think we’ve seen this with the Knicks too just in general with the way that they push their guys minutes. Um the Pacers dominated the second half of the season. The Knicks underachieved this year, but they played all their guys big minutes and like the those dudes were asked to do a ton. The Thunder attacked the regular season relentlessly. Timberwolves a little bit uh uh up and down over the course of the year, but to down the stretch of the season, they were playing great basketball. In general, the best way to per like you know that old expression uh the best indicator of future performance is uh is past performance. Similarly, like your best chance to play your best basketball when you need to is to practice playing your best basketball. Like as a Laker fan, for instance, I didn’t think the Laker defense was anywhere near as good as it was before LeBron hurt his groin. When LeBron hurt his groin, he was out for a while. The defense fell off a cliff. When LeBron came back, there was never really a point from that point to the end of the season where they looked like the same defense that they were before the injury. So yeah, I’m not surprised that they went into the Minnesota series and they were playing some shitty defense. I think there’s a certain amount of like in general preparing for playoff basketball. As it pertains specifically to uh to Oklahoma City and Indiana, these are two teams that play a very hectic style with fullcourt ball pressure and a ton of rotation speed and flying up and down the floor in transition on offense. These are teams that need to be deep and need to be in great shape. It’s just something that’s necessary for their specific play style. Alrighty. Is Pascal the underrated X X factor in the Eastern Conference Finals that I think he is. The Knicks don’t seem to have an answer for him. Uh going back to what we had last year in the postseason, if you guys remember when uh OG got hurt, Pascal caught Josh Hart for a lot of like his primary assignment stuff and he was just cooking his ass all over the place. But like in general, um, Seakum is the missing piece to the Indiana Pacer offense from what it already was before the trade last year, which was they have one of the best pick and roll players in the league. A guy that is going to consistently set teams up with their team up with an advantage and they could play advantage basketball with the best of them. But what a guy like Seakum gives you is the ability to create his own advantage one-on-one. And you know, it’s going to be different levels of value in different games based on the way the flow is. Ideally, I’m sure the Pacers would like to never have to use Pascal as an ISO player and have him attacking with an advantage consistently. And by the way, he does that. He had a couple of big catch and shoot threes. But like the it’s like a break glass in case of we got stopped by the defense. Just give the ball to Pascal, he can go get a bucket. And with that being the case, he becomes vitally important within that specific Pacers construct. All right, let’s see here. This game in particular by the Wolves involved them simply playing with a level of intensity and force that OKC expected from them but was unable to match. Finch finally made the defensive adjustments on Shay as well. What is sustainable for the uh going into game four for the Wolves? talked a little bit about this early uh earlier, but like again, I think the Thunder will absolutely bring a better defensive effort right away. Like you’re probably not going to score 72 points in the first half, right? And they certainly will take better care of the basketball. I can’t remember exactly what the numbers were because they’ve been adopt adopted to the full game. I guess I can give you the full game numbers real quick. Um they gave up 16 points off of turnovers in this game, but I think 13 or 15 of them, like most of those came in the first half. And by the way, Oklahoma City cleaned that up literally in the second half of this game. So I think they will take care better care of the ball. So what are the And also I think Ant and Julius hitting really tough pull-up jump shots, there’s a certain amount of variance in that. So there’s a there’s a version of game four where those guys just don’t hit the same shots. So what is it going to be that Minnesota can certainly bring into the next game? The right game plan. So again, just sagging off of Shay, packing the paint, ball pressuring the other guys when they have the ball. And then on offense, Julius and Ant making the corner kicks whenever they can and then playing advantage basketball out of that whenever they have an opportunity to that the they’ve found a formula now that has shown the ability to work. Uh T-Wolves fan, but do you think fatigue played a factor? If so, it’s going to be a long series. No. That everybody in an Oklahoma City uh jersey is uh who plays in their rotation is 26 or younger except for Alex Cruso. So, uh, any of you guys who still play basketball at my age in your mid-30s will be able to tell you how it feel feels a lot different when you’re 25, 24, when you’ve got to play every other night. Uh, I still remember playing legitimately like 4 hours of pickup basketball a night uh when I was that age, you know? So, like I it’s just a different it’s just a different physical ask for an Oklahoma City team. That said, there is like just part of human nature in terms of the natural kind of pullback of intensity that is going to take place naturally as part of uh of urgency. Like this same Thunder team kind of got smacked by Memphis and would have lost game three if John Morant didn’t get hurt. And so like there is a certain natural tendency to see that kind of pullback in these sorts of situations. How much defensively would the Wolves actually lose if they replaced Rudy with a mid-level guy who can actually shoot? I generally am of the belief, and I thought Rudy was better tonight, just was more active on the defensive glass and had a couple of sequences where he had better success against Shay than he did in earlier parts of the series. But the thing with Rudy is his value as a rim protector is actually less in a scheme where you’ve got so many quality perimeter defenders relative to what his value looked like in Utah for example where you know he was cleaning up messes constantly because there were, you know, Donovan Mitchell couldn’t guard, Joe Engles couldn’t guard, you know, Mike Connley couldn’t guard, you know, Jordan Clarkson couldn’t guard. They just had a bunch of dudes who couldn’t slide their feet. It was like Royce O’Neal was the only guy who could like really guard, you know, for that team. And so, you know, there in this particular type of scheme, like I think there’s a reason why Minnesota has consistently all year looked fantastic when it’s Nas Reed and Dante Devenzo. It’s because it’s just a bunch of elite perimeter defenders and the ability to space the floor with Nas’s shooting ability. All right. What suggestion do you have for changing the Knicks starting and closing lineups? What do you think of changing out Hart for Deuce in the starting lineup just to keep up with the Pacers during that time, then win the minutes with Mitch? Closing with Mitch, OG, Deuce, male, and Brunson. So, this is the thing. Mitchell Robinson to me is very much a a player that relies on exerting energy. And by the way, if you pull up his numbers from last night in the second half, he had I think one offensive rebound. I think he had one block. Um, and I think he was minus seven in his minutes. He was dominant in his first half stretch. The thing with Mitch is I think you want to keep his minutes in that like 18 to 22 range because that’s where he is most effective with his motor. You want him playing, you know, basically two shifts a game, right? You know, bridging the first and second quarters and bridging the third and fourth quarters. Like that’s what you want. And again, there’s a conversation to be had about the big picture in terms of whether or not you should try to find a player that can kind of approximate what Mitch is Mitch does but is capable of playing 30 35 minutes a night. But with this within this uh scale of this within the scope of this particular postseason series, you know, Mitch played what 29 minutes I think in game uh in game two like and in those final minutes, you know, in his 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th minute, that was when he was like leaving Seakum and leaving Turner open and making a couple of of sketchy decisions defensively and like helping recover situations. So, like I think if you’re going to try to close with Mitch, which by the way opens up some other uh problems in terms of spacing, but if you close with Mitch, you want to make sure that he’s closing within the scope of a minute load that he can handle. And so, it’s one thing to say, let’s put Deuce in the starting lineup. I think Deuce can handle heavy minutes. And the reality is is Josh Hart is just not doing enough damage offensively out there in his minutes. But with Mitch in particular, I don’t think you want to be necessarily closing with him unless you can keep his minutes down. And so you you might just have to get kind of creative with the rotation in order to make that happen. All right, let me double check really quick to make sure I didn’t miss any. Um, are there any defensive adjustments you think the Knicks can make versus Indie, or are they just going to have to try to beat them in shootouts? I’m going to be honest with you guys, like if you watch the film from the first two games of this series, Cat is like utterly lost on the defensive end of the four. He looks like he has no idea what he wants to do. is like I saw some clips uh uh some defensive clips from game two where like he threw some of the worst high drop kind of hedge blitz, whatever you want to call him type of looks I’ve ever seen where he’s coming out way too high and then in rotation he’s just kind of running around like a chicken with his head cut off and then like the ball will go in the basket or a cutter will catch it open. kind of just looks around like like what do you guys want me to do? And it and it just he just looks lost out there. And so I you know if if you asked me what was the best possible game plan to try to proceed with moving forward to me it would be with Cat, it would just be switching everything to prevent the obvious drop coverage looks that you can get and then just communicate like crazy behind Cat to make sure that he doesn’t get lost. But it’s when he’s in these two on the ball situations and he has to rotate that he’s getting lost. And so I would just, you know, try as hard as you can to turn Indiana into an ISO team. And the best way to do that is by switching. But there are some realities to the fact that, you know, I saw someone say, uh, I saw a Celtics fan say or a Pacers fan say on Twitter like this is going to be very different than keeping Tatum in front. And I was like, when I read that, I was like, I was trying to tell you guys this like it’s a very different series. Like it’s the Celtics succumb to switching. They allow switching to stagnate them because they want to play one-on-one. And yeah, Tatum and Brown are two guys that will absolutely settle if you slide your feet reasonably well. The Pacers do not succumb to switching until the end of the clock or for a very deep post up. They are a team that plays with so much pace and verve in the half court they’ll make you execute 15 to 20 switches before the end of the possession in inevitably you’re going to one of them up and when you do now they don’t have to play ISO ball they can play drive and kick out of that and so again like it’s it’s just it’s a really tough matchup with Cat out there and you can’t just like bench cat you don’t have the depth for that and so like you know honestly like all that you all you can hope for is that they just play better that they do a better job within their scheme. By the way, like I I think the Knicks have a decent chance to win tomorrow night. Like I I’m I’m not going to sit here and be surprised if if the Knicks win tomorrow night. Now, like I feel almost certain that Indiana’s going to get one of those two games, which means they’re going to be up 3-1, which means they’re going to probably go to the finals. But like there’s this series isn’t over. You just got to take it one game at a time. But it just the construct of this team depends too much on Jaylen Brunson and and uh Carl Anthony Towns to be attentive and focused and to give the requisite intensity in their rotations. And the two of them are just not good at that. And so it it just it just to me looks like a a matchup that’s going to be tough for them to overcome. All right guys, that’s all we have for right now. We’re going to head over to playback. Again, that’s playback.tv/hoops tonight. We’ll hang out there for about 45 minutes or so. We’d be taking callers and watching some film. Again, as always, I sincerely appreciate you guys for supporting me and supporting the show. We will see you guys next time.

Jason reacts live to Minnesota Timberwolves blowout win vs the OKC Thunder. Jason applauds Anthony Edwards and Julius Randle for their ability to bother OKC’s defensive scheme, and previews what each team must do to win Game 4.

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