Thursday night in Dallas looked like one in which the Minnesota Timberwolves were going to play all the hits.
Near double-digit favorites on the road against a severely shorthanded Dallas Mavericks team, anyone who’s followed this team close enough over the last two seasons probably could have predicted how things were going to go.
With so many players out that Mavs PR needed two tweets in a thread to make sure everyone was accounted for, the Wolves came out of the gate with their typical lackadaisical energy, familiar to fans when they play teams they have no excuse to lose to.
Whether it was poor ball containment, bad closeouts on shots, or poor rebounding by the frontcourt, it was clear that once again, the Wolves were short on sources of energy.
But with 2:44 left in the first quarter, in came Joan Beringer.
A big man that plays basketball like the athletic guy who plays another sport in high school, the Wolves first round pick immediately came in and provided a shot in the arm that seemed to wake up others around him.
Down two points when Beringer entered the game, he went to work. Gliding up and down the floor, the seventeenth overall pick immediately pulled in an offensive rebound that resulted in a Mike Conley three, and ended the first quarter with a well-timed alley-oop from Anthony Edwards.
The Wolves would go on to win the game by 13 points.
As for Beringer? Second on the team with a +11.
Perhaps the Wolves would go on to win without him in the lineup purely due to the talent imbalance on the floor alone.
But perhaps not. With several frustrating performances against subpar teams year after year, Chris Finch finds himself in a spot of continuous searching for someone to pull them out of their lulls of disenchantment. With the usual suspects in the starting five not tending to be takers unless a wave of desperation comes upon them late in the game or in the form of a losing streak, a bench of mixed bag performances is sometimes where he’s forced to go.
I think it’s been found.
A Feel on the Floor
Like an attacking midfielder on the pitch, the French rookie’s background in playing soccer gives him a clear understanding of floor positioning.
Even though he hasn’t been playing basketball for very long, his experience proves effective navigation of the dunker area on the offensive end, and good drop coverage and shot blocking instincts on the defensive end.
Many times, rookies come into the league behind the eight ball in the NBA from a positioning standpoint because of how structured the college game is schematically, juxtaposed to a more free-flowing pro game. For a team like the Timberwolves who have always tended to lean towards the latter, Beringer’s feel for the game was something that has caught coach Chris Finch’s eye.
“It’s something I noticed about him right away,” he said after a blowout win against the Golden State Warriors on Monday. “At Summer League, I always thought he kinda knew where to be…his spacing, his timing, and he’s actually been a pretty quick learner [in learning the Wolves’ systems].”
It shows in the advanced numbers.
Out of the 13 people Beringer has shared the floor with, he only has a negative net rating with four of them (Joe Ingles, Leonard Miller, Rob Dillingham, and Terrence Shannon Jr.), making him and an additive to most of the lineup combos he finds himself on the floor with in a small sample size.
“He’s a big energy guy, and he helps tremendously,” Naz Reid said after the win in Dallas. “[He gave us a lift] on the glass, blocking shots, catching lobs, that’s what he does.”
There’s something to be said about a percolating chemistry with Reid and Beringer. More importantly, the lift that the rookie’s presence can have with both Reid and a struggling Mike Conley on the floor together.
Hesitant to be taken off the floor by Chris Finch due to his ability to cover ground of defense and bring a mature offensive approach, Mike Conley has been a source of skepticism among fans for his lackluster play this season and inability to generate the offensive lift that he once did. His decline has been steep, but his presence on the floor next to Reid and Beringer has given a sense of optimism in a small sample size.
With all three on the floor together, the Wolves have an 11 net rating.
A similar tale unfolds with Beringer on the floor with Conley and Reid separately as well.
Simply, Beringer provides the characteristics that Wolves’ bench currently lacks, said perfectly by Reid.
Rebounding, blocking shots, catching lobs, and bringing energy.
To some degree, it’s the Jarred Vanderbilt effect.
On the floor, it’s a shot in the arm.
The Energy Solution
It doesn’t matter who it is, but essentially every player has said it at some point during the season.
This Wolves team, alongside the two that have come before it, tends to come out with an energy level that corresponds to the level of the opponent and the time of year it is.
Some tend to blame this on Chris Finch. I find that misguided.
Finch can only do so much. Confirmed by Anthony Edwards after the game against the Memphis Grizzlies on Saturday, his unhappiness with the effort was unable to throw on a jersey and run up and down the floor with the five people out there.
“Nights like this, it’s super hard to find the, not the why, but the energy to put behind it on every play,” Edwards said. “[Finch] said somethin’ like, ‘I’m not gonna let up on y’all. If we bullshit on games like this, I’m gonna be on y’all ass until y’all stop bullshitting’.”
Whether it be Edwards, Naz Reid, Conley, Julius Randle, Rudy Gobert, or even Jaden McDaniels, everyone has called out the inconsistent energy on both ends of the floor.
The one person who doesn’t care who’s on the other end is Beringer. His ability to flip a switch and make plays that others don’t want to make, and at key points of what seem to be inconsequential games, make himself a lever that Finch needs to pull more consistently.
Whether it be his career-high 13 points on the road in Milwaukee with no Rudy Gobert, his immediate injection of life in Dallas, or his near double-double on the road in San Antonio, his youthful ignorance of who’s on the other end and at what point of the season it is inject urgency into the lineup – or make it an embarrassing discrepancy of effort for all to see.
Whether it be for film sessions or fan viewing, it needs to be an audit we see more often.
