NBA: The Warriors are the Best in the West, and Andrew Wiggins is finally happy.
Dubs lose to Denver, but things are looking good.
The Warriors (27-7) may have just lost a heartbreaker to the Nuggets (17-6) at home in Chase Center last night, but the game was still a reminder of just how good this team can be. Golden State still has the best record in the league, and last night they outscored Denver 50-29 in the second half.
Steph was -13 in the first quarter and -17 in the first half before going off after the break. He was +12 in his minutes in the third, and played all of the fourth quarter in which the Warriors outscored the Nuggets by 10 points. But it wasn’t just Steph, although he did a lot of the work even though he started the game 0 for 7 from deep.
Everyone who played at the end of the game killed it—Kevon Looney (who deserves his own article), Gary Payton II (of course), Juan Toscano-Anderson (shoutout hyphenation nation), Andrew Wiggins (read on), Otto Porter Jr. (Mr. Ottomatic), Nemanja Bjelica (it’s neh-men-ya), Andre Iguodala (greatest arms in the league), and Jonathan Kuminga (best Warriors draft pick in the last five years?). And really, had JTA and Kuminga been able to make just a few more of their free throws (they went 4-16 combined) they just might have pulled it off.
And they did it all without their co-captain, Draymond Green, who should be an All-Star and the Defensive Player of the Year. I promise I’ll give a whole article to it later.
But this piece is about Andrew Wiggins, who I noted in November is playing the most efficient and fun basketball of his life.
In the six seasons that Wiggins played with the Minnesota Timberwolves, the franchise had one winning season, one playoff appearance, and four different head coaches. After being drafted first overall in 2014 by the Cavaliers, Wiggins was sent to the Timberwolves so that Cleveland could have Kevin Love join LeBron James and Kyrie Irving.
More than fellow 2014 draftee Zach LaVine, Wiggins was asked to do a lot for Minnesota right out of the gate. At 19 years old he played all 82 games and led the team in minutes, field goals, points, and steals, in addition to finishing in the top five for most other statistical categories. Only three other guys on that team started in 40 or more games, and none of them aside from Wiggins made more than 50 starts.
Though they did add another number one pick the next year with big man Karl-Anthony Towns, the Timberwolves compiled a 76-170 record over the first three seasons Wiggins played with the team.
But in 2017 the Timberwolves front office decided to make a move, trading LaVine along with Kris Dunn and Lauri Markkanen in order to get All-Star small forward Jimmy Butler from the rebuilding Bulls.
Under head coach Tom Thibodeau, the new-look Wolves finished with a 47-35 record, their best finish in over a decade, and they made the playoffs for the first time since Kevin Garnett’s MVP campaign in 2004. That year was also the last time they reached the 50-win mark, and is the only time the team has ever won more than 65% of their games.
But the Butler experiment didn’t work out, despite his pre-existing relationship with Thibodeau from their time together in Chicago. Butler is a notoriously hard worker, and he doesn’t tolerate guys who aren’t willing to put in the same effort he does. After a practice with the Wolves where he joined the third-string players for a scrimmage against the starters, torched them on both ends and called out both Towns and Wiggins, Butler sat down for an interview with former ESPN reporter Rachel Nichols to talk about the dynamic:
“I'm not the most talented player. Who's the most talented player on our team? KAT. Who's the most god-gifted player on our team? Wigs. Wigs got the longest arms, the biggest hands, can jump the highest, can run the fastest. But like who plays the hardest? Me.”
As Nichols pointed out, after the 2018 playoffs where the Wolves were eliminated by the Houston Rockets in the first round, Butler didn’t fly home with the rest of the team, presumably due to his frustration with their performance in the five-game series. And, ten games into the next season, Butler was traded to the 76ers, ending his time in Minnesota after just 69 games.
The Butler era was highly characteristic of the Timberwolves experience that Wiggins was a part of—aside from the success. In fact, part of what had frustrated Butler beyond the energy on the floor was the five-year max extension Wiggins had signed in the fall of 2017, which hampered Minnesota’s ability to offer Butler his own extension despite the fact that he was doing a whole lot more for the team.
The year Butler left saw Thibodeau depart after a 19-21 start, only to be replaced by rookie head coach Ryan Saunders, who oversaw a 17-25 finish to the back half of the season.
That season also saw Wiggins post his worst career PER, shooting percentage, box plus/minus, and value over replacement player. With his extension kicking in, the Wolves were on the hook for a whole lot of money for a guy who looked tired and unenthusiastic, and now had guaranteed money coming his way for the foreseeable future.
As you can see here from KOC, Wiggins is on the same contract scale that Joel Embiid is. As in 2021 MVP finalist Joel Embiid. Four time All-Star Joel Embiid. That means it was going to be pretty hard to find a team that wanted to take on that money when Wiggins was getting paid like an All-NBA talent.
Luckily for Minnesota (and nobody else), Warriors All-Star Klay Thompson tore his ACL in the 2019 Finals and missed the entirety of the next season. Additionally, superstar Kevin Durant left Golden State that summer, and the Warriors got D’Angelo Russell in the sign-and-trade for KD with the Nets (right now, we might actually say this worked out for everyone involved).
Russell was supposed to be able to help the Dubs stay competitive while they were waiting for Klay to come back from his injury. But then, in the fourth game of the season against Phoenix, Steph broke his left hand and ended up missing all but one of the subsequent 61 games that the Warriors played that year.
As a result, Golden State got an unexpected year to experiment with their younger pieces. Glenn Robinson III started a team-high 48, and Eric Paschall led the Warriors with appearances in 60 of 65 games that season. They finished the season with a 15-50 record, which ended up landing them the number two pick in the draft, James Wiseman.
Sadly, the D-Lo experiment didn’t go too well. For starters, he missed 19 of their first 52 games. Even though he had some fun highlights, he wasn’t the asset they hoped he could be. With Russell on the floor, Golden State got outscored by 10.6 points per hundred possessions. When he wasn’t playing, their offensive production dipped by 0.8 points (per 100 possessions), but their defense improved by 3.5 points. So, in February of 2020 the Warriors decided to end the experiment.
Finally, there was a team with the incentive and the money to take a chance on Wiggins. But not everyone thought it was such a great idea.
At first it seemed like the Timberwolves had finally gotten a win, at least for the front office, offloading a whole lot of salary and uniting Russell and Towns, who were already friends and had expressed a mutual desire to play together. On The Jump, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst described it as “a huge win for the Wolves,” partially because they were able to keep the pick that would eventually turn into Anthony Edwards. Of course, Minnesota went 4-10 to close the season after the trade, and the Warriors went 3-10 in that same stretch so we couldn’t really tell what the impact of the trade was going to be.
Now we know.
Golden State won, and so did Andrew Wiggins.
The 2014 top pick, who stands 6’ 7” with a seven foot wingspan, has always been an incredible athlete. That’s part of why Jimmy Butler was so pissed at him in Minnesota—he knew what he could be, but he never saw the energy and commitment from Wiggins that could unlock his potential.
It turned out that he never found it in his time with the Timberwolves. But the Minnesota front office ‘giving up’ on him was also a gift. It’s not every day that you get to be paired up with Steph Curry. But it’s also not every day that you get to leave a bad situation and come to a better one.
Wiggins got to leave a Wolves team that lacked an identity, where frustration had built up over years and lurked over everything they did. And he got to come to a team that already had veteran leadership, where he was going to be expected to be the number three option instead of the first or second.
Last year, in his first full season with the Warriors, Wiggins set personal bests in basically every efficiency category, and had his first season as a plus defender in his career. He matched his second lowest usage rate, and hit a career best 42% of his midrange attempts and 38% of his threes.
It really seemed like he could be a very nice complement to Steph, Klay, and Draymond.
But what some of us (okay, me) forgot was that Wiggins is just just 26 years old. It turns out he’s still getting better, and he plays an invaluable role on this team.
Before missing the last four games, Wiggins was on a six game streak where he averaged 20.3 points, 4.7 rebounds, and 2.5 assists while shooting a ridiculous 54% from deep. And not just like he went 2-4 or something. Wiggins attempted five or more threes five times, and went 21-39 across the six games. He opened the streak with 28 points against Orlando, and had 27 against Boston in the game before he went out.
On the season, Wiggins is averaging 18.8 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.8 assists, and shooting 49% overall and 42.5% from deep—both improvements on last year’s career bests. He’s also taking fewer shots than any year aside from his rookie campaign, but he’s still making more threes than ever and is shooting just below last year’s career-best 53% on twos. Thanks to some majorly increased aggression driving to the basket, he’s making a career best 71.4% of his shots within three feet of the basket and 47.6% of his tries between three and ten feet. He’s taking a career low attempts from midrange, and he’s turned them into the most threes he’s ever taken as a share of all his shots.
He also did this:
The Minnesota game was characteristic of the energy and enthusiasm that Wiggins has played with since coming to the Warriors, and especially this year. He’s probably always been able to make dunks like that, but he has to want to.
That’s what Butler knew when he asked to be traded out of Minnesota. He knew that Wiggins was a fantastic athlete, and that Towns could be an incredible scorer. But he felt after one season that they didn’t have the right motivation to do it, to play the game the way they needed to in order to be great.
And maybe it’s okay that Wiggins might settle in to a role as a number three option. And it might also be okay that he needed a change of scenery in order to find somewhere he could have fun playing the game again. And that might have been helped by joining a team with an identity, and one where he could have a shot at some real success for the first time in his career. Will he think it’s worth taking a pay cut when his current contract expires? Or will he continue to grow into the talent he has the potential to be? I don’t know, but I think a lot of people would consider getting to play for this team more than worth the pay cut. And if he earns the chance to stick around for the long term, the 26-year-old could be the perfect bridge between the old and the new in Golden State.
So far, it seems like Warriors were exactly what Wiggins needed.
Golden State visits the Nuggets on Thursday night for a rematch.
Wiggins had 21 points, 8 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 steals, and 1 block on Tuesday night while shooting 50% from downtown and 40% overall. He made the last Warriors basket of the game to cut it to 88-86 before Jokić blocked a Kuminga layup in the final seconds to seal the game.
For Denver, it was Jokić, who is averaging 25.8 points, 14.0 rebounds, and 7.1 assists, making a career-best 72% of his shots at the rim, and is leading the league with a PER of 32.3, better than his MVP campaign last year. He had 22 points, 18 rebounds, 5 assists, and 4 steals against the Warriors on Tuesday. The Nuggets are 17-16, 5th in the West without star point guard Jamal Murray and forward Michael Porter Jr., and new addition Aaron Gordon out with a hamstring injury.