The Wolves brilliant strategy against Jokic

What did the Wolves do to stop Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets? This detailed film breakdown & scouting report explores how the Minnesota Timberwolves won Game 1 of the Western Conference Semifinals against the defending champion Denver Nuggets, their defensive tactic to slow down the Jamal Murray-Jokic 2-man game, and how Denver defending the red hot Anthony Edwards.

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the Minnesota Timberwolves took game one of the western semis against the defending Champion nuggets behind a Transcendent 43-point explosion from Anthony Edwards and a brilliant defensive strategy to slow down niic and the Nuggets offense in their last meeting of the regular season the Wolves stuck Rudy goar on Aaron Gordon and had Nas Reed guard jic Carl Anthony towns was injured and didn’t play in this game and the obvious idea here is that one big takes yic well goar roams off Aaron Gordon to help because he’s their weakest shooter we’ve seen teams do this before the Lakers famously tried it by having ruy haimura guard yic last year and before that the 76ers switch PJ Tucker onto him and let Joel embiid roam around protecting the rim and the idea here is to sort of muck up the Nuggets flowing offense by stationing a shop Locker right in front of the basket so in a normal isolation situation goar wants to help on the postup while they keep an eye on Gordon on the Baseline and then recover out to the shooters as quickly as possible in order to never really give Denver a clear advantage on The Possession but Minnesota took this to another level against the Nuggets pick and roll game where he can roam into the paint so jokic’s Defender can stay with him on the roll and sure enough the Wolves went to this right out of the gate with Carl Anthony towns basically ignoring Murray off the screen because he knows goar is goalkeeping right in front of the rim this is the exact same tactic we saw Boston use against embiid last year where the idea is to take away that roll pass and funnel the ball into a shot blocker one subtle component here is that the on ball Defender needs to stay connected around the screen to push the ball handler inside the three-point line forcing him into a mid-ranger or all the way to go bear and they were happy to let pton Watson shoot this instead of yic this time nille Alexander Walker’s hounding Murray around the pick but cat doesn’t trust goar behind him and stays with the ball too long and so Murray can hit that pocket pass and Gordon does his Baseline Highwire act and this is what the Nuggets want to Spring Murray with a strong pick Force jokic’s Defender to pick up the ball and from there we all know the drill so the Brilliance of this tactic is that it takes away jokic’s decisionmaking and forces Murray to attack against the shifted defense and this isn’t easy to break down with goar playing the ball in Gordon Edwards playing Gordon ORD in the corner and Conley’s playing the ball in the wing so if the spacing isn’t pristine you end up with no obvious outlet for the ball handler who gets pushed into the wall of gobear and look at cat on this literally turn his back to the ball to take away yic and make the possession uncomfortable watch how quickly the Wolves rotate here Michael Porter Jr sheds Edwards on the handoff cat stays with yic the low man rotates over Reed sits on the corner pass and Alexander Walker rotates to the wing so the only brief opening is actually directly behind the ball handler and that’s an incredibly hard pass to make Denver does much better with different spacing here by filling the strong side corner with a shooter so when goar slides over to contest there’s only one Defender left to rotate to Gordon Murray can then hit that corner and it’s a great look here’s one with two Shooters on the near side and Gordon space to the far side corner and Rudy’s depth is so key here because he can clog Gordon’s cut while contesting the driving lane and that’s just a nonsensical shot from Jamal Murray who will apparently do that to goar every few years in the playoffs um anyway goar’s positioning and ability to recover in short spaces make this hard to attack jic finally Springs free this time Rudy is there but can also play the lob yeesh and we saw this recoverability when he was roaming off Gordon 2 sliding to jic then breaking up the pass and it wasn’t easy for Denver to find shots at the basket because of this and even on kcps delivery it takes Reed kind of screening off Rudy for joic to get this up goar’s roaming also made entry passes to joic tough Nas fronts him here and Rudy’s long enough to break up the lob over the top and on this one he’s Cross Match with the smaller Edwards Alexander Walker calls it out so Rudy can come down and prevent Joker from even shooting and still recover to take away a highlight pass so by sitting on jokic’s role and having rud lurk around there were fewer Joker Rumblings that led to his patented offensive rebounds because it’s harder for him to back his man under the rim when goar is sitting there and you end up with more fadeaway shots like this the Nuggets grabbed just four offensive boards all night which was their lowest total since New Year’s Day 2023 and I think this goar roaming was a huge reason for that Denver goes to a bread and butter screen for yic here and goar is waiting to just pick up Joker because Gordon isn’t a threat just standing at the elbow then yic wants to dribble Rudy into the basket he’s long enough to contest and Reed coming over actually prevents the offensive rebound and ends the trip note that the roaming doesn’t work when there’s a shooter in the corner Nas ignores kcp here and yic can make that pass to calwell Pope in his sleep Joker was also quick to back down goar in isolation and since the Wolves weren’t helping there were definitely a few easy looks for him out of this matchup and it’ll be interesting to see if Minnesota continues to let them play oneon-one in these spots but otherwise this is just a really cool chess match goar is roaming off Justin holiday here he tells Kyle Anderson to slide up toward him and watch how everyone recovers when joic picks up the dribble goar slides back to the block as nille recovers to the corner and Anderson Falls for jokic’s head fake otherwise this would have been defensive Perfection this time they try to force Mike Conley to switch on to Murray but Jaden McDaniels doesn’t concede the switch then he avoids jokic’s screen to stay connected to Jamal and this thing is just going nowhere and it’s not easy for Jo Jer to pull a rabbit out of his hat from 25 ft away here’s one where the wolves are smaller with Reed at Center guarding yic so they send a double the defense recovers and then on the repost Nas pokes it away and the Nuggets actually forced joic into seven turnovers in this game with Reed forcing a couple himself McDaniels using his gangly spider arms to derail him on a drive and even ant caught him off guard once with his superhuman athleticism taking a basic pass the other way for a bunny of course Edwards was the other story in this game and we’ll get to the offense but he authored some incredible defensive plays in this one including the opening possession where he chased Jamaal Murray around before a 3se second violation and what could be described as the platonic ideal of perimeter defense my goodness that was actually outdone by this play where he’s switched onto jic comes off him to block mpj and that Springs cat in transition for a huge and one dunk and I have no clue how ant jumped backwards and got that kind of elevation oh yeah his athletic gifts were on display on offense just powering Reggie Jackson into a layup here and his eyes lit up in the second quarter when Jackson switched onto him and without a double he discarded him like a piece of lint for a little midi Denver didn’t send much extra attention towards Edwards so his decision- making wasn’t challenged in this game that was a nice pocket pass to set up an open CAD three and late in the game against the same pick and roll coverage he made this beautiful skip pass to the corner that Uncorked Nas for a huge and one so they actually defended ant pretty well without having to send a bunch of extra help it’s just his shot making was too good kyp’s draped all over him and he turns into motan Michael Jordan he had a bunch of these big buckets in the fourth quarter including this insane dance with Gordon that wasn’t suitable for work but my favorite was this one to seal the game where kcp is stuck on his hip he tells cat to empty the corner and the only reason to do this is so there’s space to set up the ABS third fade away and that was all she wrote we will see what kind of answers Denver can provide in game two after Murray struggled with the length of either Edwards or McDaniels jokic couldn’t play his normal game and there were basically no offensive rebounds for the Nuggets because in game one coach Chris Finch’s game plan built around Rudy gobear in that swarming defense held Denver to a 109 offensive rating to take a one- nothing series leak to support this channel check out patreon.com thinking basketball that’s where we have our live playoff stat board that updates throughout the postseason we should also mention Nas Reed just had a huge spurt late in this game alongside ant to propel Minnesota to Victory thanks for watching this one all the way through and of course wherever you’re watching from I hope you’re having a great day