LaMelo Ball sure looks like the difference: Timberwolves and Hornets trending in opposite directions after trade
· Yahoo Sports
We will stipulate that, when it comes to success and struggle in the NBA, the answer is never just one thing. There's plenty that goes into teams' fortunes rising and falling, and all sorts of stuff can factor into the difference between living in the penthouse and taking up residence in the outhouse.
With that caveat in place: While the Minnesota Timberwolves were doing this in Minneapolis on Thursday, en route to dismantling the Dallas Mavericks, 133-94 …
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… and the Charlotte Hornets were doing this in Phoenix on the same night, en route to a desultory 101-96 defeat …
… it was hard not to note the Just One Thing that seems to be contributing to the difference between Minnesota and Charlotte. Or, rather, the Guy Wearing No. 1.
After walloping a pretty good Mavs team, the Wolves are 9-3, in third place in the Western Conference, with the NBA's best net rating. They've won five in a row, and six out of eight since losing superstar No. 1 option Anthony Edwards to knee surgery. They've outscored their opponents by a total of 161 points this season; according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes, that's the largest point differential through 12 games in Wolves franchise history — by 50 points.
After falling in Phoenix, mustering just 96 points against the league's fourth-worst defense, the Hornets are now 4-8, tied for 10th in the East, with the NBA's No. 26 net rating. They've lost seven of eight, have logged more turnovers than assists four times in 12 games, and have already failed to crack 100 points six times — as many times as Charlotte finished south of the century mark all of last season.
Again: It's not just that LaMelo Ball used to play for the Hornets, and now he plays for the Wolves. The operating theory for how Charlotte would generate offense in the absence of its one-time linchpin rested largely on continued growth and elevated production from Brandon Miller, Kon Knueppel and the re-signed Coby White, with a dash of second-unit contribution from veteran Dennis Schröder. The Hornets have gotten a grand total of 97 minutes thus far from White, who's on a minutes restriction as he works his way back from a left calf strain, and Knueppel, who'll miss the next several weeks with a balky left hamstring. Schröder's also on the shelf with a hamstring strain; Miller, the team's leading scorer, has missed the last two games with a groin injury.
Any team would struggle to score without the bulk of its perimeter firepower, ball-handling and shot creation. It has to be painful, though, to be mired in such a horrific offensive morass mere months after consciously choosing to bid farewell to Ball, the player whom both the eye test and the advanced numbers suggested served as the rising tide that lifted Charlotte's offense last season.
And it must be particularly galling to be suffering through the doldrums while watching LaMelo have exactly the same kind of effusive, elevating effect in the Twin Cities.
Ball had nine of the Wolves' 33 assists in the blowout win over the Mavericks on Thursday — Minnesota's fourth 30-assist game of the season, more than anybody but the Hawks, Warriors, Nuggets and Spurs. Those helpers led to 19 Minnesota points, in addition to the 22 that Ball scored himself; for the season, he's directly creating 56.9 points of offense per 100 possessions for the Wolves, according to Databallr, which is 20th in the NBA — and nearly five points-per-100 more than White, who leads this season's Hornets.
The Wolves generate a higher share of their shots at the rim when LaMelo's on the floor than when he's off it. Their 3-point shooting goes through the roof in his minutes, and nearly every member of the team sees a bump in shot quality when playing alongside him.
The Wolves are more efficient in the half-court when Ball's at the controls, and they get out in transition way more often with him out there. Minnesota's team-wide effective field-goal percentage spikes by 6.5% with LaMelo on the floor — the largest on/off split on the team, and one of the largest among all NBA players to log at least 200 minutes this season, according to Cleaning the Glass.
The numbers tell a compelling story. So, too, does the joy that seems to leap off the screen from so many of the Wolves as they run with LaMelo — orbiting, emulating and ultimately benefiting from the irrepressible style and flow with which he plays.
"I think when you have a guy like Melo, he makes it fun for everybody," Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch said after Thursday's win, according to Sarah Todd of the Minnesota Star Tribune. "And the guys can trust in the next pass, next play."
That trust is tougher to come by these days in Charlotte, where the Hornets enter Friday's action ranked dead last in the NBA in points scored per possession, field-goal percentage, free-throw attempts, assists and turnovers, struggling to consistently string together quality possessions, even against lesser defensive outfits.
"How do we stop the bleeding?" White told reporters after a recent loss to the Detroit Pistons. "There's gonna be turnovers. There's gonna be miscommunications on both sides of the ball. How do we not let it continue to derail us from what we're trying to do?"
The loss of a superstar of Edwards' magnitude would've derailed plenty of teams. The Wolves, though, have continued to thrive, buoyed in part by the NBA's No. 1 defense — a unit on which Ball has somewhat surprisingly emerged as a physical and positive contributor at the point of attack. All told, Minnesota has outscored opponents by a whopping 15.5 points per 100 possessions when Ball has played without Edwards — a loftier net rating than even their regular-season leading mark, and more than good enough to stay afloat in the brutally competitive West while Ant continues to rehab his ailing knee.
There are plenty of other factors at play. The Hornets have underperformed their expected shot quality by more than any other team in the NBA thus far, according to Synergy Sports Technology's tracking; the combination of some regression to the mean and the hopefully healthy return of some key pieces should help bolster their offense. And there's plenty of credit to go around in Minnesota, from Rudy Gobert's perpetually stalwart work on the back line to Finch getting career-best play from the likes of Jonathan Kuminga, Ayo Dosunmu and Bones Hyland to a collective closing kick that has the Wolves ranked second in the NBA in fourth-quarter net rating.
"We've definitely [elevated] our play in the fourth quarters on both sides of the ball," Finch said. "Getting key stops, rebounding really well, executing, finding really good shots. And LaMelo's been at the heart of a lot of that on offense."
LaMelo's presence has been at the heart of a lot of what's gone well for the Wolves, and his absence, it seems, has been at the heart of a lot of what's haunting the Hornets. It's never just one thing. Sometimes, though, one thing can make one hell of a big difference.