JJ Redick has high praise after his conversation with Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch on the former NBA sharpshooter’s The Old Man & the Three podcast.
Redick labeled a quick teaser of the full conversation as “One of the most profound conversations we’ve had about modern coaching,” and the 2-minute, 2-second clip gives a preview of the full podcast ahead of its release on Thursday.
“First of all you got to nail the high notes, to be an efficient offense you still have to get to the right shots,” Finch said about creating a gameplan for the Wolves. “Now, the distribution of the shots are different … I believe, right now, as we head into this next year, which is hopefully a complete season with KAT and Rudy, we need more structure, just because the structure is going to provide us the right spacing for the two bigs to stay out of each other’s way. I think that at times they got into each other’s way. Offensively we weren’t great. We were pretty medium last year as a result of not taking enough threes, probably. We were a pretty low volume 3-point shooting team, so we got to get some guys to take a few more threes.”
During the 2022-23 season the Wolves ranked 15th in 3-pointers taken per game (33.3) and 14th in 3-point accuracy (36.5%). The Warriors averaged the most 3-point shots in the NBA last season with 43.2 per game while the 76ers led the league in accuracy at 38.7%.
“You know, out of those pick-and-roll situations we were not creating enough of the right shots perhaps,” Finch explained in the teaser video. “So, lots of little things we can do but I think structure will help us do that. As long as we’re trying to get to the right shots I think that’s the biggest thing. The rest of it is you have to coach it into existence. I say all the time, these analytics, they’re guides, they’re not Gods. We’re not doing this stuff just because the numbers say it, we have to figure out what’s best for our team and if we’re within certain paradigm we’re going to be okay. Maybe we take a few more mid-range shots than some other teams than I had, ideally, but we have to augment that with getting to the line more, or living on the offensive glass. Last year we weren’t very good on the offensive glass and there is no reason we shouldn’t have been. We should have been better on the offensive glass but we decided to punt offensive rebounding to be good in transition, and with the two bigs on the floor we weren’t, so we didn’t benefit from either.”
“That’s where I feel confident going into this season coming up because I think we learned a lot from personnel grouping last year, even though sample size was chopped up. It gives us a good starting place,” Finch added.
You can watch part of the conversation in the video below. The full podcast comes out Thursday.
