Rudy Gobert Found A New Guy To Annoy

It's fun to speculate about bad team chemistry. Sometimes the sideline body language is revealing enough. Sometimes you get an uncharacteristically detailed and cogent Shams Charania report, like the one the Sixers suffered last week. Sometimes you can figure it out in the circuitous sentences of beat reporters, who are too polite or compromised to say it outright. And sometimes it can be deduced from the mere presence of Rudy Gobert, a man so unpopular among his colleagues that ESPN tried to learn why at feature length. Even as the team around him has changed, Gobert is still Gobert, with charisma about as strong as his low-post repertoire.

This offseason's trade between the Knicks and Timberwolves was, in some ways, trading like for like. One offensively gifted, sporadically infuriating big man was swapped for another, Julius Randle to Minnesota and Karl-Anthony Towns to New York. All things considered, the Towns-Gobert pairing was a pretty successful experiment, schematically and interpersonally. But Randle is a bit more dour than the man he was replacing. Gobert-Randle had tremendous grump-on-grump potential, and we're starting to see it, eight wins and seven losses into a Wolves campaign against a very soft slate of opponents.

The Wolves were tied 95-95 with the Raptors with five minutes to go on Thursday night. Following an offensive rebound, Randle prepared to isolate against the slow-footed Jakob Poeltl. Gobert, meanwhile, had sealed his much smaller defender, Scottie Barnes, and was calling for the rock. Randle absolutely should have made the entry pass; perhaps he was struck by a premonition of the rock hands and utter baglessness of his colleague, but come on, all Gobert had to do was turn and dunk there. In any case Randle waved him off and Gobert sulked out of the lane so slowly he was called for a three-second violation. Teammate Anthony Edwards, who is younger than everyone but spiritually in charge, went off on the big man afterward. A pissy Gobert did not help his cause by immediately hip-checking Barnes and getting called for a foul.

The Raptors went on a run from there and won, 110-105. Somewhere in there, Randle hit Gobert with a nice dump-off for a dunk. But in the meaningless last seconds of regulation, Randle flung him a spiteful, thigh-level pass and slumped off the court. Seems great.

The situation bears monitoring. So far nobody's thrown a punch during a huddle, so they're still better off than they were in 2023.