The Timberwolves defense evokes an old, familiar championship feeling

You suspect Michael Malone isn’t surprised by what he sees.

The Denver Nuggets coach learned firsthand about championship-level defense from his late father, Brendan, a lifer in the game and a longtime assistant coach for the Detroit Pistons. He was part of Chuck Daly’s staff for the 1989 and 1990 championships. Most relevantly, Brendan Malone was the defensive mind behind “The Jordan Rules,” the Pistons’ blueprint for preventing Michael Jordan from making the play- dominates off matches, as Nikola Jokić from Denver is doing now.

The rules were actually quite simple.

Detroit’s Hall of Fame guard Joe Dumars, one of the best ball defenders of the era, would do anything to prevent Jordan from reaching his favorite spots on the floor. contest when Jordan stood up for a jumper. If and when Jordan beat Dumars or other Detroit defenders off the dribble, they would funnel Jordan into the paint, where a host of leggy and graceful Pistons defenders waited: Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, John Salley, Dennis Rodman, James Edwards . They would gather in the Jordan like a pack of jackals, forcing him to shoot across their length. If Jordan tried to get up, one or more of them would send him crashing to the ground.

Over the course of a six or seven game series, the overt physicality would wear Jordan down. If Jordan didn’t get offensive help from elsewhere, the frustration between him and his Bulls teammates would only increase. It took Chicago years of meaningless playoffs before finally beating Detroit in 1991.

Accordingly, Michael Malone knows well the psychological underpinnings of what the Minnesota Timberwolves did to his defending NBA champion Nuggets in the first two games of their Western Conference semifinals.

Minnesota not only won the important moments in the first two games in Denver to take a 2-0 lead back to Minnesota, where a loud crowd awaits at Target Center on Friday and Sunday evenings. The Wolves also captured the Nuggets’ heart, just as the Pistons — and eventually Jordan’s Bulls — used defense to demoralize and rattle opponents.

“You can’t lose the game And the fight. You’ve got to win one,” Denver’s Reggie Jackson said after Game 2.

There were the long, seemingly limitless arms of Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who pounced on Denver’s Jamal Murray at center half in Game 2 and attacked him with relentless energy and movement – while not insulting him. They forced a 24-second foul early in the second quarter Monday night.

There was Rudy Gobert’s presence in Game 1, before Gobert missed Game 2 to be with his girlfriend for the birth of their first child and before winning his fourth NBA Defensive Player of the Year award. In Game 2, without Gobert, the Wolves didn’t miss a beat, with Karl-Anthony Towns and Naz Reid, neither of whom were known as shutdown defensemen before this season, each putting a physical body on Jokić all game.

For someone who has lamented the NBA’s surgical, years-long campaign to remove all but the most rudimentary defensive elements from the game, culminating in the unwatchable All-Star Games of recent years where the Wolves harassed the Nuggets and dislocating was wonderful. It’s like having a VHS tape in one Panasonic PV-V4522watching NBC’s vaunted Thursday night lineupcirca “A Different World”/”Cheers”/”LA Law,” and wash down dinner with a Bartles and Jaymes cooler.

Mom, I’m home.

you can still play defense in the NBA, if you’re allowed to do so.

The league’s de-emphasis on calling every little bit of contact, as officials did in the first half of the season, hasn’t hurt the postseason game at all. In fact, the playoffs were spectacular, with plenty of offensive wizardry, starting with Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards. But there was also Jalen Brunson, Luka Dončić, Kyrie Irving, Donovan Mitchell, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Tyrese Maxey, Paolo Banchero, Tyrese Haliburton… need I go further?

Minnesota has dominated and won its first six playoff games with its ferocious defense, just as Oklahoma City and Boston have done. Minnesota’s defenders aren’t pushing and pulling or hacking; they move their feet, beat the Nuggets to their favorite spots on the floor and don’t give up those spots easily. The Wolves don’t do anything dirty. They only cause manifest misery for their opponent.

This was Denver’s second possession of Game 2.

“He threw it away,” TNT global player Kevin Harlan said of Jokić. But Jokić didn’t throw it away: Kyle Anderson knocked the ball out of Jokić’s hands with his off hand, just as the Joker started his post-up move.

This Denver possession was already three minutes into the game.

Murray is limited by his calf injury. But he, like all Nuggets, revels in opponents doubling Jokić. That’s Denver’s entirety reason for existence: Jokić’s brilliance with the ball, cutting through the defense with his 360-degree view of what’s happening on the floor. This time, Towns inhaled Murray’s drive as guard Mike Conley swept low for the ball.

David Adelman, Michael Malone’s right-hand man as his top assistant coach, has certainly seen this before.

His father, Hall of Fame coach Rick Adelman, had to try to thwart the Pistons and Bulls with his great Portland Trail Blazers teams, led by Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler, in the 1990 and 1992 NBA Finals, respectively. Portland got both the best of Detroit’s defense and the Bulls’ revered “Dobermans” – the nickname for Chicago’s defense coined by Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach.

The Dobermans initially consisted of Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant. When Grant left for Orlando after Chicago’s first three-peat in free agency, Chicago reached for Rodman — who by then had worn out his welcome in San Antonio. Rodman, in a completely different way than Grant, lifted the Bulls’ defense even higher; Chicago led the league in defensive rating in his first season (1995-96), and the Bulls were ranked in the top five in each of his three seasons there, all of which ended in championships.

Jordan, especially early in his career, was great in his defensive expectations. He was Defensive Player of the Year in 1988, he used his long arms like a scythe and cut the ball away from the opponent’s ballhandlers.

However, Pippen made Chicago impenetrable.

His height, smarts, physicality and ability to jump passing lanes made him one of the best defenders of all time. Chicago used him everywhere and against anyone from Magic Johnson to Charles Barkley.

The Wolves have played like those Pistons and Bulls teams. They have made it difficult for their opponents to do what they want. They haven’t budged an inch. The game is at its best when a simple question is answered: who, with their talent and will, coaching and toughness, can overcome their opponent’s physical obstacles?

Minnesota’s defense is advanced in its planning and executed well in real time. Like other teams in the Jokić era, the Wolves often don’t guard him with their center.

In Game 1, they dropped Gobert in a roaming position behind Denver’s forward — usually Aaron Gordon — and let Gobert wander to protect the front of the rim. That led to Gobert, in what was perhaps the key role in Minnesota’s victory Saturday, being free to tip and steal a Jokić lob to Gordon from the dunker spot with three minutes left and the Wolves were holding a five-point lead. The Wolves got out in transition and Edwards was fouled, making two from the free throw line. What could have been a three-point game instead became a seven-point game.

Minnesota had the top-ranked defense in the league all season. It allowed the fewest points in the league (106.5 points per game) and was No. 1 in opponent effective field goal percentage (51.5), which explains the added value of three-pointers.

Different sites have different ways of determining metrics such as defensive rating. Regardless of the source, the Wolves are at the top of that category.

StatMuse has Minnesota No. 1 in defensive rating at 109.0, more than two full points ahead of second-place Orlando (111.3). According to StatMuse, this is the largest gap in eight years between the top- and second-ranked defenses in that category, since the 2015-16 San Antonio Spurs held a 2.4-point lead over the second-place Atlanta Hawks (101, 4). Minnesota had the best defensive rating this season at 108.4, according to NBA.com calculations, 2.2 points ahead of the Boston Celtics. Basketball-Reference.com has Minnesota at the top in both unadjusted and adjusted (for schedule) defensive rating metrics.

You can’t implement “The Jordan Rules” now; the NBA has legislated most of the physicality that was at the core of them outside of the game. That’s no problem. Everything must evolve. But the ferocious defense, in both mind and body, that was the core of Detroit’s championship teams — and then Chicago’s — still applies. Minnesota is showing it can co-exist with today’s incredible offensive talents.

It’s a fight. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Required reading

(Photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)