Rocket Cracker:Will Aaron Gordon Turn Into Kobe Bryant Again In Game 5

A reporter asks Rudy Gobert about Aaron Gordon‘s remarkable performance after the Denver Nuggets lost 115-107 in Game 4. “If [Aaron] Gordon turns into Kobe Bryant for stretches, we got to be living with that.” Gobert continues, “Those shots were contested, highly-contested some of them. This is part of the game.

Gordon scored 27 points on 11 of 12 shooting in Denver’s effort to even the series at 2-2. As Gobert alluded to, the Timberwolves heavily contested some of those shots. However, some of them resulted from Minnesota’s game plan. The Wolves gambled that the likelihood of Gordon shooting well is less than the odds that Jamal Murray or Nikola Jokic would pick them apart.

Gordon is a career 32.3% three-point shooter but shot a less-than-stellar 29.0% in the 2023-24 regular season on just 1.9 attempts per game. To stress the abnormality of Gordon going full Kobe Bryant mode, he was only 1 of 10 from distance in Denver’s five-game Round 1 series win over the Los Angeles Lakers.

That leads to Minnesota’s current predicament. In Games 2 and 3, Gordon has shot 6 of 9 (66.7%) combined from three. That’s over double his regular season average in attempts per game and percentage of makes. The Wolves’ strategy heading into the series and Game 4 was to allow a combination of Naz Reid and Karl-Anthony Towns to guard Denver’s three-time MVP, Jokic, allowing Minnesota’s four-time DPOY Gobert to sag off Gordon and help on Jokic or a player driving into the paint.