Joan Beringer was the best story of the Wolves’ preseason opener, and he picked up four fouls in 15 minutes while he was at it. That is the whole question for the backup center job in one box score line: 12 points, 7 rebounds, 1 block, 4 fouls, plus-7, in a 116-97 win over the Bucks on Monday night, per ESPN’s box score.
My take: Beringer is the right backup for Rudy Gobert, and the Wolves have no good answer if he can’t stay on the floor. Everything else behind him is thinner than the opener made it look.
What Beringer showed
He shot 5 for 8, and the points came the way his rookie season said they would. Last year, in 40 games at 7.9 minutes a night, he made 66.3 percent of his shots and took every one of them inside the arc, per Basketball Reference. He scored on dunks Monday, according to Last Word On Basketball’s recap, and added seven rebounds, two of them offensive, with a block and some altered shots.
He also rebounds. He averaged 10.5 rebounds per 36 minutes as a rookie, a big number for a 19-year-old who played fewer than 8 minutes a game. When Gobert sits, the Wolves lose their center. Beringer is the one player on the roster who looks like he can give even part of that back.
Beringer was one of the first players off Chris Finch’s bench, per Sports Illustrated. I covered this in the roster guide: Beringer goes from a 7.9-minute rookie to the first center off the bench, with the Reid and Randle minutes gone in the Ball trade.
The problem is the whistle
Four fouls in his first nine minutes, per Last Word On Basketball, and four in 15 total. Scale that to a full game and you get 9.6 fouls per 36 minutes, which no one plays through. It is one game, but it fits last year: he committed 5.4 fouls per 36 minutes as a rookie, and Monday’s pace was about 1.8 times that.
For comparison, Gobert finished with one foul and seven rebounds. The Wolves need the backup to give them real minutes behind Gobert, and a center with four fouls can’t stay on the floor to do that.
Fouls matter more for Beringer than for most backups because Minnesota has so little behind him. Look at the other bigs from Monday:
| Player | Minutes | Points | Rebounds | Fouls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joan Beringer | 15 | 12 | 7 | 4 |
| Trey Lyles | 12 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Rocco Zikarsky | 8 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| Drew Timme | 6 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
Source: ESPN box score.
Lyles made 1 of 4 shots and 1 of 4 threes. Zikarsky, on a two-way deal, took one shot, missed it, and picked up two fouls in eight minutes. Drew Timme scored three points on one shot in six minutes with no fouls. I still think Timme should win the last roster spot over KJ Martin, who played nine minutes and scored four points. If Beringer’s foul trouble is real, Timme’s six clean minutes are worth watching in the next preseason game.
Why the rest of the game makes this matter more
The Wolves won big, and it hid some soft spots. Milwaukee shot 30 for 91, per the ESPN box score, and the Bucks still grabbed 14 offensive rebounds to Minnesota’s 9. The Wolves outscored them 56 to 26 in the paint and 26 to 9 on the fast break, so they got what they wanted. A closer game against a better-shooting team makes those 14 second chances hurt.
Kel’el Ware had 12 rebounds in 24 minutes for Milwaukee. The Wolves won the rebounding only 51 to 47, and a backup center who has to sit makes that margin harder to hold.
The offense is in better shape. With LaMelo Ball running things, as I wrote in the piece on Ball and Gobert as a lob pairing, a big man who finishes at the rim gets easy looks. Beringer made 65 of 98 shots last year, and Monday’s 5 for 8 fit that. Shooting won’t keep him from 18 minutes a night.
What to watch
Finch has a short list of fixes. He can slot Jonathan Kuminga at center in smaller lineups, which fits the size argument in my Kuminga starting piece, but that costs the Wolves size on the glass. He can play Lyles more, but Lyles is not a rim protector. Or he can coach Beringer into smarter positioning and live with a few more bad nights.
I’d bet on the third option. Watch Beringer’s foul count in the next preseason game, and watch whether Finch keeps him in with two early fouls or sits him. If he’s still at four or five per 15 minutes by the end of October, the Wolves will be looking for a veteran big on the buyout market.