If you like suspense, the 2024-25 Minnesota Timberwolves season is shaping up to be a real cliffhanger.
Riding a three-game losing streak into Sacramento last Friday, the Wolves built a 16-point lead over the Kings heading into the fourth quarter, squandered it all in less than seven minutes, trailed by four with two minutes to play, rallied to force overtime and escaped with a four-point victory.
Back home Sunday against a Phoenix Suns foe missing superstar Kevin Durant, Minnesota fell behind by as many as 16 points, took its first lead with 69 seconds left to play and eventually triumphed on a Julius Randle three-pointer at the final buzzer.
By Monday morning, those two wins had put the Wolves just three games out of first place in the brutally competitive Western Conference — and just two games ahead of the 13th place club among the West’s 15 teams.
This first month of play has initiated the plotline for a season of uncertainty. Compelling cases can be made both for how the Wolves will thrill and thrive, and how they will frustrate and falter.
Despite a major trade on the cusp of training camp that reordered the team’s top eight players in the rotation, as of Tuesday morning the Wolves had the 9th best offensive rating (points scored per possessions) and 12th best defensive rating (points allowed per possession) in the 30-team NBA. The unity between the coaching staff and the front office and the harmony in the locker room have been exemplary.
On the other hand, the Wolves have benefited from near-perfect health throughout their roster and have played a very favorable schedule through the first 14 games. While compiling a record of 8-6, they have displayed some persistent vulnerabilities that need to be addressed and question marks are starting to form around some key personnel. The second-highest payroll in the NBA has set a high bar for success and sharpens the consequences if the team fails to measure up.
New roster, new approach
At this stage of the campaign, it can’t be overemphasized how differently the Wolves were approaching the season even two months ago, when I sat down for what has become an extensive annual preseason interview with head coach Chris Finch.
It was obvious that Finch and Wolves President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly had determined that the best way for the team to boost and extend their aspirations toward attaining an NBA Championship was to increase their reliance on a trio of “second timeline” players: Anthony Edwards, Jaden McDaniels and Naz Reid.
These young guns were all acquired during the tenure of former POBO Gersson Rosas, the spangles on his resume. Spaced a year apart in age — Ant is 23, McDaniels 24, Naz 25 — all have already exceeded initial expectations. As the Wolves unexpectedly surged into the Western Conference Finals in 2023-24, Ant finished 7th in the NBA’s MVP voting, McDaniels was named to the league’s All-Defensive second team, and Naz was voted the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year.
Ant and McDaniels came into training camp this October with four full seasons of experience, one fewer than Naz. All have logged enough minutes and shimmied up the learning curve to a point where they are supposed to play with poise and maturity, even as they remain a year or two or three away from the prime of their careers. They are “second timeline” players because they are expected to supplant the grizzled veterans such as Rudy Gobert and Mike Conley — and on down to Karl-Anthony Towns (before the trade with New York) and Julius Randle (KAT’s replacement via the trade and his chronological peer) — as the team’s core leaders over the next four or five years.
Put simply, more than any of their current teammates, Ant, McDaniels and Naz are regarded as vital to both the present and the future of the Timberwolves franchise.
Finch made that obvious during our conversation in September. Within the first 10 minutes of a 70-minute interview, he unilaterally volunteered that he planned to get McDaniels more involved in the offense as both a scorer and initiator and that he wanted to experiment more often with a huge front line of Gobert at center, KAT at power forward and Naz at small forward.
Later in the interview, Finch likened the development of Ant to that of Anthony Davis, who was with New Orleans when Finch was a coach with the Houston Rockets. Due to geographical proximity, the teams would always play each other in the preseason and AD would inevitably have bolstered his game in a way that made Finch say, “Whoa. He can do that now?!”
Automatically expecting Ant to make that kind of leap would be “dangerous” Finch noted. “What we build in is the baseline and hope there is no regression,” he said, while conceding that Ant has put “polish” on his game every season.
Then the coach again went out of his way to herald improvement for McDaniels. “I will say that there are times we build in out of hope rather than practicality. Like this year, going in, I am building in Jaden McDaniels taking a step forward.”
Finch has long said that a player’s position is best defined by what he can most capably defend. During the 2023-24 season, he rebutted the notion (put forth by me and others) that Naz was covering wings as least as well as he defended big men. On the “Naz as small forward” segment of the interview, I repeated that argument, noting the past disagreement. But he had come around to the idea.
“He very much did (defend small forwards as well as centers), yeah,” Finch said. He elaborated on the “moving parts,” actions opponents would use to test Naz defensively as a small forward. “But I have every confidence that he can do it.”
Those September comments seem poignant now, especially with respect to Naz and McDaniels, who had the size and shape of their roles on the team significantly altered by the subsequent trade of KAT to the New York Knicks for power forward Julius Randle and combo guard Donte DiVincenzo.
Begin with McDaniels, who has not become more involved in the offense and has certainly not taken a step forward thus far. Two weeks into the season, Finch acknowledged that getting more touches for Jaden would take a back seat to incorporating Randle’s unique skills — he is an isolation-heavy, ball-centric playmaker who collects assists in bunches by drawing multiple defenders into the paint — into the half-court offense.
Consequently, McDaniels is once again the fifth option among the five starters on offense — his usage rate is actually a titch lower than it has been the previous two seasons. Even so, the harsh truth is that his play at both ends of the court has been damaging thus far. With Randle replacing KAT, his three-point shooting is much more of a complementary skill for the new status quo than the cuts and pick-and-rolls Finch envisioned in September. But his accuracy from behind the arc has never been worse (ditto his free-throw percentage), despite the fact that he is arguably getting more open looks.
On defense, McDaniels is fouling more — no mean feat, as it has been a career-long flaw for him — and stopping wing-scorers less. Even in the Wolves past two victories, he was torched by DeAaron Fox of Sacramento and Devin Booker of Phoenix. For the season to-date, the Wolves are allowing 112.2 points per 100 possessions in the 416 minutes he has played and 106.9 points per 100 possessions in the 261 he has been off the court. Granted, still a small sample size, but the dirty little secret is that a similar dynamic held sway last season, when the fearsome reputation he acquired his first three years as a defender, plus the Wolves designation as a top-ranked defense, boosted him to All-Defensive team status.
Defining Naz Reid’s role
How Finch and the Wolves (and Naz) respond to miscasting of Naz stands as the most significant plot twist in this suspenseful season. At both ends of the court he is playing like a natural combo forward. That’s glorious on offense, where he is splashing 43.2% of his threes on a career-high 7.7 attempts per game; along with 62.9% of his two-pointers and 90.6% of his free throws.
Ah, but on defense, Naz is getting steamrolled by larger opponents as the backup center beside Randle in the frontcourt. When the two of them share the court, the Wolves yield a whopping 117.4 points per 100 possessions, by far the worst among any two-player pairings together for more than 100 minutes this season. (Randle and McDaniels are a distant second at 113 points allowed per 100 possessions.)
Consequently, despite Naz racking up a gaudy true shooting percentage of 67.4 thus far this season, the Wolves’ only score .2 more points per 100 possessions than they allow when he is on the court.
Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse, not better. Over the last four games, the Wolves have scored just 103.1 points per 100 possessions and yielded 128.2 points per 100 possession when Naz is in the lineup. If you prefer basic math, in the 108 minutes Naz has logged in the past four games, the Wolves have been outscored by 61 points, 133-72.
To complete the triad of “second timeline” players, Ant has been typically spectacular, having added a more accurate and willing three-point shot to his arsenal. Yes, warts remain — when the Wolves blew an end-of-game lead against Miami earlier this month, Ant absentmindedly switched on defense when he wasn’t supposed to switch and then absentmindedly accepted the referee handoff to inbound the ball when he should have been the one taking the do-or-die shot.
For Connelly and Finch, Ant’s superstar nova-heat burns those warts from the memory bank when it comes to nuts-and-bolts team construction and management. But a subplot that will linger over this 2024-25 season is how to handle next year’s salary cap when Randle and Naz both have player options on whether or not they wish to return for a final season or pursue free agency.
Randle, who will turn 30 later this month, does not fit into the second timeline. For the Wolves to want to extend his contract — or even countenance him opting into the roster next season for $31 million — the team will probably have to repeat or exceed last year’s postseason success.
For Naz, the situation is much different. His player option is for $15 million next season, an amount he could nearly double on the free agent market if he chose to test it this summer. It’s imperative that he and the Wolves find a happy medium that better accommodates his still-blossoming talents — and that mitigates the carnage that has begun taking place when he steps on the court.
Then there is McDaniels, who has just begun a five-year, $133 million deal that will pay him over $30 million in the 2028-29 season, a sizable bet whose odds of panning out have diminished in recent months. The Wolves have a reasonable facsimile in Nickeil Alexander-Walker — slightly older at age 26, with less upside but more recent reliability, and almost certainly cheaper, given that he is currently being paid $4 million in the final year of his contract.
It is hard to maneuver roster personnel when you are in the “second apron” of payroll cost under the NBA collective bargaining agreement. Even if the front office was disenchanted with McDaniels to the point of wanting to cut corners and replace his role with NAW, it would be a magic trick to happily retain both Randle and Naz (via either option or contract extension) next season.
Meanwhile, it is hard not to notice that Ant shouts out praises for McDaniels every chance he gets, and that McDaniels and Naz have logged more than one summer right here in the Twin Cities honing their games together.
The second timeline trio are bros. But right now, in the first timeline, finding a groove that hastens the adjustment period and synergy of the existing roster is the priority. After the last-second win against Phoenix Sunday, Finch said he welcomed the three-day break before the next game (in Toronto on Thursday) so that the team can simplify its defense.
Given the payroll, the level of expectation, and the obvious seams that are showing in the fabric of the defense, winning games, over and over, is the only way this roster equivalent of a happy family doesn’t become a broken home.
Britt Robson
Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.
