The Minnesota Timberwolves denied the doomsayers for at least another day or two by thrashing the hapless Charlotte Hornets by as much as they wanted to Monday night at Target Center.
The final was 114-93, the outcome never seriously in doubt after the Wolves built a double-digit lead four minutes into the second quarter against an opponent missing their two best big men due to injury and being picked to finish near the bottom of the inferior Eastern Conference even when in full health.
It was a necessary cleanse after a moribund Wolves defeat against the Spurs in San Antonio Saturday night. It was a “schedule loss,” borne from the team’s new status as a national attraction. Their Friday night home game against the Denver Nuggets had been bumped from 7 to 8:30 so it could become the second contest in a double-header broadcast on ESPN. The Wolves didn’t get into Texas until 5:30 a.m. and dutifully slept-walked their way through defensive rotations later that evening while also permitting the younger, springier Spurs to fluster their offense.
But the malign schedule didn’t cause problems for the Wolves so much as it allowed already existing deficiencies to fester. Last year, the team almost immediately established itself as possessing the best defense in the NBA, a distinction vigorously enforced and never relinquished throughout the regular season. After this season’s sixth game in San Antonio, the Wolves were middle-of-the-pack in denying points, losers of as many games as they’d won, and enduring remarkably bad performances from two of their five starters, Mike Conley and Jaden McDaniels.
Entering his 18th season, the 37-year old Conley revealed last week that he was troubled all summer by the flare-up of an old injury, torn ligaments in his left wrist, his shooting hand. The confession helped explain a reticence and some uncharacteristic maladies that dogged him over the first six games, most obviously inaccurate shooting and his lowest assist-to-turnover ratio in more than a decade.
McDaniels has no such alibi for his wretched start at both ends of the court. During my long conversation with coach Chris Finch just before training camp, he raved about what a great summer McDaniels was having and flatly stated that “I am building in Jaden McDaniels taking a big step forward.”
Thus far, the opposite has happened. Ever since he came into the NBA four years ago, McDaniels has been a hound defending the perimeter and the Wolves designated stopper not only for wings, but point guards and even power forwards who frequently initiate the offense. Last season he was rewarded by being named to the NBA’s All Defensive second team.
By contrast, through the Wolves’ first six games, the team gave up more points per possession when McDaniels was on the court than any other player in the team’s 8-man rotation. When Finch was asked in his pregame press conference on Monday about the way McDaniels was defending the perimeter, he was terse. “It is not good. It has got to be way better.”
But McDaniels extended his nightmare through the first half against Charlotte. When he took the Wolves first shot of the game—a pull-up three-pointer from the top of the arc—it was a foot short, barely grazing the bottom of net. Less than a minute later, he failed to properly box out past-his-prime center Taj Gibson, who out-jousted him for the rebound and successfully completed the putback.
Two other three-point attempts had no chance of success from the moment they left his hand, and a pair of questionable fouls—the one persistent flaw in his defense–sent him to the bench with 6:25 left in the first quarter, his team trailing 18-11. When he returned with 7:37 left to the play in the half, he missed three more shots. At the halftime buzzer, the Wolves had been outscored by 6 in the 13:12 McDaniels had been on the court—and dominated the Hornets by 18 points in the 10:48 he was on the sidelines.
The good news is that McDaniels arguably had his most productive nine-minute stint of the season in the third quarter of a game that, because it was a blowout, constituted his only action in the second half.
After missing his seventh straight shot of the contest on a wayward reverse layup, he kept it simple with a pull-up 16-footer for his first points of the game as Gobert drew Hornet defenders to him on a pick-and-roll. The drought broken, he executed a nifty cut on the very next offensive possession that forced a Charlotte foul when Conley found him with a lob. Thirsty now, on the next offensive possession after that he took a feed from Conley and splashed an above-the-break three-pointer.
Suddenly, vintage Jaden McDaniels was in the building. Responsible for rim protection due to switches, he harassed an interior pass and then blocked a hook shot in the paint, coming down with the rebound after the swat. And after his next defensive rebound, he drove the length of the court and finished with a four-foot floater along the baseline.
Finding a new rhythm
It was a night for redemptions, belated and otherwise. Conley had four dimes without a turnover and sank three of his five three-point attempts. And to ensure that this wouldn’t be a Spurs redux, the bench trio of Donte DiVincenzo, Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker collectively put on a clinic on how to play alert, purposeful energetic and team-oriented basketball at both ends of the court.
DDV was a nonstop dervish, pausing only to rise up for open three-pointers, dividends of the spacing he catalyzed via his prescient passing and movement without the ball. Seven games into the season he has been the most well-rounded player on the team, with his 14 points, 5 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 steals and 2 blocks against Charlotte the latest evidence. The Wolves outscored the Hornets by 33 points in the 28:17 he was on the court.
Naz and NAW were slightly less spectacular but shared the generosity of spirt, vigor and intelligence that DDV possesses and the result is exponentially good for the Wolves. Minnesota was also +33 in the 25:59 logged by Naz, and +22 in the 21:09 NAW was on the court.
It was a laugher, to the point where Finch could empty his bench with eight minutes yet to play, allowing the briefly heralded rookie Rob Dillingham to make his regular-season Target Center debut, along with rookie TJ Shannon, the promising combo forward Josh Minott, crowd-favorite Luka Garza, and journeyman PJ Dozier.
Was it “good for what ails” the Wolves in this slightly disappointing season thus far? After the game, Finch wouldn’t go that far. He presaged his praise for his overachieving bench trio (“I’m lucky, I have eight starters”) by remarking that, “We have got to find a rhythm with our starting group.”
When I asked him to expand on that by explaining where he thinks the chronic, a-rhythmic snafus are coming from, he said, “So every night it is a little bit of a different thing. Sometimes it is like the flow wasn’t there. Defense, maybe, (is lackluster) so it doesn’t give us a chance to get out and run. (The starters) have got to run a little better and get some easy stuff too, particularly earlier in the game. But there is a hesitancy to push it. So we have got to address that. One thing I think can really help there is Julius (Randle). Julius brings it (the pushing), more in that group.”
And when the starters do create good looks on offense, “Jaden and Mike, they’ve got to make those shots,” Finch added. “Then it is different.”
I followed up by wondering if a return to last season’s elite defense is just a matter of maintaining intensity and getting more familiar with each other.
“We’ll see,” the coach replied. “We’ve got to stack these type of defensive efforts (like the Charlotte game) on top of each other. In the early part of the season, as a coach, like”—at this point Finch moved his hands like two sides of a scale—“you’re not sure what to trust about your team yet. You know what’s in them but you have to see it all the time to really trust it. But that was our most sustained effort (of the season) so it was a good start.”
New roster, new season
When a professional sports franchise has a remarkably successful season that gets everybody excited, it is natural to assume that it is likely to continue, that the team will pick up where it left off. From the very beginning of training camp, Finch has warned his players that their stature and glow have to be re-earned.
The trading of Karl-Anthony Towns for two players now among the top seven in the rotation, DDV and starting power forward Julius Randle, makes that “get back on track” way of thinking even more complicated and arduous. This is a different team than last year—maybe not fundamentally, but in some important aspects. Teamwork is a chain, and chain collisions are bound to happen in the ongoing search for synergy.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Conley and McDaniels are off to such slow starts. With DDV and Randle on board in place of KAT, the Wolves have added two very capable distributors with very different styles, both of which cut into Conley’s turf as the floor general and regulator of the offensive flow. Surely the wrist has been a factor in his early struggles, but accommodating the heliocentric nature of Randle operating out of the post, with a pace and manner much different than KAT, is a nuanced but still significant adjustment for a playmaker in his 18th season.
As for McDaniels, the word from Finch was that his coming-out party on offense would be deliberate, a wrinkle in the previous structure from last season. Incorporating Randle has rightfully taken precedence over that process. Ironically, in fact, the capability and unselfishness of Randle, not to mention his remarkably accurate shooting to start the season, puts even more weight on him being accommodated.
The point is, even for the most capable NBA coaching staffs and front offices, retooling a team’s basic components is necessarily time-consuming. So is replicating a season that, by a franchise’s past standards, was wildly successful.
It so happens that the Wolves are two games into one of the easiest parts of their schedule this season. Both San Antonio and Charlotte were projected to be in the draft lottery according to their preseason betting line in Vegas on their over/under win totals. Their next six games include four matchups against foes expected to miss the postseason altogether and two others projected to participate in the play-in for the right to one of the final two seeds in each conference.
As the Spurs game demonstrated, victories over this stretch are not guaranteed. But it is a good, forgiving environment for a team trying to find familiarity, ingrain some positive habits and discover what kind of ball club they really are.
Consequently, it is also a stretch that will help Wolves fans realize which is the better comp for the 2024-25 Timberwolves—last year’s Western Conference Finalist and the 2022-23 team that struggled to reconcile the arrival of Rudy Gobert and had to earn their way via the play-in tournament.
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.
