Was it really less just a few days ago that the Minnesota Timberwolves seemed primed to make a serious push up the Western Conference standings for the first time in this season? 

The Wolves had won a season-high five straight games to close out January with a  record of 27-21, just a half-game out of 6^th place that would provide them with a hall pass to skip the play-in tournament and avoid the ignominy of potentially not even qualifying for the postseason. Better yet, they were just a game-and-a-half out of 4^th place, a spot that would ensure home-court advantage for the first round of the playoffs. 

Seven of their next eight games were at home, the first three against eminently beatable opponents, beginning with the Washington Wizards, owner of the worst record in the NBA and in the midst of their second 16-game losing streak of the season. Then a day off and a matchup against the Sacramento Kings, a team whose star player, De’Aaron Fox, had enervated the franchise by asking for a trade. Another day off and then a contest with a Chicago Bulls squad who had won just two of its previous 10 games. 

Even the ever wary and weary Wolves fans had to concede there was an available window that just might permit some sunshine to permeate their dusky hopes. 

Hah.

It was suddenly time for the remarkable good health the Wolves enjoyed for most of the past two seasons to go kaput. That strained groin muscle forward Julius Randle had pulled 10 minutes into the game against the Utah Jazz to close out January was going to keep him on the sidelines for a while. And superstar guard Anthony Edwards, who didn’t miss a game in calendar year 2024, was hollowed out of the picture by an illness. 

Randle and Ant were added to the absence of guard Donte DiVincenzo, hobbled by a torn ligament in his big toe back in late January. And then Naz Reid jammed his fingers in the first half against the Wizards and became the last of the Wolves’ top four scorers to tap out of action. 

OK, but the Wizards were still posed to be an inconsequential obstacle, eh? Six wins in 47 games. Not one, but two 16-game losing streaks already this season. Yeah, the Wolves had played cat-and-mouse with them, grabbing the lead for only 49 seconds near the end of the first half, but never really letting the game get out of hand. And when Minnesota went on a 16-5 run in the fourth quarter to go up by three with 7:27 left to play, the natural order of things re-clicked into focus.  

For a brief moment. Then the downtrodden Wizards stirred for a 9-0 run of their own to make it 99-93 with just a little under four minutes left to play. They never trailed again, icing the victory when forward Kyle Kuzma twice isolated on the Wolves best on-ball defender, Jaden McDaniels, and turned both possessions into buckets. 

Then the Kings came to town, reeling from the announcement that Fox had indeed been traded just hours before, too soon for the players Sacramento had acquired in the deal to make it to Minnesota. Rotation player Kevin Huerter had also been dealt. 

As for the Wolves, Ant was suited up and mostly ready to go. Naz, his jammed fingers taped, was alongside him in the starting lineup. Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley and McDaniels filled out a quintet that logged 200 minutes together as a unit last season, allowing just 102.1 points scored per 100 possessions. But the short-handed, in-transition Kings scored at a rate of 177.8 points per 100 possessions before the first wave of substitutions arrived a little more than nine minutes into the game. 

But once again the score stayed agonizingly close into the fourth quarter, the teams separated by no more than six points in the final five minutes. And once again the Wolves stumbled – the final was 116-114, Sacramento. 

Citing “bad chemistry” for a team’s underperformance is usually the hallmark of lazy analysis. “Chemistry” itself is an ineffable and elusive thing that is prone to a wide array of definitions. I regard good chemistry as a synergy, a cohesion greater than the sum of its parts, arising from a shrewd assembly of complementary pieces that are further catalyzed by shared confidence, faith and trust. The less those elements exist, the more likely it is that the synergy will be stymied.

Do the Wolves suffer from poor chemistry? If you examine how the team performs when it matters most, the answer is yes. 

The NBA defines “clutch” situations as the times when the teams are within five points of each other in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime. It is when the outcome of the game is more or less a tossup, there for the taking – or the giving away. 

Over their first 50 games of the 2024-25 season, amounting to a total of 2,410 minutes played, the Wolves have outscored their opponents by 151 points. They have been pretty consistent in earning that advantage, going plus 36 in the first quarter, plus 39 in the second quarter, plus 35 in the third quarter, and plus 43 in the fourth quarter. They are minus 2 in their two five minutes (10 total) of overtime. 

Too often, however, they fall apart in the clutch. 

Specifically, in 107 minutes of clutch play, they have been outscored by 55 points. Remember, by definition, clutch minutes can only occur near the end of the fourth quarter or overtime, which makes the disparity in the team’s performance with the game on the line rather than when the pressure is less intense, even more dramatic. 

Here’s the math: Overall, the Wolves outscore their opponents by 41 points in the 610 minutes comprising their 50 fourth quarters and two overtimes. But since they are outscored by 55 in the 107 clutch minutes, that means they outscore the other team by 96 points in the 503 minutes of their fourth quarters and overtimes that aren’t clutch situations. 

Failing to deliver in the clutch has had a significant impact on the course of their season. Thirty-one of the Wolves’ first 50 games this season have included some clutch minutes – the most in the NBA. The Wolves’ record in those games is 13-18, compared to their 14-5 mark in the 29 games that aren’t close near the end of the game. They lead the NBA with 13 losses in games in which they have led in the fourth quarter.

Because the clutch minutes vary from game-to-game, blinking off when a team pulls away by more than five points (and back on if the narrow margin returns), the Wolves are tied for fifth in the 30-team league for the sheer amount of clutch minutes at 107. The sample sizes vary wildly – from the mere 35 minutes logged by the terrible Wizards and the 48 minutes teams are able to contest the dominant Thunder, to the 117 minutes played in the clutch by the Houston Rockets. Consequently, offensive and defensive ratings (the amount of points scored and allowed per possession) can be skewed.

That said, in their relatively robust sample size, the Wolves rank 24^th in defensive rating, allowing 116.8 points per 100 possessions, and 27^th in offensive rating, scoring just 100.5 points per 100 possessions. Their net rating – points scored minus points allowed per 100 possessions – of -16.3, is better (or less worse) than only the Wizards and the Utah Jazz, the two teams with the worst overall won-lost records in the NBA. 

Put simply, the two teams who perform worse than the Wolves in the clutch perform terribly in a lot of non-clutch time as well. In fact, among the bottom nine teams in clutch-time net rating, only the Wolves have a winning record overall. (The Milwaukee Bucks, 21^st is clutch net rating at minus 6.9, but with an overall record of 26-22, is the next worst clutch performer among “winning” teams.) 

On a team-wide basis in the clutch, the Wolves are grossly underperforming the rest of the league and their own non-clutch play at both ends of the court, which is why this feels like the fault extends not only to the players logging the most clutch time, but to the way President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly has constructed the team and the way Coach Chris Finch has operated it. 

That said, Edwards is the team’s unquestioned go-to star when it matters most and his performance on offense reflects the team’s incompetence at that end. For example, the Wolves overall shooting percentage and accuracy from three-point range both take a dive in clutch situations. They are 46.3% shooters from the field overall (16^th in the NBA) and 40.7% in the clutch (22^nd). And from behind the arc, they fall from 38.3% accuracy overall (3^rd best) to 25.3% (28^th) with the pressure on. 

As the dominant locus of the offense, it is not surprising that Ant (who has logged 102.5 of the 107 clutch minutes, missing only the Wizards game due to illness), is likewise tumbling, from 44.6% overall to 39.4% in the clutch from the field, and from 42.1% overall to 28.2% in the clutch from long range. 

There is a lot more to be said about clutch minutes – Naz has just two three-point attempts, missing both, in his 23.6 clutch minutes and owns a ridiculously skewed net rating of minus 43.9. Conley is 2-13 from the floor and 1-8 from three-point territory in his 46.3 clutch minutes, yet he only played clutch minutes in 17 games and the Wolves were 10-7 and a mere minus 4 in plus/minus during his time on the court.

My take on the clutch minutes fiasco is that it is a symptom of the Wolves lack of chemistry thus far this season, in which dysfunction has made them less than the sum of their parts. And there are a lot of reasons why it has occurred. 

Begin with the major trade that happened just before training camp. I don’t disagree with it, for reasons discussed in multiple prior columns, but the timing was harmful. It disrupted the unique harmony Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns had created (designed by Finch) in the “double-bigs” lineup. It compelled not only the readjustment of supplanting Karl-Anthony Towns with Randle as the starting power forward, but altered the way Naz, McDaniels, Conley and even Joe Ingles would be deployed. 

Another reason why the Wolves aren’t thriving in pressure situations this season is because there is more ambient pressure on them in general. Last year’s 56-win campaign was a season-long party, made even more piquant by its unexpected excellence. This season, the team entered with the NBA’s second-highest salary, including big raises kicking in for Ant and McDaniels, plus an extension for Gobert. Randle and Naz have player option years on the table next season. 

The overall expectation was, if not a return to the Western Conference Finals, a standard of play that was among the elites in the conference. The fan base had a taste of consistently marvelous play, ticket prices spiked. Ant was supposedly “the face of the NBA.” It was, and is, a lot. 

Then there is the deployment of personnel. To accelerate familiarity and quicken research, Finch hewed to an eight player rotation, and even with the recent onslaught of injuries and absences, leans in that direction. But the grizzled veterans Conley and Gobert, both stellar pros who deserve respect, are having off-years and don’t deliver as reliably, especially in the clutch. 

Meanwhile, first-round lottery pick Rob Dillingham has shown enormous promise – and inconsistency. Finch, under the same gun of delivering last season’s caliber of play, plays tug of war with his support and faith. Josh Minott had an excellent preseason, barely played the first couple months, and is now in the doghouse for defensive lapses. Luka Garza has been “developing” forever but isn’t reliable. Right now Jaylen Clark is the development success story because Finch prioritizes ball pressure and he’s been delivering. 

There is, of course, a chicken-or-egg quandary to young player development. Can the Wolves sustain expectations and capably bring these bright talents along? That’s tough under any circumstances and particularly thorny at the moment, when injuries open the rotation but provide a narrower margin for success. 

Already this season we have had the notorious spat when Randle wouldn’t deliver the ball to Gobert and Rudy pouted and acted out; Ant calling out his team for lackluster play just before Thanksgiving, and Finch caustically getting on his troops after a losing streak in January. In all of these cases, the team rebounded admirably. It remains a collection of high-character individuals. Folks in limbo, like Randle, Naz, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Joe Ingles, have been pros willing to adapt to uncomfortable changes. 

But adjusting to those changes hinders synergy. Ditto injuries, which, to be fair, the Wolves have mostly been lucky with the past couple seasons. Ditto the pressure of repeating last year’s standard. The NBA is rife with teams that made a leap and then took a step back. 

The wider lens is that all this can change, in a blink or inexorably, until you see the blooms. Just a few days ago, the Wolves seemed primed for an 8-game winning streak. Now it is comparatively bleak. But this too could change. 

We’ll know it has if they suck it up in the clutch and begin winning tossups.

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.

The post Shocking losses following winning streak frustrate Minnesota Timberwolves fans appeared first on MinnPost.

Despite what the NBA standings wish to insist, not all wins are created equal. 

On Saturday afternoon, the Minnesota Timberwolves played their most complete game of the season, thumping the Denver Nuggets by 29 points, a longtime rival that had won eight of their previous nine games. 

The Wolves led wire-to-wire, increasing their advantage in every quarter, dominating at both ends of the court. They exploded for 40 points in the first period and limited Denver to just 13 in the final stanza. They scored a whopping 37 points off 19 Nuggets turnovers. Denver’s three-time MVP Nikola Jokic was strikingly helpless in all three of his rotations, his team outscored by 24 points in his 32:24 of playing time.

On Monday night, against an Atlanta Hawks team missing its three best players, and four of its top five, the victory was grotesque. Gazing at the ragtag starters opposing them – backup center Onyeka Okongwu was the only one even on the roster last season – the Wolves immediately went into cruise control and were still up 13-2 five minutes into the game. 

The Hawks eventually brought in two capable subs, but the caliber of the foe didn’t provide as much resistance to the Wolves as their own arrogant nonchalance. They were shorn of purpose, discipline and the legitimate effort bruited by ball clubs who give a damn in order to keep their edge to face more rugged competition. 

Consequently, a 17-point lead was fumbled down to six by the end of the third quarter and it was still a two-possession game with less than two minutes left to play. After the final score came in 100 – 92, Wolves Head Coach Chris Finch was clearly peeved during the postgame presser. 

“We made it close, they didn’t make it close. That was a totally unacceptable second half of basketball,” Finch began. Asked for specifics, he replied, “Sloppiness, turnovers, approach.”

Finch actually gave his players a little too much credit when he said, “I thought we played really well to start the game, collectively. But yeah, we (don’t play hard) against short-handed teams and we bullshit. And it starts with our top guys.”

That would be Anthony Edwards and Julius Randle, the alpha leaders in committing to the shrug on Monday. Ant logged all 12 minutes in that dreadful third quarter, jacked up nine shots (making three) while doling out just one assist. Randle missed both his shots, had zero assists and three of his five turnovers in his 8:20 on the court in the third period. 

Ant’s disinterest matters more. Where Randle is a laudable but seasonal ornament on the roster – acquired as a means to facilitate the Karl-Anthony Towns trade last September, it will be awkward if he is still with the Wolves for the 2025-26 campaign. Ant is a cornerstone, a charismatic talent who has become appointment viewing for a nation of basketball fans. His habits, attitude and dedication set the meter on the Wolves resilience and reveal skylights in any preconceived ceiling on their achievements. 

On a night when he was a wet match against the dry tinder of inferior opponents, it was disappointing to hear Ant keep his distance from any meaningful self-critique after the game. 

Rebutting Finch’s scathing portrayal of the second half, and third quarter in particular, Ant said, “I don’t think it was (that) we weren’t taking them seriously. I just think we weren’t making shots.” 

But what about the nine turnovers in the third quarter?

“Trying to be aggressive,” Ant replied, but knew it was a weak response, so he pivoted to, “I don’t know, man. It’s part of the game. I can’t sit here and downplay the Hawks like they (were) just trash.” 

Finch understands that this is a critical point in the Timberwolves season. He noted during his postgame press conference that the team’s play that night had “already been addressed in the locker room.” Or, as Ant put it, “He came in and cussed us out.”

But that’s because the team has been maddeningly inconsistent. Per John Schuhmann, the excellent writer and analyst at NBA.com, before Monday night, the Wolves had been three games over .500 on six occasions this season and had lost every time. It took a decrepit Hawks outfit to help finally hoist them to four games up in the win column, at 25-21. 

Finch himself noted that he is grading his team’s play on a curve, which is why when it comes to simply beating the Hawks, in terms of, “What we’re trying to be as a team, where we’re trying to go, that not good enough.” 

A proper thrashing of a weak opponent would have sustained the momentum generated from the way the Wolves blew out the Nuggets on Saturday, as they go into Phoenix Wednesday night to play a Suns team that has won eight of 10 is just a half-game behind the Wolves at 24-21.

Finch’s exasperation Monday night was almost certainly heightened by the fact that the Wolves entered the Hawks game closer to realizing their goal of being a legitimate championship contender than at any point during this lackluster season. 

With 14 games played and two yet to go in January, the Wolves rank in the top 10 in both offensive rating (10^th) and defensive rating (eighth) for the first time in a calendar month since an abbreviated four-game slate in April 2023. The last full month of games-played where they were top ten occurred back in March 2022, before the Gobert trade. 

Obviously, since Rudy Gobert’s arrival, the Wolves defensive rating (fewest points allowed per possession) has been a monthly fixture in the top 10. The current reason for optimism is not only that the offensive efficiency (points scored per possession) has risen to better balance the team’s virtues, but that three of the primary catalysts for that rise are the trio of “second timeline” players on the roster: Ant, Jaden McDaniels and Naz Reid. 

Ant’s majestic skill set will always serve as a ballast for the Wolves at the offensive end of the court and while we can rightfully carp on a lazy game or two this month, the issue is more pertinent on the defensive side of the ball. 

That said, even by Ant’s standards it has been quite a month. He has splashed at least seven more three-pointers than any other NBA player in January, due to 42.9% accuracy on ten attempts per game. 

Yes, Ant has a career-low shooting percentage on two-point shots this season, but in January he has buttressed that aspect of his game by getting to the free throw more than anyone but the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo and making more free throws than anyone but Oklahoma’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. (even though Ant is shooting 84.2% at the line this month, SGA is 106 for 109, or 97.2%).

And yes, Ant leads the Wolves with four turnovers per game in January. But he also leads the team in assists this month, at 5.4 per contest. 

Naz also is well-known for showcasing an array of potent skills on offense, but he too has upped it a notch in January, mostly by joining Ant in the bombardier club. Among players who have launched at least 50 treys in the month of January, nobody has been more accurate than Naz, who has gone 42-for-75, which is 56%. That puts him 51^st in the NBA in the number of three-point takes, and 12^th in the number of three-point makes. That has fueled his average of 16.4 points per game while logging just 26.8 minutes per contest thus far this month. 

The revelation here is McDaniels, whose comprehensive ascendance during the month of January is the single greatest reason for optimism about these Timberwolves during the remainder of the 2024-25 season. 

Few things were more discouraging than watching McDaniels spend the first three months of the season being appropriately ignored by defenses, who loaded up the gaps while guarding Ant and thus granted the Wolves wide open looks on three-pointers in the corner for Jaden. In the 32 games of the 2024 calendar year this season, McDaniels launched 119 treys and made 36, a measly 30.2%.

In January, boom! With a seismic show of aggression that Finch primarily credits to McDaniels himself, Jaden started moving without the ball, moving the ball when he got it, and making quick decisions – the three tenets of Finch’s flow offensive philosophy.

His corner treys are about the only things that hasn’t improved thus far in January – he is shooting 31%, 11-for-35. But on three-pointers above the break, he is 11-for-20, a robust 55%, giving him a monthly accuracy of 40% from distance in January so far. 

That’s just the beginning. Because he’s being aggressive – taking the corner pass off the bounce to get to the rim or draw defenders and dish – McDaniels is determining his own shot selection, to marvelous results. Through December, he sank 53% of his two-pointer. Thus far in January, it is 61.3%. Throw in his 86.4% accuracy at the free throw line and you get a gaudy true shooting percentage of 63.4. For Jaden McDaniels, whose true shooting percentage in October, November and December were 50.2, 52.4 and 49.1, respectively. 

Meanwhile, Finch has begun to tinker with occasionally taking McDaniels off the ball on defense against the other team’s best shooter, and choosing some spots to play him at power forward in smallball lineups with Randle or Naz as the other big. This has unlocked his ability to roam more effectively for rebounds, steals and blocks, while providing with more non-exhaustion energy otherwise spent trying to wear out ace opposing scorers. 

(A cautionary note: Donte DiVincenzo is already out with a significant toe sprain, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker had to be helped off the court late in the game Monday with, as of Tuesday afternoon, was an undisclosed leg injury. If both of those staunch wing defenders are out, McDaniels may soon be back to logging more duty as a wing-stopper, limiting his versatility.)

Nevertheless, McDaniels is making his mark on the boards. Here are his rebounding per-game averages by month: October, 2.8. November, 4.0. December, 5.8. Thus far in January, 6.6. That puts McDaniels third on the team, behind Gobert and Randle, in rebounds per game this month. He is first in steals and second in blocks. 

Best of all, as mentioned, Ant, Naz and McDaniels are all second-timeline players, meaning that they are the supposed core of the future Timberwolves when the first-line veterans such as Gobert, Mike Conley, and presumably Randle are gone. 

Ant and McDaniels are both signed through the 2028-29 season, the year the qualifying offers on the rookie deals for Rob Dillingham and Terrence Shannon Jr. kick in. A central reason KAT had to be traded is to figure out a way to keep Naz in this contingent, as his contract expires with a $15 million player option for next season that represents maybe 60% of his market value. 

If you are going to be a perpetually successful team, you have to make sure your long-term investments are sound. Along with losing KAT’s salary, a motivation for the trade with the Knicks was getting DiVicenzo, who is making “just” $12 million per season this year and the two beyond it.

So long as the Wolves have Gobert on the roster, defense will remain the identity for this team. But the remarkable recent growth in offensive efficiency exhibited by Ant, Naz and McDaniels indicates that the offensive may be able to share more of the load in the remaining three months of the season, and beyond into the second timeline.

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.

The post The defensive-minded Minnesota Timberwolves are lighting it up on offense (finally) in January. appeared first on MinnPost.

The Minnesota Timberwolves are up to their old tricks, or pranks, or deadpan mining for fool’s gold. They intrigue, excite, exasperate, before stirring just enough to mollify. 

The Wolves are prone to putting themselves in high-pressure situations, where they exhibit the composure of a cucumber, play-acting as cool and ready to refresh their way into the mix, but too frequently diced into something drab and in dire need of oil and vinegar.

On Wednesday night the Wolves beat the sorry remnants of the Dallas Mavericks by a single point. Mike Conley played like he was back in President Trump’s first term, Rudy Gobert mostly stayed out of his own way, Jaden McDaniels continued his recent spree of meaningful menace, and Naz Reid drew the short straw that designated he be the one to act the fool in his angst toward the officials. 

The Mavs were missing superstar Luka Doncic and four other members of the top nine in their rotation, which didn’t prevent them from scoring 66 points in the paint against a Wolves defense that now ranks 20^th in defensive efficiency during the month of January. Minnesota is now 6-6 in 2025, 23-21 overall, good enough to participate in the play-in tournament to decide the bottom two seeds in the Western Conference playoffs, should the season end today. 

The 2024-25 Timberwolves season is too reminiscent of the team’s 2022-23 campaign, when an off-season trade by President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly both elevated expectations and concussed the status quo into a fugue state that made it difficult to retain what was good before making it better.

Almost exactly two years ago, I described the 2022-23 Wolves this way: “(T)his team lacks character. They have not demonstrated the type of focus and commitment necessary to discover and sustain the elements of teamwork that create synergy and produce an identity. … everyone knows, or least strongly suspects, that the main components comprise an awkward fit, creating fundamental obstacles to the synergy necessary for a happy, productive, environment.”

But there are also important distinctions between the situation now and what was occurring with the 2022-23 Wolves. 

Two years ago, the issue was pretty cut-and-dried: How do you effectively incorporate the sterling but dilapidated skill set of Gobert, who had spent the previous nine seasons with a franchise that molded its entire style of play around him, into the catalyst for a makeover of a different franchise with a track history of ineptitude? 

The answer was a February trade that brought in Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW) and sent out D’Angelo Russell, the continued maturation of Anthony Edwards, and extended time and tinkering to synergize the frontcourt fit of Gobert with Karl-Anthony Towns. 

Many people, including me, concluded after that mediocre 2022-23 season that the Gobert-KAT pairing would never truly pan out, and urged a trade of one or the other. But Connelly and Head Coach Chris Finch were steadfast in their faith, and via patience, creative schemes and buy-in from the players, put together one of the two best seasons in the Wolves’ 35-year existence in 2023-24.

That’s one crucial distinction between now and two years ago: The team’s glorious journey to the conference finals last season raised an already rising bar on expectations (and on the payroll). No one cares that the Wolves are currently over .500 after 44 games for only the third time since 2005. The fans want to keep dancing to the club music of the 2023-24 defense and swoon to the diva arias of Ant’s soprano-soaring slam-dunks.

But the defining demarcation between 2022-23 Wolves and the 2024-25 edition is the added complexity of the task, due to the contrary forces at play. 

After the Wolves acquired Gobert, total attention could be paid to his integration. But the maturation of the “second line” rotation players in the pipeline and the greater restrictions in the new collective bargaining agreement compel Connelly and Finch to yo-yo back and forth in an attempt to sustain success both this year and beyond.

Let’s get specific. Using salary figures from basketball-reference.com, the Wolves paid Ant $10.7 million for the 2022-23 season – this season he is getting $42.2 million. McDaniels earned $2.1 million in 2022-23; this year it is $23 million. Naz Reid was still on his “Gupta special” undrafted rookie deal in 2022-23, getting $1.9 million. This season it is $14 million. And a primary reason KAT is in New York is because his salary jumped from $33.8 million in 2022-23 to $49.2 million this season and keeps rising all the way to his player option season at $61 million in 2027-28.

Yes, Connelly got important discounts on Conley ($22 million in 2022-23, just $10 million per season this year and next) and Gobert, who signed for $12 million less than he could have made exercising his player option next season, but leveraged the concession into a package of three more years at a total of $109 million.

There are plenty of fans who would have wanted Connelly to wait at least one more season before trying to trade KAT, and we’ll never know what he could have fetched for him, now with a $53 million salary, at the end of this season. But it was always going to be that the Wolves would have to trade KAT or Gobert next year to have any hope of being able to re-sign Naz. And you don’t have to be too enmeshed in social media to realize that Gobert is a player too many NBA fan bases love to hate, and would almost certainly not have brought back even close to equal value.

Enough about the numbers, except to say that this is the price of NBA success, made even more acute by the restrictions on roster management for high-payroll teams under the new collective bargaining agreement. You win big, you pay your players. But the salary of the total roster is capped, and successful teams are squeezed out of retaining all their talent. 

This is the new, unfamiliar reality for a Wolves franchise that rarely, if ever, won big. Under Finch, and especially Connelly, they are trying to win as many games as possible this year, next year, and three or four years out. 

Using that lens, it is fascinating to view how the Wolves have prioritized players within their rotations. For example, ever since the KAT trade was made, Finch has sought to maximize Julius Randle’s value to the current team. Yes, that also makes him more valuable to any team that might want to trade for him before Feb. 6 or try to sign him this summer, when he can either exercise his player option to stay with the Wolves for $31 million or become an unrestricted free agent. 

The point is, Finch has attacked the awkward fit of Randle in rotation with Gobert and Naz in the frontcourt as diligently as he did the awkward fit of KAT, Gobert and Naz two years ago. And to his credit, Randle has bought in. Consequently, Randle has become increasingly valuable by promoting more pace in the offense with his faster decision-making on ball movement, and enhancing his defensive capabilities by guarding opposing bigs in the paint more effectively. 

As I wrote in last week’s column, the relationship between Randle and the Wolves is still likely to have an unhappy ending. The size of his player option and the way his style of play is increasingly at odds with the modern NBA were always going to be sticking points, especially if the Wolves want to hold on to Naz, who has his own player option, at terms he can exceed on the open market. 

But the Wolves have not allowed that noise to get too much in the way of probing the best current fits in their frontcourt. Yes, Randle and Gobert continue to start, despite a still-awkward fit. But Randle and Naz have improved their tandem by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the season, and all three have distinctive ways, individually and as pairs, in which they help the team. Consequently, over the past few weeks, Finch has increasingly flexed who gets to finish games or log high-leverage minutes, according to game situations. 

Another striking, season-long example of Finch’s roster management has been his preference for a tight rotation. Again, the priority seems to be embracing a win-now philosophy. 

It was easy to limit the rotation to eight players when the Wolves were enjoying extraordinarily good health. But now that Donte DiVincenzo (DDV) is out indefinitely with a strained big toe, we see an uptick in minutes for last summer’s top draft choice, Rob Dillingham, but not to the level DDV or Conley were mostly sharing point guard duties this season. 

Dillingham has played every game of the three DDV has missed, but his minutes per-game have only climbed from 9.7 to 14.7 in that span. Meanwhile, time on the court for Conley and NAW have both ticked up; ditto Ant and Randle (the two scoring playmakers) and McDaniels, who has earned the extra burn. 

Meanwhile, former ninth man Josh Minott is mysteriously missing-in-action, and was even disastrously replaced by an infamous return of Joe Ingles against Cleveland. Clearly, Finch doesn’t believe this underperforming roster can afford the unreliability of too much untested youth, which of course is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The coach has said kind things about both Dillingham and Minott, but actions speak louder than words and, as I said last week, the ninth and 10^th players in the Wolves rotation log far fewer minutes than their counterparts on the other 29  NBA teams. 

I am on record favoring Naz over Randle in the starting lineup and finding more minutes for Dillingham and Minott even if and when the Wolves return to their remarkably good roster health. And Finch sure seemed ripe for criticism when the Wolves were outscored by 14 points in the 8:43 Ingles played in what used to be Minott’s stead in a seven-point loss to Cleveland last Saturday; or when he benched a productive Dillingham in favor of Conley and watched the Wolves cough up the lead in the final four-and-a-half minutes of a two-point loss to Memphis on Monday. 

But then Conley responded Wednesday night with his best game of the season and was an absolutely vital component of the Wolves eking out that one-point victory in Dallas.

Meanwhile the standings are a jumble, to the point where realistic scenarios can be made for the Wolves finishing anywhere from fourth (which would give them home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs) to 12^th (out of even the play-in scenario, and without their first-round pick, sent to Utah in the Gobert deal). 

Through it all, the variables are fluid, the situation complex. Since signing that three-year extension (two if you assume he would have opted in next season anyway), Gobert’s play has fallen off at both ends of the court this season. Conley’s throw-back excellence on Wednesday was a boon, but how repeatable can he make it? Would Dillingham and Minott capsize the Wolves fragile place in the standings or would they improve sufficiently with added burn to help the Wolves perhaps this season and most certainly down the line? 

What happens if Randle isn’t traded and opts in? NAW is thus guaranteed to be gone, and perhaps Naz too. Then the KAT trade looks infinitely worse. 

Less than a month after I wrote those disparaging words about the 2022-23 Wolves, Connelly executed the best trade in Timberwolves history, swapping out the polarizing D’Lo (Russell) for the platinum teammate Conley and the underrated gem NAW (plus some second round draft picks). 

The point is, there are times and places for significant overhauls to be made, before the Feb. 6 trading deadline and in the remaining 38 games of the season, depending upon how the Wolves perform in the ensuing weeks and months. And if there is one thing the Connelly-Finch tandem demonstrated in the 2023-24 season, sometimes standing pat sets up the best possible scenario.

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.

The post Bull or bear: Are we buying or selling this version of the Minnesota Timberwolves? appeared first on MinnPost.

Up here in the frozen tundra of Minnesota, we have an intimate relationship with the concept of traction. 

When the wheels find purchase in the slush, gravel or ice, and you’re lurching out of the deepening hole you’ve painstakingly dug for yourself, or re-hugging the curve for your suddenly dear life after the adrenaline jolt of an abrupt careen, a sense of reliability, security and glorious normality returns like a séance of endorphins.

One of the many bountiful pleasures brought by the 2023-24 Minnesota Timberwolves was the omnipresence of their traction. Two weeks into the season, they had already knocked off titans like the reigning champion Denver Nuggets and the soon-to-be champion Boston Celtics, while serving what became a season-long notice that their defense would be without parallel in the NBA. Within the first month their record was 11-3. Their first two-game losing streak was in the next calendar year and they never lost three in a row while winning 56 of 82 regular season contests – followed by their first two playoff series triumphs in 20 years. 

On Friday night, the 2024-25 Minnesota Timberwolves will reach the midpoint of their season; one that has become increasingly annoying for its proclivity of skids and spinning wheels. It is a vehicle that Head Coach Chris Finch has trusted too much, opting for the patient, drive-reverse-drive rocking strategy that makes agonizingly fitful progress as the hole extends but never seems to cede. When finally underway for a while, the team enters the curves with careless arrogance, compelling Finch to turn into the inevitable skid, the right short-term strategy that still makes all involved skitterish that it had to be deployed in the first place. 

A couple of weeks ago, just before the Wolves won their third straight game by beating the San Antonio Spurs, Finch acknowledged that where the 2023-24 team had rapidly “settled into a rhythm,” the current campaign was revealing “more of a learning curve” for his squad. The Wolves then proceeded to ratify his caution by losing three in a row for the fourth time in 35 games. 

Finch resorted to his first significant lineup shift of the season, installing Donte DiVincenzo over Mike Conley as the starting point guard, and the Wolves responded with four wins in five games heading into Wednesday night against Golden State Warriors at Target Center Wednesday night. 

Before the game, I asked Finch whether he felt the team could generate enough traction to justify the NBA’s second-highest payroll and the equally elevated expectations in the wake of last year’s excellence. 

“I think so,” he replied. “When I think back about some previous seasons and you’re .500 and then you kind of hit a spurt and everything changes. But in answer to your question I think we do see traction.”

Then the Wolves went out and got blitzed, 34-12, in the first quarter, giving up as many points via five turnovers and the team scored itself. Although they rallied – even tying the score with 1:07 left in the game – they were done in on some muffed layups, the majesty of Steph Curry as a closer, and a Golden State rebound off a missed free throw that essentially iced the game as a one-point Wolves loss. 

Finch bemoaned the start, of course, and the fact that a team that hangs its hat on playing “big” was outrebounded by a smaller, vastly inexperienced frontcourt, especially second-year center Trayce Jackson-Davis and G-league call-up Gui Santos as the starters for the depleted Warriors roster. 

It didn’t matter that Minnesota scored 103 points in the ensuing three quarters. “It took us too long to find that gear,” Finch said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t think we were out there working very hard. We wanted it to come easy.”

Asked why that was, Finch retained an even tone as he indicted the team. 

“I don’t know. We struggled to complete some plays. They got out to a hot start shooting-wise and we tried to get it all back with one quick pass and shot. Again not willing to put the work in offensively. We’ve had a habit of that all season,” said Finch, who then repeated, “We just want it easy.”

The record is now 21-19, with a pair of rugged games on the horizon – in New York against a Knicks team that walloped them in their previous meeting this season, and home against a Cleveland Cavs squad that has the best record in the NBA. 

By now we know there will be no meaningful traction. Certainly not enough to rekindle the hopes and foster the synergy displayed for almost the entirety of last season. 

A game away from the halfway mark, it is time for some harsh truths. Here are a couple.

The relationship between the Timberwolves franchise and power forward Julius Randle will have an unhappy ending

Randle was never the main focus of the deal that brought him to Minnesota just before training camp. There were myriad motivations for the trade made with the New York Knicks by Wolves President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly. 

He wanted to acquire a point guard who could serve as a bridge between veteran point guard Mike Conley and 2024 first round draft pick Rob Dillingham, and Donte DiVincenzo perfectly fit that need at the bargain basement salary of $12 million per year over the next three seasons. 

He needed to get off of the enormous long-term “supermax” contract of then-Wolves star Karl-Anthony Towns or almost certainly lose the younger Naz Reid, the reigning Sixth Man of the Year, due to salary cap constraints. 

He wanted to get back a first-round draft pick after expending so much draft capital in the Rudy Gobert trade three seasons ago, and the Knicks had one to spare via the Detroit Pistons. 

And he needed to acquire Randle to keep up the Wolves identity for rugged frontcourt performance, and, more pertinently, to make the collective salaries on both sides match enough to facilitate the deal. 

In terms of pure skills and experience, Randle is one of the three or four best players on the team. But the only thing remaining on his current contract is a player option for next season at $31 million. He needs to perform well enough with the Wolves to entice a team to sign him for at least that much money over multiple years. That team will not be the Wolves – their priority is Naz, who has a $15 million player option himself for next season that would nearly double on the free agent market. 

But if Randle opts in for next season, the Wolves are obligated to keep him at that $31 million, complicating efforts to re-sign Naz and hopefully Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW), another key member of the rotation. 

The situation is tailor-made for friction and inevitable acrimony, but Finch and Randle had a mutual admiration for each other when Finch coached him in New Orleans six years ago, and both sides have worked very hard and acted very professionally to meet each other’s needs. But that is very unlikely in the long run.

Randle does not fit in a lineup that already has an isolation scorer in Anthony Edwards and a space-clogging big man in Rudy Gobert. His virtues involve a lot of ball possession and the Wolves offense can’t afford those touches.

More to the point, the Wolves won’t choose even a maximized Randle, age 30, over the 25-year old Naz, who has the higher future ceiling and a style of play and longstanding camaraderie that fits with Ant, the alpha force in the future of the franchise. 

The hope is that Randle plays well enough to garner a decent return on the trade market, either by the Feb. 6 trade deadline or in the offseason. The Wolves – and, to be fair, Randle – have expended a lot of time and energy trying to integrate him in a manner that bolsters the current team and brightens his future elsewhere. But that is becoming a gulf too far and the status quo is increasingly becoming a damaging prospect for both sides. 

(For the record, after a slow start, DiVincenzo is performing brilliantly, and the Pistons have improved enough this season to make the protections on their draft pick less likely to be implemented, clearing the way for the Wolves to add another young piece. Trading KAT obviously was a bigger blow to the Wolves than originally supposed, but it does still create cap space for a Naz extension and maybe a chance to retain NAW too.) 

Finch needs a more authoritarian voice or a new offensive philosophy

As someone who has covered the Wolves since their second season of existence, I am in a good position to hold the opinion that Finch is the best coach in franchise history. His strength is player-relations, via direct but not inflammatory communications skills and a supposed inclination to build his schematic approach around the strengths of his roster. 

But something has been amiss on offense throughout his three-and-a-half-year tenure. Finch prefers a “flow” offense, an ostensibly player-friendly philosophy that functions best under three basic principles: move the ball, move yourself when you don’t have the ball and make quick decisions. 

But Ant – remember, the alpha force of all plans for the present and future – too frequently eschews all of those basic principles. That has not always been the case – peak Ant in “flow” mode may well have been a stretch beginning in December 2022 and January 2023 when KAT was injured, Conley had not yet arrived, and he balanced play-making and scoring in a glorious ascendance that led to his first All Star game appearance. And it was furthered under Conley’s tutelage.

But as Ant has become a superstar and “face of the league,” he has faced enormous pressures, be it opposing defenses stacked to deter him, the heightened scrutiny of the gluttonous, gossipy media or the judgments of his former heroes both active and retired from the NBA.

Put bluntly, Ant’s maturation hasn’t kept pace with the sharper arc of his learning curve this season. His incredible three-point shooting has camouflaged his more subtle shortcomings, which frequently sabotage the “flow” via impetuous shot selection in the face of rugged resistance, lazy ball movement, and precious little movement himself off the ball. 

Led by Ant (and Randle), the Wolves have a roster of proven scorers and have no business ranking 17^th in offensive efficiency (points scored per possession). But here’s why that’s where they stand: Only five teams use “isolation” plays as a larger percentage of their offensive mix than the Wolves, and yet only five teams score fewer points per isolation play than the Wolves’ putrid mark of .79 points per play. 

The low-hanging fruit of a competent “flow” offense is meanwhile unpicked. The Wolves defense ranks 13^th in the number of turnovers it generates, yet the team is 30^th, dead last, in percentage of “transition” plays in its offensive mix, scoring 12^th most points per play (1.14) when they do get out and run after a steal or block. And as for “cuts” to the basket, they do it with the 24^th highest frequency and yet the 13^th best success rate. 

Finch needs to exert a heavier hand on how his team executes his offensive principles, or acknowledge (if he hasn’t de facto done that already) that his players choose to do otherwise and then lean into strategies that better exploit their natural instincts. 

(In the And One newsletter – two harsh truths: Expanding the rotation and resetting expectations for the postseason.)

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.

The post It’s time for some harsh truths about the Minnesota Timberwolves appeared first on MinnPost.

On New Year’s Eve, the Minnesota Timberwolves saw the future, and the future was glorious.  

Unfortunately, it belongs to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

At 27-5, the Thunder’s won-lost record is at least five games better than any other team in the rugged 15-team Western Conference. Coming into Tuesday night’s game against the Wolves, their defense was allowing fewer points per possession compared to the league average than any team in the 29 years the NBA has been keeping play-by-play data.

They are the second-youngest team in the NBA. Despite their superlative yet precocious performance, they have not mortgaged their future. On the contrary, they currently own the rights to 13 picks in the first-round of the drafts between 2025-2030, and 17 picks in the second round for seasoning around the edges should something minor go amiss. That’s why, in a recent poll conducted by The Athletic, the Thunder were deemed the best front office — personnel managers — of all the teams in the four major sports (football, baseball, basketball and hockey) as voted on by their peers.

Playing OKC for the first time in four scheduled meetings this season was thus a litmus test for the Wolves, whose front office finished fifth among the 30 NBA teams and 20^th among the 124 teams overall in The Athletic poll. Minnesota came into the game having won 9 of its last 13 contests, all against opponents with a record of .500 or better, while compiling the NBA’s second-best defensive rating (behind the Thunder, of course) over that span.

But there was one aspect of the matchup that portended doom for the Wolves: turnovers. Coming into the game, the Thunder were forcing opponents to commit 18.8 turnovers per 100 possessions, the highest rate in 26 years. And for the third straight season, the Wolves ranked among the bottom ten teams in terms of their ability to retain possession of the basketball. 

For the first 27-and-a-half minutes of the game, Minnesota was thriving. At the half they were up by six, 52-46, and had ceded just 7 points off their 8 turnovers to the Thunder, well below OKC’s average of more than 23 points scored per game via opponent turnovers. In the first two-and-a-half minutes of the third quarter, the Wolves doubled their lead to a dozen, 65-53, thanks to three straight three-pointers from point guard Mike Conley. 

Then came the deluge.  

After Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (SGA) hit a baseline jumper to cut the lead to 10, Wolves center Rudy Gobert smashed a wide-open slam-dunk attempt off the back iron of the rim. While Gobert was late in getting back on defense, three Timberwolves ran to stop OKC’s Cason Wallace on the drive, ignoring Lu Dort behind the three-point line in the corner, where he has made 41% of his attempts during his 6-year career. Dort’s splash made it a 7-point lead. 

Julius Randle was pickpocketed off the dribble, leading to a breakout layup by SGA. The Wolves neglected the shortened shot clock after running time stopped for substitutions. OKC seized on that turnover when Conley was beaten off the dribble by Wallace and Kenrich Williams hit another corner three off Wallace’s feed when Naz Reid came over to help.

OKC had reduced the Wolves lead from 12 to 2 in 113 seconds. Coach Chris Finch called time, but when play resumed, the steamroll stayed in third gear. In the 8:30 between Conley’s array of treys and the close of the third quarter, OKC outscored the Wolves 36-10. More than half of those points, 19, came off 9 Timberwolves turnovers. 

The Wolves rallied valiantly in the final period, cutting the Thunder lead to 3 with 2:03 left in the game, but three more turnovers sealed their fate and the final score was 113-105, OKC’s 12^th straight victory. 

“We did the one thing that we couldn’t do: turned the ball over at a high level. We talked about that coming in here,” said an obviously disgruntled Finch, during a postgame press conference that lasted 74 seconds. Indeed, the final tally was 31 Thunder points scored off 24 Timberwolves turnovers, while the Wolves garnered just 8 points off 12 OKC miscues — a 23-point disparity in a game decided by 8 points. 

Making the Wolves repeatedly synergistic

If you’re measuring the 2024-25 Timberwolves against the Thunder, you’re automatically dialing up doldrums. Save your dolor for the 12-day span from Feb. 13-24, when the two teams complete their season series with three matchups. Between now and then is a trade deadline (Feb. 6), six weeks of tinkering, and a week-long All-Star break before you return with a back-to-back, home-and-away duet with OKC right after the layoff. 

Before the Wolves can consider themselves peers with the Thunder, or the defending champion Boston Celtics, their opponent Thursday night, they need to land on roster combinations and rotations that can be repeatedly synergistic. By now it’s no secret that the trading away of Karl-Anthony Towns (KAT) for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo (DDV) was more disruptive than anticipated, and finding a way to maximize Randle’s unique skill set while retaining the extraordinary skills that holdover core players at or near the top of the pecking order — Anthony Edwards, Gobert and Conley — has been a trial riddled with errors. 

Finch has done a great job activating Randle’s more complementary traits by rotating him in with personnel off the bench that space the floor and play at a faster pace. The rub here is that those bench players — DDV, Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW) and Naz Reid — are the trio getting the most out of their natural ability thus far this season. Thus far, they’ve been good with everybody. 

Sure, Randle has thrived while filling the “point forward” role in the second unit, in a manner somewhat similar to what Kyle “SloMo” Anderson did last season. But the fact is that Conley and Gobert thrived alongside the bench trio too; and when you toss Josh Minott in as the ninth man, he galvanizes that trio as a kindred spirit in ways the original starters can’t. 

Before the Wolves ran their winning streak to three with a victory over the Spurs last week, I asked Finch if a tweak in roles among the starters — putting Randle in on-ball defense against the opposing big so Gobert was allowed to roam more comfortably — was working because it plugged Randle into something KAT did for two seasons. 

Finch agreed that the familiarity helped Gobert and other holdovers and said, “We really love doing it. But you know every night, again, things are a little different, because of pick and rolls and other matchups on the floor and that kind of stuff. Last year we were able to settle into a rhythm and do it. This year it has kind of been a little bit more of a learning curve for us.”

The situation is similar to two seasons ago, when Finch and roster struggled to acclimate to a scheme and dynamic that would allow Gobert and KAT to flourish both individually and separately, according to rotations. The key difference this season is that it is far from certain whether the team both desires and can afford to incorporate Randle as a long-term piece in the organization. Even if he isn’t, it makes sense to boost his value for a potential trade in the next six weeks. But not if you’re messing with the crown jewels.

That would be Ant, the resident superstar and pervasive top priority. His fabulous three-point shooting has properly generated a lot of positive attention. Ditto his inspiring, verbal kick-in-the-pants to his teammates in late November, which crystallized better team-wide effort and focus.

But the uncomfortable fact is that Ant has not been the joyous force of nature and the crunchtime catalyst so vital to the team’s success the past two seasons — and he knows it. You can tell by his increasingly salty attitude toward the officiating, and his extended bouts of lassitude that used to primarily pockmark his play with respect to off-ball defense, but has invaded his offensive decision-making and initiation in recent weeks. 

For example, Ant played the vast majority of that third quarter on Tuesday night before heading to the bench with less than three minutes to play. During that 9:03, the box score has him down for one turnover and one personal foul. No shots, no dimes, no boards, no steals. By contrast, SGA, his superstar counterpart for OKC, had 19 points, a steal and a turnover. 

In prior seasons, Ant would have followed that disappearing act with some fireworks in the fourth quarter. But on Tuesday, although he did chip in two free throws, three rebounds and an assist, Ant missed four of five shots, including an airball corner three and a floater that hit the back iron in the final five minutes of the team’s attempted comeback.

Ant has reason to be frustrated by the lack of calls he receives from the officials. Among the top 20 scorers in the NBA, only Kyrie Irving (who is 19^th in points per game, compared to Ant being 15th) gets to the free-throw line less often. But it isn’t all a conspiracy theory. 

Ant’s three-point prowess has begun to shortchange other aspects of his game. His two-point attempts are less frequent than in all but his second season in the league and his accuracy on shots inside the arc is a career low. At least partly due to his relative inactivity in going to the hoop, he is getting to the line less frequently per 36 minutes than in any of his four prior seasons. Does making 41.5% of his treys on 13.3 attempts per game compensate for that? It’s more debatable than you might think.

One could argue that Ant’s shooting opens up the floor for others. But Ant’s own playmaking isn’t exploiting that virtue. His assists per 36 minutes are the lowest since his rookie season and his assist-to-turnover ratio is a career low. And despite that notoriously great shooting from long-range, his dropoff in free throw attempts and lower accuracy from two-point range actually makes his current true shooting percentage (57.4%) a smidgen below what it was last season (57.5%). 

A starting lineup that doesn’t work

Like almost everybody else on the team, Ant’s contributions become more rewarding, for himself and the team, when he’s playing with Naz, NAW and DDV. And whether it is the underappreciated versatility of KAT’s fit with the team or some combination of aging, unfamiliarity, or simply a stubbornly slow start, all of the four starters that were beside KAT have taken a step back this season. 

Last year, Gobert captained a phenomenal defense that was the best in the NBA nearly from start to finish, powered by a synergistic meld of Gobert’s willingness to trust his teammates and defend in space more often, and their ability to engender that trust with disciplined energy. This year has seen games in which Gobert has been overwhelmed by his matchup — KAT during the Knicks game and Houston’s Alperen Sengun the two times the Wolves have faced the Rockets. Whenever possible, putting Randle on the opposing big makes more sense — but then having Randle on the floor with Jaden McDaniels and Gobert obviously hamstrings the roles and comfort levels of Ant and Conley. 

Bottom line, the starting lineup doesn’t work, especially in terms of offense. And after 32 games, the sample size is becoming more conclusive. But how do you scramble it? Do you safeguard and enhance your top-notch talent and/or most expensive investments, or do you lean on their patience and flexibility for the sake of more long-term thinking? 

All things considered, it is somewhat reassuring that despite ongoing roster adjustments — and conversely, stubbornly inadequate status quos — and subpar seasons from core personnel, the Wolves remain firmly in the playoff hunt in the rugged West with a 17-15 record. After they swooned just before Thanksgiving, and flirted with a losing record even after recovering in mid-December, it felt like drastic action was warranted. And even today, the notion of tweaking the starters or getting serious about what the plans are for Randle’s future (and the chain reactions that inevitably ensue from that) are legitimate topics to put on the table.

But as the cliché goes, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Despite his ugly game (five turnovers) against OKC, NAW is an ongoing inspiration to witness. The defense and rebounding of DDV have more than compensated for inaccurate shooting and spotty playmaking — both of which have begun to improve. Josh Minott is a whirlwind and Julius Randle is a close-combat warrior at both ends of the court. Last but never least, Ant sets a ridiculously high bar and is thus very good even when he disappoints. 

It’s been a blurry season in terms of both performance and identity. And even if it clarifies, the picture likely won’t be as pretty as what is being watched in OKC.  But from the front office down through the end of the bench, this is a franchise with talent and ambition, its future continually intriguing until further notice.

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.

The post After being outclassed by the Thunder, Ant and the Wolves still searching for the magic of last season appeared first on MinnPost.

The stat sheet of a basketball game often feels as much like an impressionist painting as a mathematical calculation in terms of providing a picture of what actually transpired. 

For example, a player can nonchalantly toss the ball over to his teammate with no defender around either player. The teammate then proceeds to dazzle-dribble his way past two opponents and dances a little Euro-step around a third before laying the ball in the basket. If the official scorer is in a charitable mood that night, the player making the nonchalant pass will be credited with an assist. 

By contrast, a player can be so fearsomely skilled that he draws three defenders in his foray toward the hoop, leaving two teammates wide open. He cleverly zips the ball to the first one, who dutifully moves it along to the second one, who scores the basket. There is no assist for the player who magnetized three defenders, just for the middle-man in the three-player transaction. 

If a player dribbles the ball off his foot and it comes to you, it likely will register that you “stole” the ball. But if you and a teammate tenaciously trap a ball-handler in a double-team, and both of you deflect the desperate pass he makes trying to escape it, only one of you will get credit for a “steal”—or maybe neither one of you, if the scorer decides another teammate who catches the deflection somehow deserves credit instead. 

If you snuff a player driving to the rim, is it a “steal” or a “block”? Sometimes it depends where in the shooting motion you snuff the shot (was it below the waist or the shoulder?); or how far it has left his hand; or whether it might be perceived as a pass instead of a shot. Or maybe the shooter was able to fumble up a feeble airball toward the rim that you barely deflected and the scorer determines it is merely a missed shot with no steal nor block registered. 

Which brings us to the phenomenal performance of Minnesota Timberwolves forward Jaden McDaniels in the first quarter of his team’s past two games. Over a total of sixteen minutes and 30 seconds of playing time, McDaniels was credited with eight steals. To give you a sense of how outlandish that is, the NBA player who has stolen the ball most frequently of anyone thus far this season, Dyson Daniels of the Atlanta Hawks, has 74 steals in 849 minutes logged over 25 games—less than three per game and one approximately every 11 and a half minutes. In the first quarters against the Lakers on Friday and the Spurs on Sunday, McDaniels stole the ball approximately every two minutes he was on the court. 

That’s what the stat sheet says, anyway. In fact, two of the “steals” are outright gifts from the official scorer. On Friday, the Lakers’ Anthony Davis dribbled the ball off his foot and it rolled to McDaniels. On Sunday, his fellow starting forward Julius Randle disrupted a shot attempt by the Spurs’ Jeremy Souchan and Souchan flailing attempt to rescue the play with a kick-out pass went right to McDaniels.

But this time, the favor inflation worked on the side of justice. Eight steals in less than two full quarters was such a gaudy number that I had to investigate further. And the six legitimate plays that remain tell us a lot about the recent quantum leap  McDaniels has made in his play overall.

Against the Lakers, McDaniels blew up pick-and-roll actions without fouling. In the game’s first two minutes, he fought through a Davis screen to stay with his assignment, Austin Reaves, then poke-checked a bounce pass to Reaves to teammate Mike Conley.  

Four minutes later, he fought through another Davis screen to get to Reaves, only to discover that center Rudy Gobert had come out to the perimeter to switch on to Reaves. Shifting gears and direction with adroit athleticism, he scrambled back into the passing lane quickly enough to poke away Reaves’ pass to the cutting Davis. 

The final steal of the quarter was grand theft blotto: McDaniels pounced on a lazy inbounds pass to Davis and needed just one dribble and two steps before ascending for thunderous slam dunk. 

Two nights later against the Spurs, the prevailing theme on the trio of legit steals was length and tenacity. All were executed in the paint, deflecting passes that were over his head to foil drive-and-kicks plays. But his contribution never stopped there. 

On the first one he leapt to deflect a Souchan pass, then chased down the loose ball quickly enough to overtake Souchan in the scramble to the sideline and throw it off him out of bounds to gain the possession. 

On the second one, he and Gobert teamed up to block a pass by San Antonio’s seven-and-a-half foot praying mantis, Victor Wembanyama, but the force of the play knocked him over. He clambered to his feet, received a short pass from Randle and tore downcourt on the dribble, feeding it back to Randle for the layup.  

On the third one, he again jumped high to intercept a Souchan pass from beside the rim headed back out to the perimeter, then, just before falling out of bounds on the endline, quickly fed to Mike Conley, who whisked it to an onrushing Anthony Edwards for another layup. 

Scoring in transition

All season long, the Wolves have betrayed their offense with a lack of initiative trying to score in transition. They have forced the sixth-most turnovers in the 30-team NBA, yet rank 27^th in fast-break points. That’s because they don’t get out and run to create official “transition” playtypes. By a wide margin they are dead-last in transition possessions and dead-last in points scored off transition plays. 

Against the Lakers, McDaniels fostered transition on all three of his legitimate first-quarter steals. He ran out for a layup after poke-checking the ball from Reaves, tried to score racing down after intercepting the pass on Davis’ cut, and of course, rapidly flushed the ball through the hoop on his steal of the inbounds pass. 

Against the Spurs, he could merely save the possession and not further the play when he threw the ball off of Souchan. But the other two first-quarter steals saw him get off the deck to work a two-man transition play with Randle for a layup, and then ignite a fast break by saving his deflection to Conley who promptly threw it ahead to Ant. 

Six legitimate steals in two first quarters is fantastic, and the way McDaniels sought (and mostly succeeded) to parlay them into transition points adds luster to the achievement. 

But the real eye-opener was his rebounding. In the 307 games prior to the Lakers contest last Friday, McDaniels has grabbed 11 rebounds once and 10 rebounds once—both back in the 2021 calendar year. He had corralled 9 rebounds five other times. His sixth time happened Friday, and set what at the time was a season high in rebounds for him. Then on Sunday against Wemby and the Spurs, he tied his career-high with 11, four of them offensive rebounds, which also tied his career-high. And obviously the 20 total rebounds over a two-game span was a career-high. 

This is another way McDaniels has emerged from his tepid start to the season. He had never averaged more than 4.2 rebounds per game in any of his first four years in the league, and went below even that-mediocre standard by grabbing 2.8 rebounds per game in four October contests and 60 boards in 15 November games (an average of four apiece). But through six December games, his average is up to 5.7, which would be the highest monthly mark of his career if he sustains it. 

I have been hard on McDaniels thus far this season. His woeful start had me worrying about the future viability of the “second timeline” trio of him, Ant and Naz in a column last month and despite his placement on the All Defensive NBA second team last season, I didn’t include him as a significant factor in the Wovles’ rediscovery of their defensive identity last week. At the bottom line, the Wolves still allow more points per possession when McDaniels is on the court compared to when he sits, even during the defensive renaissance that had propelled them to six wins in their past seven games. 

The fact that McDaniels’ playing time is purposefully meant to be in sync with the opponent’s top wing scorer—his inevitable assignment–on the court is a mitigating factor. But the team’s negative defensive rating when he plays versus when he doesn’t didn’t happen his first three seasons, and much of the latter two of those years was in the wing-stopper role. 

No, the encouraging thing about Jaden’s recent upgrade in performance is how broad-based and organic it has been. He is becoming more versatile and less of a defensive specialist, even as some aspects of his defense are likewise on the rise. 

Avoiding foul trouble 

From the beginning, he has been prone to getting into foul trouble, which makes him less reliable and exerts a domino effect on defensive roles when the whistles force him to the sidelines. But after averaging 3.25 fouls per game in October and 3.5 in November, he has committed a mere 9 fouls in six December games, stabilizing the rotation. 

At the same time he has found his shooting stroke. His shooting splits (field goal percentage/three-point percentage/true shooting percentage) have gone from 45.5/18.2/50.2 in October to 43.7/30.8/52.4 in November to 47.2/47.4/57.1 thus far in December.

Everything about McDaniels is pointing upward: His defense, his shooting, his rebounding and his avoidance of fouling. The way he has stuffed the stat sheet in the past two games is notable because neither the Lakers nor the Spurs played the sort of potent wing scorer that would otherwise occupy so much of his energy and attention. 

It opens the door to the possibility of more flexible roles in the Wolves rotation. Against the Spurs he helped clog the paint to deter Wemby and the drive-and-kick playmakers, plus helped Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker hold future Hall-of-Fame point guard Chris Paul without a field goal in more than 30 minutes of play. And against the Lakers, he was able to switch and react with more fluidity knowing that his usual assignment, Lebron James, wasn’t playing. 

In other words, there can be circumstances where NAW can become the wing stopper and let McDaniels help Gobert regulate the paint. There can be smallball lineups where Randle is the de facto center and McDaniels the power forward. Such a small frontcourt would require rigorous fly-around defensive schemes elsewhere on the second unit (maybe adding Josh Minott or Rob Dillingham). But it would enable more playing time for the Wolves best five-player lineup (Conley-Gobert-Naz-NAW-DiVincenzo) and if McDaniels catch-and-shoot three-point accuracy continues, he becomes a natural partner when Randle is drawing defenders and kicking out for open treys for his teammates. Over the past seven games, the Wolves net rating (points scored versus points allowed is +18.6 points per 100 possessions when those two share the court. 

On a personal level, McDaniels has earned every bit of his improvement. The wing-stopper role is exhausting and thankless and he has successfully inhabited it by becoming almost tunnel-visioned with respect to the task and extremely hard on himself when things don’t go his way. 

Too often in the past, his temper would willfully overwhelm his judgment and he’d commit silly fouls or let ire cloud his focus. That hasn’t been the case lately. Nowadays, whether you regard the stat sheet as impressionistic or mathematical, the numbers are impressive. Meanwhile, the eye-test has been sublime.

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.

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