Please don’t stop me if you’ve already heard this one, because you really need to hear it again.
The Minnesota Timberwolves made a trade during the offseason that dramatically rearranged the composition and flair of their frontcourt. There was obvious merit in what Wolves President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly was trying to do, but even more obviously there was risk. The team had substantially improved during the recently completed season, playing with a recognizable style and personality that was very popular. The trade significantly – probably irrevocably – altered that style into something more nebulous and unproven.
Sure enough, the Wolves looked worse in some fairly predictable ways. The fit was clumsy between the old and new personnel, a mutually awkward process made everyone involved look worse, especially framed against the matte of recently pleasant memories. The cynics were smug, the fence-sitters increasingly uncomfortable, the die-hard optimists gluttons for punishment.
But Connelly and Head Coach Chris Finch were stubbornly unruffled, preaching patience by word, and, when that got derisively shopworn, exercising patience by example. While the pundits opined and the peanut gallery grew operatic about scrap-and-salvage alternatives to the blueprint, the brass in the front office and on the sidelines kept their own counsel, begrudgingly making concessions around the edges that became prudent, time-tested tweaks to the plan.
That thorough focus transformed the inevitable disruptions due to injury into a broader palette, with the new colors and textures now suddenly required to continue the portrait inserted just so, in a manner that enhanced the picture without damaging the utility of the old oils that would fill the brushstrokes once they again became available.
Or, to choose yet another analogy, Connelly and Finch kept busily tidying the nest and protectively warming the egg through various sorts of inclement weather, waiting hopefully for this thing they had conceived to hatch, break through, find its legs, and fly.
On Wednesday night in Denver against a Nuggets team that had won 22 of its previous 30 games, most recently trouncing the first-place Oklahoma City Thunder, the 2024-25 Timberwolves soared to its sixth straight victory. No, they have not matched the exploits of the 2023-24 Timberwolves in the wake of the Rudy Gobert trade. The current team has had less incubation time in the wake of last summer’s trading of Karl-Anthony Towns, and has not yet been called upon to confront the challenging peaks that come with playoff-series competition.
But there is a similar dynamic at work; an initial struggle for competence, cohesion and comfort inexorably clarifying into recognizable paths toward a common purpose, a process catalyzed by the adversity of embarrassing losses and injuries to key personnel. Then, another key step: The sudden quickening of team synergy.
Wednesday night’s wire-to-wire win provided conclusive evidence that the 2024-25 Timberwolves have hatched, and have stepped out of their nest into the air, flexing their wings.
Their previous five victories had come against teams with losing records, opponents they were supposed to beat. By contrast, the Nuggets were favored by three points at home, needing a win to stay ahead of Memphis for second place in the Western Conference, with the extra incentive of knowing that the last time they faced the Wolves in Denver, it was a Game 7 playoff loss that propelled Minnesota in the conference finals.
But Denver’s side of the ledger was less consequential to this outcome than what the Wolves have become, the force and innovation that has infiltrated the identity of this season’s roster and differentiates it from previous editions of the franchise.
Last season’s formula for success was putting KAT (Towns) on reigning MVP Nikola Jokic and letting Rudy Gobert lurk for rim protection and to cut off passing lanes that generate Jokic-assisted baskets. But KAT was swapped for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo, two players who operate with physicality at both ends of the court. Both have recently returned from injuries that sidelined them for multiple weeks. Gobert, too, is freshly recovering from a lingering bout of back spasms that put him in street clothes for nine games.
Immediately before and after the All Star break, the Wolves had to be resourceful. A smallball frontcourt of Naz Reid at center and Jaden McDaniels at power forward helped ignite a lineup that was quicker with their feet and their brains alike. Most notably, it unleashed an aggressive array of offensive skills and defensive rebounding prowess from McDaniels that helped transform the starters.
The ability of rookie Jaylen Clark to join the ever-reliable veteran Nickeil Alexander-Walker on point-of-attack defense allowed McDaniels to pursue this frontcourt-friendly renaissance. Along with the emergence of another tough-nosed rookie, the rim-running Terrence Shannon Jr., the Wolves suddenly had a workable contingency plan that provided for greater depth and different gears of pace-and-space when all the injured vets returned.
On Wednesday night, knowing that Denver’s superb and versatile power forward Aaron Gordon was out with an injury, the Wolves decided to grind the Nuggets down with depth, speed and physicality.
Gobert, whose back spasms had him listed as “questionable” on the injury report the day before the game, valiantly battled Jokic in single-coverage most of the way. Meanwhile, the Wolves plethora of ace on-ball perimeter defenders, including McDaniels, NAW (Alexander-Walker), DiVincenzo, Anthony Edwards, Clark, and even a rejuvenated Mike Conley, meant to deny Jokic his dimes and limit the playmaking of the other Nuggets starters.
The Wolves intention to tromp the throttle on every offensive possession was more blatant in the first half of the game than it has been all season. Coming into Wednesday night, the team’s pace of play was the 23rd quickest in the 30-team NBA, 98.07 possessions per game. In the first half it rose to an average of 105 possessions per game, faster than any team’s norm thus far this season.
The first quarter set the tone. Jokic went off for 15 points on 7-for-11 shooting but the rest of the team tallied only 11, making three of 15 shots. The opportunistic Wolves turned five Nuggets turnovers into 11 points, which included the bulk of the nine fast-break points they had in the quarter. But even after made baskets by the Nuggets, the Wolves played with a transition-quick pace coupled with rapid ball movement that resulted in them shooting 8 for 14 from two point range and 5 for 12 from distance, opening up an eight-point lead they would never relinquish.
Denver made a couple of feisty runs – a 10-0 spurt midway through the second quarter that cut a 14-point lead down to four, and seven straight points after a Conley trey to open the second half that got them within five. But the Wolves responded with an 8-0 run of their own in the second quarter, highlighted by a Gobert block of Jokic hook shot – and blitzed the Nuggets for 16 points in the next three-and-a-half minutes of the third period to pump the lead to 14.
By the fourth quarter, the short-handed Nuggets were spent. Departing from their usual substitution pattern as a last-gasp gambit, Denver Coach Mike Malone left Jokic in the game to start the period. The Wolves large but mobile frontcourt of Randle, Naz and McDaniels promptly ran him ragged. Randle was especially damaging, beginning with a deke drive that became an easy fadeaway midrange jumper, then a junkyard bulldog drive right through Jokic for a layup, a pass to McDaniels that Jokic scrambled to deter, and then a spinning dribble in the paint then ended with a deft feed to Naz cutting the other way that had Jokic on roller skates.
It was all there, a trio of “skilled bigs” finishing the exhaustion of the NBA’s quintessential skilled big after Gobert had warred with him first. Randle’s relentless force made him akin to a running back grinding out yardage in the fourth quarter of a football game – except Randle’s ability to dish as he pile-drives also made him a kindred spirit to an option quarterback.
The Wolves proceeded to cavort through a series of highlight-reel possessions before Malone pulled his starters with five minutes left in the game and the Wolves up 109-84. The final was 115-95.
For the cynics, including yours truly, it was a night to hand out bouquets as token atonements. In particular, my cynicism toward Randle’s ceiling of value on this roster was misguided. When Gobert was first acquired in the summer of 2022, I was on the fence about it, and only turned negative after a 2022-23 Timberwolves season of underachievement – just in time to be proven wrong by the 2023-24 Timberwolves.
For Randle, the cynicism was immediate, borne of not being able to understand how good spacing could be achieved with Ant, Gobert and Randle all on the floor at the same time. It wasn’t a bad instinct – the Wolves struggled for the first month or two due exactly to that flaw. But I underestimated Randle’s adaptability and am pleasantly flabbergasted by the way he has transformed himself into a playmaker of quick and correct decisions, also upping his on-ball intensity against bigs on defense and in general recognizing how he could be optimal to this team at both ends of the court.
Chris Finch has a lot to do with that. Those who want to blame Finch for giving his team sufficient opportunity to come undone by not calling timeouts, limiting set play-calls and being overly patient with underachieving veterans, are better off making those cases early in his roster development, because he is going to figure it out and make you look silly later on.
The coach’s ace-in-the-hole is player relationships. He is creative and supportive, traits that inspire trust in his players. As I’ve said many times, he has an ability to criticize his troops in a “just the facts” recitation manner, without making it personal. He will wait for a long time for the player(s) to get the clues he is providing. He runs a happy locker room and enjoys the abiding faith and support of his superstar, Ant, trusted veterans like Conley and Gobert, and players struggling to adjust to new circumstances, like Randle and DiVincenzo.
At the end of the day, Finch figures it out. Over the course of his nearly four full seasons with the Wolves, when he has had the chance to coach from training camp to season elimination, his two best months to-date in terms of winning percentage have been the final two of the regular season: 11-6 (.647) in April, and 32-18 (.640) in March.
As of Thursday morning, the Wolves were .002 behind the Golden State Warriors for the sixth seed in the Western Conference, the final slot that avoids the play-in tournament. The Warriors have been red-hot since acquiring Jimmy Butler, and stand 9-1 in their past 10 games. Above Golden State, the best bet for a collapse from the top five would be the Los Angeles Lakers due to the groin injury of team leader Lebron James.
But the Lakers are a full four games up on the Wolves, and Minnesota only has 15 remaining games to close the gap, compared to 19 left for L.A. Bottom line, the odds of the Wolves climbing out of the play-in and qualifying for a first-round series as a top-six seed are plausible but not probable.
No matter. After months of lowering expectations, this team has whipped itself into shapes, not shape, as the emergence of a small-ball unit in addition to the longstanding starting five, and the remarkable versatility of DiVincenzo, Naz, NAW and the rookies Clark and Shannon give Finch more genuine options and counter-options than he’s ever had in Minnesota.
Expect him to pull most of the right levers, and buckle up for an exciting postseason, however lengthy or brief.
In the And One newsletter
Why Naz is the most unsung hero of this 2024-25 season and deserves serious consideration to repeat as 6th Man of the Year.
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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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
