Measuring the merit of the Minnesota Timberwolves has been a mysteriously elusive enterprise for many months now.
For those who put their stock in trump cards, you can simply say, “back-to-back Western Conference finalists,” and be done with it. For a sports franchise that for decades was mocked for its dysfunction and mired in misery out here on the frozen tundra of the NBA landscape, being among the league’s final four for two seasons running is a chalice-raising feat that still feels dangerously close to a mirage, the soft focus of an audacious prophecy: The meek share inherit the court.
But we know that one conference finalist was not like the other.
After dropping two of its first three games, the 2023-24 Timberwolves stomped on the league for two solid months, going 13-2 in November and 10-3 in December, propelled by a pugnaciously airtight defense that separated itself from the rest of the NBA like the vintage Spurs from the Pop-Duncan era. Two years ago this month, after the Wolves had toppled the then-previously unbeaten Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics in the same week, I led my column by declaring that “Sometimes it is appropriate to get carried away.”
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Those Wolves never lost three games in a row during the regular season. Disrespected as underdogs in the opening round of the playoffs against the star-studded Phoenix Suns, they performed a solar eclipse, a 4-0 sweep. Then came the classic series against the defending-champion Nuggets.
The Wolves won the first two games on the road — the second one a merciless suffocation on defense despite the absence of Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert, who was off for the birth of his first child. But Nikola Jokić and the Nuggets rallied to win the next three. Facing two elimination games, the Wolves won Game 6 at home by 45 points, then overcame a 20-point second-half deficit in Denver to advance to the conference finals, where Luka Dončić and the Dallas Mavericks ended the best season in franchise history in a stunningly quick five games.
The 2024-25 Timberwolves were an alienated mediocrity of a ballclub for more than half of their regular season. A year ago this month, they suffered a four-game losing streak, bracketed by Gobert deliberately incurring a three-second violation due to his snit over Julius Randle not feeding him the ball in a loss to Toronto on November 21, and Anthony Edwards calling himself and his teammates “internally soft” and pursuing their own agendas after the Wolves allowed the Sacramento Kings to score on 11 straight fourth quarter possessions, transforming a 12-point lead into an 11-point defeat on November 27.
On March 1 of this calendar year, the Wolves won-lost record was 32-29, good for a tenth-place tie in the Western Conference, the final spot for the play-in tournament that requires the tenth-place team to win twice simply for the right to go on the road against the best ballclub in the conference in the first round of the playoffs.
What happened over the final six weeks of that 2024-25 season has become a hallmark of the Wolves’ recent success — they beat the teams they are supposed to defeat. Two-thirds of their remaining 21 opponents had losing records and won thirteen of those fourteen games. Tack on the relatively pedestrian 4-3 mark against the seven foes who had winning records and their 17-4 closing surge allowed them to escape the play-in by a single game.
Beating Luka, Lebron James and the Lakers 4-1 on the road in the first round was impressive — they exposed the inexperience of Lakers coach JJ Redick, Luka’s lack of physical conditioning, and L.A.’s absence of a big man in the paint. But the second-round walkover of Golden State paled in comparison to the drama in Denver during the previous year’s second round. Golden State won the opener with Steph Curry mostly healthy, and fell in four straight after Curry was injured near the close of Game 1.
I gulled myself into thinking it was all kismet and picked the Wolves over the Oklahoma City Thunder in the conference finals. That became particularly foolish after the Thunder mostly toyed with the Wolves to win in five games, then struggled mightily to beat an over-achieving Indiana Pacers team for the championship.
Bottom line, the first of Minnesota’s two recent trips to the conference finals felt a lot more legitimate than the second. And through 14 games of the 2025-26 season, it is still very difficult to gauge the real mettle of this team, an uncertainty that is likely to continue up to Christmas week.
The record is 9-5, but that win total has been fattened by a procession of cupcakes on the schedule. All nine victories have come against teams that currently sport losing records, and of those, only the opening night opponent, the Portland Trailblazers, is near .500 at 6-7. The rest have a combined record of 19-64.
Fold this year’s start with last season’s close and the Wolves have won 22 out of 23 regular season games against teams with losing records since March 1. But unlike last season’s 4-3 close against winning teams, the 2025-26 Wolves are 0-5 thus far, with all but one of those losses by double-digit margins. The Lakers and the Nuggets have each beaten them twice thus far this season, with the other loss coming against the New York Knicks. Last season, the Wolves were 7-3 against those three teams.
Going down the rabbit hole of extenuating circumstances is mostly a waste of energy on specious judgment calls. For example, both Ant, the superstar, and Jaylen Clark, the increasingly valuable defensive specialist, were out with injuries during the second loss to the Lakers and the first loss to the Nuggets. Okay, but L.A. was missing Luka as well as Lebron when they won at Target Center in their second meeting, and the Nuggets beat the Wolves by a remarkably similar score in the rematch nearly three weeks later when both Ant and Clark were healthy.
One caveat that does feel legitimate is to note that playing terrible opponents nearly two-thirds of the time for a solid month deprives a team of some crucial context and standards of performance. It becomes much more difficult to sharpen teamwork, whet awareness, and coalesce the rhythms and resources required to succeed at a relatively high level in the NBA.
We see this in the rematches against the patsies. The Wolves walloped the Utah Jazz by 40 points on November 7 and by seven points on November 10. They shredded the Sacramento Kings by 27 points on November 9 and by 14 on November 14.
Eight of the Wolves nine wins have come against opponents who rank in the bottom third of the NBA in defensive rating (fewest points allowed per possession) and the outlier, Dallas, didn’t have their ace defender Anthony Davis healthy against Minnesota. Obviously, it is easier to move the ball without steals or deflections, to free yourself more often via simple screens for jumpers or feeds to the roll man on pick-and-rolls, and to score in transition, against poor defensive teams. And it is harder to do all of those things when you are accustomed to less than rigorous resistance and go up against a higher quality defense.
Naturally the same is true at the other end of the court. You intuitively know that much less is required on defense to throttle opponents with inefficient, unskilled and uncoordinated offenses, but it is still really hard to level up to defend better foes when you’ve had more experience achieving success with less.
The numbers say that it is harder for the Wolves defense to step up in class thus far this season than it has been for the offense. (Then again, it is a relatively higher climb. The Nuggets and Knicks are second and third, respectively, in offensive rating — points scored per possession — and the Lakers are 17th .)
Per the stats at nba.com, the Wolves have allowed 104.7 points per 100 possessions in their nine wins and 127.7 points in their five losses, for a differential of 23 points per 100 possessions. By contrast, Minnesota’s offense scores only 5.5 fewer points per 100 possessions in their losses, 114.8, than they do in their victories, 120.3. This tracks with the eye test, which indicates that a porous defense is a greater vulnerability than an anemic offense for the team thus far this season.
Of course an organization that boasted about its continuity throughout the preseason shouldn’t have this much difficulty regaining the in-game context to execute at a high level, despite the soporific effect of a really soft schedule. (Basketball-reference.com rates it 28th, tougher than only Oklahoma City and Phoenix thus far.)
The good news is that coach Chris Finch has consistently improved his teams over the course of the season, especially on offense, in the five-plus years he has been here. When I asked him why that was, he initially cited continuity, but clarified that in-season continuity was more important than year-to-year.
“It’s understanding each other as the season goes along that is the key,” Finch replied. “Every year, even if you have the same personnel, there are things that your team gravitates to that they are telling you that they are good at, or that they want to do more of, so you start leaning into those things as they become available. So it is having your finger on the pulse of that as it goes along.”
The most prominent example of that thus far this season has been the increased strategic usage of Jaden McDaniels, which have been both intentional coming into the season and “gravitational” as he has thrived. The aspiration was always to engage him more on offense, but that became more essential during the period when Ant was out and McDaniels took over as a viable number-two option to score and otherwise initiate the offense, behind only Julius Randle.
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Staggering McDaniels’ rotation so he is on the court without Ant but alongside the frontcourt of Randle and Naz Reid has been a tonic for both offense and defense. By bringing in Clark as another defensive bulwark that lightens the rim protection and rebounding load on that smaller frontcourt duo, Finch has dramatically reduced the most harmful vulnerability on the team to start the season, which was incompetent defense when Gobert was on the sidelines.
Like McDaniels, Clark is a superb on-ball defender who can guard multiple positions and enjoys jousting for rebounds and trying to disrupt opponents in their own backcourt. Unlike McDaniels, he is best at very low usage, a conduit for the offense far more than an end-product. With Ant out and Clark beside him as a wing, McDaniels has much more freedom and engagement to flex his offensive prowess.
Mike Conley likewise has found a valuable role securing that second-unit defense and splitting time with starters like Gobert as well as handling the ball more when Randle and/or Ant sits. Finding the time and place for Rob Dillingham to emerge has been more problematic. Sure, his playing time and his competency on the court is a chicken-or-egg conundrum, but there are nights when he is too obviously overmatched. In a blowout win against Dallas on Monday night, the Wolves were outscored by 17 points in the 12:58 Dillingham played and were +41 in the 35:02 Dillingham sat out.
As I mentioned earlier, the schedule doesn’t really toughen until the week of Christmas, although after playing the woeful Washington Wizards (record: 1-12) on Wednesday night, they go to Phoenix to face the surprising Suns (8-6 with that easy schedule) on Friday, get a third meeting with the Kings after that and finish the month with some gristle in form of NBA champs OKC, the Celts and the Spurs.
By definition, December and calendar year 2026 will become much more rugged after such a forgiving slate of opponents these first five weeks. It will then be easier for the Wolves to level up, or to discover where and how they can’t, and hopefully make adjustments. And we’ll get a more accurate, if belated, measure of what this edition of the Timberwolves is capable of delivering.
The post The Timberwolves have the easy schedule blues appeared first on MinnPost.
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