Let’s get the hard part out of the way early. Barring a miracle, the Minnesota Timberwolves are not winning an NBA championship this season.
The Oklahoma City Thunder are 17-1 without their second-best player and barreling towards a dynasty in real time.
The Denver Nuggets employ the best player of this generation and are playing their best basketball since the championship run.
The Houston Rockets have the best offense in the NBA.
The Los Angeles Lakers have a three-headed monster of on-ball creators in Luka Doncic, LeBron James, and Austin Reaves.
And the Pistons have already won more games than they did all of last season.
Minnesota entered the season with hopes of raising the Larry O’Brien trophy. However, nearly a quarter of the way through the season, something will need to change if this iteration of the Timberwolves ever wants to cash in on the championship aspirations.
This is the golden era of Timberwolves basketball. The Wolves have made the playoffs in four straight seasons and advanced to the Western Conference Finals in back-to-back seasons.
However, as this season marches forward, it’s becoming increasingly evident that there may be a ceiling on this Wolves team. Two straight mind-numbing losses, while blowing late fourth-quarter leads, to the Phoenix Suns and the 5-13 Sacramento Kings, dropped the Timberwolves to 10-7 after a promising start to the season. It’s another disappointing start that has the Wolves questioning their identity.
But maybe that is the identity of this Wolves era: High expectations with slightly disappointing returns.
The words championship or bust have been uttered around the Twin Cities for the last two seasons. But people are starting to say “we lost our minds” and “let’s see if we care” around the Timberwolves locker room this week. The Wolves look nothing like a team that will do anything to win a title and more like a team that’s just happy to no longer be in the running for worst franchise in North American sports.
Anthony Edwards has blossomed into a superstar and a top 5 to 10 player in the NBA. He’s exactly what Timberwolves fans have been dreaming about since Kevin Garnett left. Edwards isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and still hasn’t reached his full potential yet. He’s still only 24.
However, it’s Year 6, and the mental lapses that you can excuse as a young player learning to lead a team are still lingering in his game. He’s having the most efficient season of his career, and his turnover percentage is the lowest in his six seasons in the NBA despite missing four games with a hamstring injury.
Still, he bricked two free throws that would have likely won the game against the Suns after scoring 41 points. He continues to play iso ball and settle for stepback, contested threes, which helped the Kings race back into the game on Monday and win in overtime.
He still can’t guard a back cut correctly, and the inconsistency can no longer be chalked up to the innocence of youth. Ant continuously locks in in the playoffs when the stakes ratchet up. For him to take the Wolves to a championship, he needs to bring that focus and intensity every game.
Tim Connelly saw the cliff coming after the Wolves flamed out in the 2024 West Finals against the Dallas Mavericks. Instead of riding his flawed star, Karl-Anthony Towns, as long as he could, he knew the Wolves needed to change things up to get over the hump, so he traded Towns for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo in hopes they would bring more to the table than Towns.
Randle is playing the best basketball of his career, but even at his best, he still has glaring weaknesses. Randle is a bully in the post, leading the Wolves in assists and committing his fewest turnovers since 2017-18.
But too often, Randle looks exactly like me playing seventh-grade basketball and s–ts his pants every time a defender gets near him and either drops the ball or throws it out of bounds. His turnovers down the stretch helped lead to Minnesota’s demise in Phoenix and Sacramento. They ultimately hold Minnesota’s ceiling down, as we saw in his lackluster performance against the Thunder in last year’s West Finals.
The Wolves have thrust DiVincenzo into a lead guard role and, too often, drives into the teeth of the defense with no exit plan, only to drop the ball at a defender’s feet or wildly kick it to nobody.
Rudy Gobert is one of the greatest defenders of all time, but if he takes one dribble on offense, Minnesota’s possession is immediately cooked.
Jaden McDaniels and Naz Reid had youth on their side, but now at 25 and 26, respectively, their decision-making is still not worthy of a championship team. Nobody on the team can be trusted with the ball in their hands in crunch time, save for maybe 38-year-old Mike Conley, which brings us to Chris Finch.
Finch is the best coach in Timberwolves history. He’s shown time and again that when everyone counts the Timberwolves out, he can rally the troops and push them to another level. The Wolves won 56 games two seasons ago and led the team in defense under Finch’s tutelage.
But far too often, his teams are immature, unprepared, turnover-prone, and devoid of anyone with a high situational basketball IQ. Much of that has been attributed to the growing pains of coaching up a young team. Still, the Wolves are one of the older teams in the NBA this season and are still making the same mistakes they did four years ago, when Patrick Beverley was the veteran voice in the locker room.
At what point does the constant sloppiness reflect a laissez-faire coaching style that gives the players far too much power?
How much is on Tim Connelly and his front office for surrounding a young player in Anthony Edwards with other mistake-prone players, hoping they finally figure it all out together?
This isn’t meant to be a sky-is-falling all around the Target Center hit piece. The Wolves are still a relatively good team that has a good chance of making the playoffs for a fifth consecutive season. They’re on pace to win close to 50 games again, and maybe they get hot down the stretch and have another nice showing in the playoffs in 2026.
As the season goes on, the Minnesota Timberwolves increasingly look like a perennial playoff team rather than a true championship contender. If things keep going as they are, this era of Wolves basketball will be remembered alongside the Damian Lillard-led Portland Trail Blazers from 2014 to 2021, or the Donovan Mitchell-Rudy Gobert Jazz from 2017 to 2022, or maybe those Al Horford Atlanta Hawks teams from the mid-2010s. Good teams with sustained success that never truly competed for a championship.
If that’s the path the Wolves are on, some major changes will need to happen sooner rather than later.