Depth and roster continuity were supposed to be the Minnesota Timberwolves’ power this season. After swinging big trades for Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley, Julius Randle, and Donte DiVincenzo from 2022-24, Tim Connelly held firm in the summer of 2025, believing that this roster, as mostly currently constructed, could build off its two consecutive trips to the Western Conference Finals and contend for a championship. Nickeil Alexander-Walker is the only player from last year’s squad who saw regular minutes and no longer works for the Timberwolves.
Even without NAW, the 2025-26 Wolves projected as one of the deeper teams in the NBA. Led by Anthony Edwards, who was coming off his second consecutive All-NBA season. Julius Randle is in his second season in Minnesota. Rudy Gobert is only a few years removed from his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award. Jaden McDaniels is having his best offensive season in Year 6. Donte DiVincenzo is finally settled in Minnesota. Naz Reid is a perennial Sixth Man of the Year candidate. And Jaylen Clark, Rob Dillingham, and Terrence Shannon Jr. are all promising young players looking to improve in Year 2.
27 games into the season, and after a loss to a struggling Memphis Grizzlies team with an injury list longer than Santa’s naughty list, the Wolves sit where they always sit. On the outside of true contention, looking in with a slew of bad losses and flaws up and down the roster. One of the issues holding the Timberwolves out of the top tier of the NBA hierarchy this season is the abysmal performance of Chris Finch’s bench unit.
Naz Reid is having his typical Sixth Man of the Year type of season. But even the Paul Bunyan of the hardwood has had his struggles this year.
After signing a fat new contract in the offseason, Naz took a few weeks to get reacclimated with getting buckets. Through the first 12 games of the season, Naz averaged just 10.9 points per game on 32.3 percent from three. He’s been a step slow and often out of position on defense, exacerbated further when he shares the frontcourt with Julius Randle and Rudy Gobert sits.
Still, Reid’s shooting and scoring have rebounded since his slow start. He’s averaging 16.4 points on 41.8 percent from deep over Minnesota’s last 15 games. However, outside of Naz, the Wolves have little to no scoring punch coming from their second unit.
The Wolves rank 27th in the NBA in bench scoring, averaging just 31.7 points per game. Naz is averaging 14 of those points. Mike Conley is averaging a career-low 5.3 points per game. TSJ hasn’t taken the leap most Wolves fans expected and is averaging 4.8. Clark’s average is 4.4. And Chris Finch’s personal enemy, Rob Dillingham, is scoring just 3.9 points per game. Joan Beringer is in the G League, and others like Leonard Miller, Johnny Juzang, and Joe Ingles play infrequently.
Losing NAW and being forced to push DiVincenzo into the starting lineup for a severely diminished Conley has crippled Minnesota’s overall depth and roster flexibility. It’s forcing Chris Finch to ride his starters more than ever.
Minnesota is 25th in the NBA in minutes played from the bench so far this season. They were 19th in bench minutes last year, 21st during the 56-win season in 2023-24, and 14th in 2022-23. The Timberwolves are a veteran-laden team with six players averaging 26.5 minutes per game or more, and Chris Finch doesn’t have time to burn potential wins in the regular season while holding the young players’ hands through development.
The starters are holding their own. Chris Finch’s preferred starting lineup has a plus-12.7 net rating this season. That would be the second-best net rating in the NBA this season, and the starters have the equivalent of the second-best offense and second-best defense if they were the whole team. Unfortunately, Edwards, Randle, McDaniels, DiVincenzo, and Gobert can’t all play 48 minutes per game for 82 games a season.
If the Wolves want to crack the top four in the West and jump into the tier of contenders this season, the bench needs to develop into a competent unit fast.
At 38 years old, Mike Conley still has moments of magic that can turn a loss into a victory. But as his career winds down, those moments are few and far between. He should be a third point guard playing whatever minutes DiVincenzo, Dillingham, and Bones Hyland leave him — a role Chris Paul would hate. But Conley is still averaging 19 minutes per game while shooting 36.3 percent from the field, and he’s clearly a hindrance to the Wolves while he’s on the court.
Conley’s outsized role is largely thanks to Rob Dillingham’s lack of development, which has shown through in the third of his second NBA season. He’s still only playing 10.5 minutes a game, the exact same amount of playing time he saw as a rookie last year. When Dillingham is on the court, he’s caught in the young NBA purgatory of not wanting to f— up and still needing to show he deserves a bigger role going forward.
That hesitation has led Rob to second-guess his shot, and he has hit just 30.4 percent of his threes and 36.2 percent of his shots overall. He has flashes of brilliance followed by sequences of trying to do way too much. Finch recently said that if his bench players are only given 10 minutes a game, “Shouldn’t you crush those 10 minutes?” Rob certainly isn’t crushing his 10 minutes a game and could lose even more ground if the Wolves pull off a trade for a true point guard.
Terrence Shannon Jr. showed promise as a future big-time slasher/scorer last season, but has not built on that progress this season. TSJ has scored in double figures just three times this year, and while he’s improved his three-point shot, he’s only shooting 40 percent from two-point range. He’s lightning fast on offense and slow on defense, leaving Finch to have to limit his playing time and subbing TSJ out when he needs the defense to tighten up.
Jaylen Clark is the opposite. He’s a menace on defense, and he gets the early-career Jaden McDaniels left alone in the corner because he’s not an offensive threat treatment. Joan Beringer is 19 years old and just got sent to the G League. Leonard Miller will never play a meaningful minute for the Wolves. And Joe Ingles is only on the roster in a break glass in case of emergency end of game inbounding situation.
Every regular bench player for the Wolves has a negative on/off net rating. They don’t have the talent or depth to consistently come back from second-half deficits as we saw on Wednesday against the Grizzlies. Chris Finch has a bench problem on his hands with no internal fix in sight.