Fans of the Minnesota Timberwolves at Game Four of the playoffs.Photograph by Carlos Gonzalez / The Minnesota Star Tribune / Getty
One must consider that Sisyphus is, perhaps, deeply in love with the boulder. That, from time to time, during his endless task, the sun glints across the rock’s face in a way that reminds him that there were good times, or at least different times. It helps to imagine his perpetual hoisting not as a punishment or as a necessity but as a task charged with affection. He can’t stop, but he wouldn’t want to even if he could. To imagine it any other way would be to admit that it’s all misery, all the time.
Your sports fandom, my sports fandom, the sports fandoms of people we know and love—it can all feel Sisyphean. It can feel like misery all of the time, even when it isn’t. Just last week, after the Boston Celtics lost in the first round of the playoffs, after blowing a 3–1 lead against the Philadelphia 76ers (who were led by a hobbled but determined Joel Embiid in an all-time Game Seven effort), the Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said that he felt no more empty losing the series than he had when the Celtics won the championship in 2024. He was going for something philosophical—about the relentless pursuit of greatness, undertaken by a collective, and about how, more often than not, win or lose, the result is a sense of ache when you realize that you have to do it again next season.
Granted, I’m not sure if I would want to hear the head coach of my favorite team dabbling in the kind of nihilism that propels certain strains of fandom, but I understand where he’s coming from, because I am starting to get used to the Minnesota Timberwolves not being _only_ a source of disappointment and minor depression in my life. I’ve been a fan since the nineties, through a somewhat heyday in the early two-thousands, during the Kevin Garnett era, which culminated in him taking the team to the Western Conference Finals in 2004. But the team was dismal for much of my adult life, and not in a way that I considered fun. There are fun bad teams, or teams that at least make a unique bonding experience out of their specific type of misery. Like, for example, the Cleveland Browns. My friends who are lifelong Browns fans would absolutely _love_ to see a winning season, of course. But they have been so rigorously and sort of beautifully molded by disappointment that the disappointment has become its own craving of sorts. When it arrives, it affirms who they are, which means that too much success would be disruptive (though, of course, they _do_ still hope victory will arrive).
The [Timberwolves type of bad](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-joy-of-the-minnesota-timberwolves-defense), from 2005 to 2022, wasn’t thrilling, and it didn’t lead to some emotional revelation or bonding experience for me. It was mostly just misery—a team that wasn’t good and that wasn’t close to being good, a team that squandered opportunities for franchise-changing draft picks. (I am not especially hung up on this, and I do believe it was the right decision at the time, but I’m haunted by a photo of the 2009 draft board, showing the Timberwolves choosing the point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn, right before the Golden State Warriors selected Stephen Curry. Rubio proved to be a solid but not great point guard. Flynn was out of the N.B.A. within three years.)
I have a running joke that is, like many of my running jokes, more consistent than it is funny. It began in 2011, in the early days of posting on what was then Twitter. As the N.B.A. season approached, no matter how bad the Timberwolves had been the year before and no matter how stagnant they were in the off-season, I would send out a message along the lines of, I believe the Timberwolves will be going 82–0 this season. It was a joke in that it was an absurdity, but it was also a joke in that it was an absurdity that I believed, because when there are zeros on both sides of the win-loss column you get to believe a bit in impossibilities. In the weeks and days before the first shot goes up, the sun shines on the spot of the large boulder that you have willingly affixed yourself to, and the boulder feels, momentarily, lighter. Until it doesn’t.
I don’t understand people who come to sports to feel rage, or agony, or panic. At least, I don’t understand those people _anymore_ (I once was one). I have consumed the new golden era of Timberwolves basketball the past few seasons with a sense of calm that I think alarms the rest of my Wolves-fan pals. I think that rooting for a hopeless and hapless team for so long gave me a new perspective on the simplicity of sports: It is the clearest example of zero-sum. There is only one championship, and only one team can win it. For a sliver of time, all of the teams share the same odds, and thereafter the statistics likely don’t work in your team’s favor—or if they do it doesn’t last for long. And so I no longer understand a mentality of fandom that insists that you can only feel good about a team if they win a championship. It seems, to me, that that sets one up for years of disappointment, with, perhaps, one bright spot, or two if you are lucky.
By the time you read this, the Timberwolves could be on the verge of elimination against the San Antonio Spurs, or—against the odds—they could be in a position to prevail once again, in another series win that will be called unlikely but won’t especially feel that way to me. I do believe that the Spurs are a better team than the Timberwolves, not only on paper but also on the floor. They are a team that stifles defensively, and a team that is near-impossible to defend against at all three levels. One highlight of their first-round victory over the Denver Nuggets, for example, was watching Jaden McDaniels, a consistent defensive menace, declare that the Nuggets were “all bad defenders” after Game Two of the series, before going out and scoring thirty-two points in the closeout Game Six. And yet one thing about the Timberwolves—the thing that compels me most about them, I think—is that they seem almost violently propelled by their status as the underdog, or by an awareness that people have little belief in them, whether owing to injuries, to oddsmakers, or to whatever our eyes plainly tell us about a matchup.
I’ve decided that I delight in watching the Timberwolves fight almost as much as I delight in seeing them prevail at the end of the fight. When I turn on a Timberwolves game, even now, I feel distinctly aware that I need to find pleasure in something other than victory, and so I’ve chosen to find pleasure in rooting for a team that doesn’t back down, that shows up ready more often than it doesn’t (though I am, intentionally, not mentioning Game Two of this Spurs series), and a team that has managed to correct all that I believed about it during the dark decades. I am enjoying these Timberwolves precisely because I know how bad it can get, I know how easy it is for a team to slip back into perennial badness, and I am training my heart to not fall _too_ much in love with whatever this different thing is, because there is a chance that, at some point in the future, I will be longing for these Timberwolves while watching a version of the team that is not rising to the same heights. And I’ll have to love that team, too, as easily as I love this one. ♦