In November the Minnesota Timberwolves unveiled a dazzling new personality, fronted by a charismatic star flexing his the contours of his ascendance and bulwarked by a pair of reconciled seven-footers looming large across a surprisingly expansive intimidation zone. Toss in a sage to regulate mood and rhythm and a hound to beset the opponent’s best perimeter scorer and the Wolves were somehow instantly fabulous.
The record was 13-2 and the calling card was an unexpected ace in the hole: Defense. Fueled by gleeful teamwork, the Wolves were a workout machine when the other team had the ball, especially after the feeling-out periods of the first half. Through the third and fourth quarters, Minnesota’s brute size and syncopated hustle had opponents hurrying shots and searching futilely for a safe space to catch their breath. In the third quarter alone they allowed 20.9 fewer points per 100 possessions than they scored. For the entire second halves of November, their defensive rating was 5.5 points per 100 possessions stingier than everybody else. Autopsy reports on their 13 victims couldn’t determine whether they ultimately succumbed to exhaustion or suffocation.
As we get set to embark on the final week of January, the Wolves are in a spirited three-way struggle to retain the first-place perch in the Western Conference that they seized in November and have yet to relinquish. They are essentially tied with two of their November victims, the defending champion Denver Nuggets and the upstart Oklahoma City Thunder. Despite being on the road, they will be favored against their next three opponents, all of whom sport losing records.
But their performance against the woeful Charlotte Hornets at home on Monday night signals that all bets are, at least temporarily, off. That dazzling personality, once shiny with sweat equity and celebratory grins, is in danger of being reduced to a pillar of salt by the old demons of hubris and immaturity.
The signature wins in November against the then-previously undefeated Nuggets and Boston Celtics announced that these Timberwolves were different from the other 34 versions of the team throughout the course of franchise history. And as recently as last week’s column, I credibly wrote that that was still true. As of Wednesday morning, they still have the best defense (measured by points allowed per possession) and are tied for the second-best record in the NBA.
But in the dozen games played thus far in 2024, the Wolves are sowing doubts about whether they have enough poise, character and perspective to appreciate what it will take to sustain the joyous trajectory of this season and truly become a team worthy of being cherished.
But it was hard not to notice that the team’s abiding sense of purpose had inexorably slackened, replaced by sporadic bouts of galvanizing teamwork that were short-circuited through careless passing on offense and overconfident indifference at the defensive end. They gave up 40 first quarter points to a Detroit Pistons team with a record of 4-36. Even after regaining the lead, instead of a second-half suffocation, they let the hapless Pistons hang around — Detroit finished the game making more than half of their field goals and 40% of their three-pointers.
The next night, at home against Memphis, the injury-riddled Grizzlies raced to a 12-point lead and still led by 5 heading into the fourth quarter before the Wolves stepped on the gas and walloped them in the final stanza. That was followed by the Wolves blowing a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter at home against the Thunder in a matchup of the teams with the two best records in the West.
In other words, the fiasco Monday night had been presaged since the onset of the new year. It was easy to provide excuses. The Wolves had just endured the most rugged stretch of what basketball-reference.com had deemed the toughest schedule in the NBA less than two weeks ago. Despite the hiccups, they hadn’t lost to a team with a losing record since the third game of the season in late October. In a make-or-miss league, they possessed a superb defense able to compensate for their offensive inefficiency.
It took a flagrantly embarrassing performance to at least temporarily detonate this gloss of optimism.
The Charlotte Hornets came to town with the worst net rating—meaning the worst differential between the points they scored and the points they allowed per possession—of any team in the NBA. They had lost 18 of their past 20 games since December 11. Their offense was ranked 27th among the league’s 30 teams. Their defense was ranked 28th.
The Hornets starting shooting guard and highest-salaried player, Gordon Hayward, has been out since late December with a calf strain. Even more onerous, the Hornets two 7-footers, Mark Williams and Nick Richards, were out, leaving a starting lineup of two players 6 foot 7 inches P.J. Washington and Miles Bridges, to guard Wolves big men Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns.
None of this mattered, except for what it did to the Wolves mindset. When the Wolves looked at themselves in the mirror before Monday night’s game, they did not see themselves as a team that had blown three fourth quarter leads in the past two weeks; they did not see a team who commits the third-most turnovers in the NBA, causing it to languish in the bottom half of the league in offensive rating despite copious firepower on its roster.
Instead, what they saw in themselves came from figments of their childish imagination. They saw themselves as a team that could beat Charlotte without maximum effort or a full commitment to reestablishing their identity as a defensive behemoth nobody wants to face. They wanted to pre-assume the credit without putting in the work.
At the end of the first quarter, the score was 34-32, Minnesota. The Hornets undersized frontcourt and bottom-four offense had scored just as many points in the paint, 14, as Minnesota, with the same shooting line, seven baskets in nine attempts. In fact, both teams made 13 of 21 shots overall in the period—a gaudy 61.9% accuracy.
But shoddy defense against an undermanned, significantly less-talented opponent was not the top thing on the Wolves’ radar. No, KAT was going wild — 22 points in the first quarter. So what if his primary defensive assignment had 13?
In the second quarter, KAT had 22 more points, a whopping 44 points in a single half, easily a Timberwolves franchise record. And, in all seriousness, it truly was a phenomenal display of shooting — eight-of-nine from three-point range, eight-of-12 from the foul line and six-of-eight on two-pointers. It was spectacular, and created a carnival-like atmosphere within Target Center.
Few people noticed that KAT also had five turnovers in one half of action; or that, for all of KAT’s fireworks, Charlotte was matching the Wolves nearly bucket for bucket. The Hornets shot 25-for-40 (62.5%) compared to Minnesota’s 24-for-38, albeit with fewer three-pointers or free throws than the Wolves.
Coach Chris Finch noticed. After the game he minced few words.
“What I said at halftime is, why don’t we start getting back to who we are and play some defense and not let this game fall down to a point where we miss a bunch of shots, then they make a bunch of shots, and now we’re behind. That’s what I said at halftime,” Finch spat, clearly peeved that his warning was prescient down to the details – and still unheeded.
A scoring spurt at the end of the third quarter had built the Wolves lead up to 15 – specifically, 107-92. It was becoming another night in the NBA – a first-place team turning it on late to rout a doormat opponent down the stretch.
Except Finch had known better. KAT cooled off – he made two-of-10 shots in the fourth quarter, including no treys on three attempts and no trips to the foul line to finish with a franchise-record 62 points. His teammates did little better, sinking four-of-12, with just one trey and five made free throws for a total of 18.
As the Wolves missed a bunch, the Hornets made a bunch. Six-of-10 from behind the arc, eight-for-13 from two-point range, two-of-two from the foul line – for 36 points. Final score, Charlotte 128, Minnesota 125.
The first question Finch was asked is, how did the game slip away?
“It was an absolutely disgusting performance of defense and immature basketball, so it really didn’t slip away. It had been there from the jump. That’s what happens when you have that type of approach,” he said.
He went on to describe all the different schemes he invoked to try and jumpstart the defense, along with imploring them to “get up on the shooters. Yeah, the messages weren’t getting through.”
When beat writer Jace Frederick observed that the Wolves seem to let down whenever KAT and Anthony Edwards begin the game with a barrage of points, Finch replied, “You’re spot on … Obviously we are going to try and feed the hot hand. But at some point we’ve got to go back to making the right play, doing the right things. There’s a lot of ways to be immature.”
That’s Ant’s cue. While KAT was pouring in 44 first-half points, Ant had 0, and took just one shot. Yes, he had fice assists and rang up five more before taking his second shot more than halfway through the third quarter. Ten assists is great. Your top scorer turning down five or six obvious shot opportunities seems like faux teamwork to highlight your passing. It wasn’t a surprise that from the tenth dime onward, he was three-for-10 from the field with just one other assist.
“He’s getting off it, making a lot of the right plays,” Finch allowed. “But he’s got to stay aggressive offensively and for some reason he didn’t.” Acknowledging that it is natural to feed KAT when he is hot, he added, “But we still need for him to be a scorer, and from that, make the right plays.”
It is no coincidence that this pratfall occurred during the first game that sage veteran point guard Mike Conley has missed, due to rest and a slight hamstring pull. And it was heartening to see Ant and Conley in deep conversation when the media entered the locker room Monday night.
But the clock is ticking. The Wolves are already labeled around the league as postseason underachievers – whether you are talking about ancient franchise history, what Gobert has done here and in Utah, or the failure of KAT, Ant, and the rest of the roster to parlay regular-season success into meaningful playoff advancement.
Finch knows he has to accelerate the learning curve and affixed his boot to the team’s rear. “We totally disrespected the game, ourselves, and we got exactly what we deserved,” he said.
Can the Wolves grow up enough to thrive in the crucible of playoff hoops? That is suddenly the dramatized storyline for this team in the final 40 games of the regular season. They need to absorb the fact that they have been exposed as psychologically vulnerable, with an immature approach to the season-long grind that shortchanges their impressive skills and corrodes the thrilling defensive prowess that got everybody so excited in the first place.
But the hit to their egos needs to be a bruise, not a virus. Their dedication going forward needs to be thorough and sincere, not performative. The prescription for what ails them isn’t that hard to parse: Sustain your focus, thrive in your role, sweat the small stuff, and the nearly invisible stuff that high-character teams address. Bottom line, don’t disrespect the game, or yourselves, and learn how to deserve the winning you claim is your top priority.
The jury is out.
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