It haunted the Minnesota Timberwolves all summer long. When executives, coaches and players looked back on a 2022-23 season that ended with a 4-1 series loss to the Denver Nuggets in the first round of the NBA playoffs, they immediately started to do some soul-searching on what sent them home early.
There were many reasons that they didn’t fulfill the expectations they had for themselves, from injuries to unfamiliarity to immaturity. But one pebble stuck in their shoe as much as any other in their summer of lament. The Wolves went 7-13 against the teams with the seven worst records in the league, including a dumbfounding 1-9 against Charlotte, Washington, Detroit and Portland.
All of those losses to all of those losers helped push the Timberwolves down to eighth in the Western Conference at season’s end. It could have made all the difference if they had been mediocre rather than embarrassing in those matchups. Going 5-5 in those 10 games against the Hornets, Wizards, Pistons and Trail Blazers would have put them as a No. 4-seeded team and given them home-court advantage in the first round.
Instead, they had to go on the road to play the Los Angeles Lakers for the first game of the Play-In Tournament. Then, after beating Oklahoma City in the second Play-In game, they earned the No. 8 seed and had to play in the first round against the Nuggets, the team that steamrolled through the playoffs to their first championship.
Had the Wolves won just one more of those games against the dregs of the league, they would have hosted the Lakers in the Play-In Tournament. Maybe they would have beaten Los Angeles at Target Center, which would have set up a first-round matchup against the vulnerable Memphis Grizzlies instead of the juggernaut Nuggets. Maybe the Wolves would have beaten the Grizzlies like the Lakers did, which would have been just the second time in franchise history they made it out of the first round.
It would have been harder to declare last season a failure and to criticize the Rudy Gobert trade that had happened, right? It would have been impossible had the Wolves beaten the Suns in the second round and advanced to the Western Conference finals like the Lakers did.
Of course, none of that happened. They put up a good fight against Denver but went out quickly and spent the next four months being ridiculed and discounted. President of basketball operations Tim Connelly and coach Chris Finch harped on the team’s lack of maturity throughout the offseason, emphasizing the importance of not looking past any opponent, no matter the record.
“Some of those were just immature losses,” Finch said last month. “We needed to form an identity. We didn’t have an identity last year. They were a little bit different every night.”
The message appears to have landed.
After thrashing the Grizzlies 127-103 in Memphis on Friday night, the Wolves improved to 7-0 this season in games against the worst teams on their schedule. They have beaten Memphis (6-15), Utah (7-15) and San Antonio (3-18) twice each, including two road wins against the Grizzlies in the same season for the first time since 2003-04, and Charlotte (7-13) once on their way to a franchise-best 17-4 start to this season.
The Wolves have had far more impressive victories than those, including against Boston, Denver, Oklahoma City and New York. But in terms of quantifying the differences between this year’s incredible start and last season’s underwhelming finish, the way they are handling their business against the struggling teams that come across their path stands out.
The 2022-23 season was filled with trap games. This season, to use one of the Grizzlies’ favorite phrases, the Wolves walk in your trap and take over your trap.
“I’m not going to lie, it’s different players every night,” Anthony Edwards said after they beat the Spurs on Wednesday when asked why they aren’t suffering the same letdowns this season. “It’s never one player. It’s always two or three players that come in and plays big on nights like this.”
That has never been truer than in Memphis against a Grizzlies team missing Ja Morant because of a suspension and Steven Adams, Brandon Clarke and Marcus Smart because of injuries.
Just over three minutes into the game Edwards pulled himself out after aggravating the right hip pointer that caused him to miss two games and hampered him in the win over the Spurs on Wednesday. Finch said his hip was hit on the first play of the game and he “came down on it at an odd angle when he landed and kind of flared up on him.”
Edwards will be examined further in Minneapolis on Saturday, and it remains unclear if he will have to miss any more time.
“Hopefully, we can get him back right,” Finch said.
Earlier this season, losing Edwards would have meant death for the Timberwolves offense. But the Wolves were able to close out the Thunder in the fourth quarter on Nov. 28 after Edwards left the game with his initial hip injury and have now won all three games they have had to play without him in the last week.
Karl-Anthony Towns led the scoring Friday with 24 points and also had seven rebounds and five assists. Gobert had another monster night with 16 points, 20 rebounds and six blocked shots. Mike Conley had 19 points, seven assists and four rebounds. But it was the players down the depth chart who stepped in for Edwards on the wing.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker scored 14 points, hit four 3s and held Grizzlies star Desmond Bane, who scored 49 points in a win over Detroit last time out, to 16 points on 6-of-13 shooting with four turnovers. Troy Brown Jr. started the third quarter in Edwards’ spot and hit three 3s and scored 11 of his 20 points in the period.
“I was just focused on winning,” Brown told reporters in Memphis. “My teammates found me in the second half.”
And long-struggling Shake Milton had his best game with the Timberwolves, scoring 17 points on 6-of-9 shooting in 22 minutes. He hit three 3s in the game after hitting just two in his previous 12.
That is the Shake Milton the Wolves thought they were getting when they signed him from Philadelphia this summer. They needed a true bucket-getter with the second unit, a role that Jaylen Nowell was unable to fill. But Milton was hitting just 35 percent from the field and 21 percent of his 3s this season. He looked much more confident and assertive Friday night, and that is what Finch has been pushing him to do for the last few weeks.
If Milton’s night was not just a one-off and a sign of things to come, the team with the best record in the league just got a little more dangerous.
“We’ve got a lot of guys that can play and a lot of guys that can score,” said Gobert, who led the way for the Wolves to outrebound Memphis 54-28. “We are an unselfish team. When the ball is moving, we are a really, really tough team to guard because you don’t know where it’s coming from. … Everyone is shining. I think that’s the Minnesota Timberwolves we want to see and we’ve got to see consistently.”
Gobert had his first career game with at least 15 points, 20 rebounds and five blocks. Kevin Garnett is the only other Timberwolves player to have such a stat line. Gobert also blocked his 1,500th career shot and posted his ninth straight game with multiple blocks, tying Garnett and Eddie Griffin for the longest such streak in franchise history.
Now comes the hard part for the league-leading Wolves. They travel to New Orleans for a game Monday that is the first of 16 straight against teams with a record that is currently above .500. They play at Dallas (twice), Miami, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, New York, Orlando and Boston in this daunting stretch.
Then again, given their struggles last season against the league’s weakest teams, maybe the Timberwolves already conquered their biggest challenge.
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