Something has happened – and keeps happening – to the Minnesota Timberwolves that seems too good to be true in more ways than one.
There is the pinch-me delirium of their ascending achievements, swelling the goodness to improbable new levels.
For starters, the Wolves didn’t just beat a Phoenix Suns team that had scorched them three straight in the regular season, they swept them in four with a mere modicum of strife. Then they went to Denver and beat the defending champs in the first game – a split on the road? No, better. A marauding defensive masterpiece without their best defender (Rudy Gobert, back in Minnesota attending the birth of his first child) present, to go up 2-0 heading back home.
Followed by three losses, a melodramatic plot twist registered with the reverberant drumbeat of reality. The champs and their maestro MVP Nikola Jokic had underestimated their foes and recalibrated.
No, not really. In fact, not at all.
Boom: A 45-point Wolves victory – a lambasting for the ages – evened the series. And then, after a beat, boom: The largest comeback from a halftime deficit (15 points) in NBA history – one that was actually 20 points a few minutes into the third quarter – snatched up the series with a bag-and-tag quickness that propelled the Wolves onward to the Western Conference Finals. On the 20th anniversary of their only previous sojourn this far into the postseason.
Meanwhile, another potent strain of goodness is also becoming improbably larger and larger as it courses along on a parallel track. This one is a trifle corny, maybe even a little mawkish, but so damned heartwarming, and fortified with a fiber that is organic and true.
Anthony Edwards, the stupendously athletic man-child with a charismatic gift for gab, has suddenly blossomed into the knowhow of making his teammates better, leveraging leadership skills on and off the court that are decades beyond his years.
Karl-Anthony Towns, a supremely talented, earnestly amiable and ferociously insecure player who had been infamously preyed upon by the Jimmy Butler/Tom Thibodeau tandem and permanently scarred by COVID taking away his mother, has quelled his legion of doubters by blossoming into a quietly confident, decisively efficient wellspring of veteran competence.
As these delicious playoff triumphs have mounted for the Wolves, Ant and KAT have begun taking the podium together for nationally televised, postgame press conferences. Their affectionate banter frequently flirts very close to bro-comedy shtick, but is always rescued by its highly-concentrated goodwill, to each other and the world around them.
Locker room video on various social media cuts even deeper. One clip features Ant addressing the team and then turning to KAT directly and recounting how, before the previous night’s game, he and his teammates had kept harping on KAT to make the right play. “And you made the right play every f—-ing time,” he finishes, to applause from those assembled.
The beauty here was KAT’s reaction. Along with the rest of the locker room, he knew that Ant’s praise was not only genuine, but accurate. The KAT of old might have protested too much or embraced it too greedily. The KAT of now simply tapped his hand twice over his heart and then led his team moving toward the center of the room to put their hands in a circle and chant, once, “Family!”
These feel-good moments continue to proliferate. After the Wolves won the first game in the Denver series, Gobert sat at his locker and told me he had “never been part of a group that really understands each other, that cares about one another” the way the Wolves do this season, and how he “loves going into battle every night with these guys.”
A little more than a week later, after point guard Mike Conley was forced to miss Game 5 of the series with an injury, a video captured Gobert walking quickly to catch up with Conley in the hallway between the court and the locker room. “Don’t ever leave me again,” Gobert said with playful sincerity, tapping Conley’s shoulder blades on the way by as he repeats the phrase. “I won’t do that to you again,” Conley responds, with enough seriousness to make it a moment, tapping Gobert back before he is out of reach.
The tie that binds these two strains of goodness stems from the way the Wolves have built their identity. It can be summed up in a single word: Defense.
Few things in life nourish the soul better than shared, arduous work, freely undertaken through collective motivation. When friends help each other move their belongings, paint a house, plant a garden, the toil is laced with kinship and relationships deepen.
The 2023-24 Timberwolves have taken that dynamic up a few notches. NBA defense is the epitome of teamwork. To play it at an elite level requires coordinated labor that must be strenuous, resilient and universal. If everybody on the court isn’t physically and mentally invested, the entire endeavor is obviously weakened.
There is no better example of the fortifying power of defensive teamwork than the resurrection of KAT in both deed and reputation. To say that the legacy of his nine-year career has been checkered is an understatement, a situation magnified by his relatively sparse and inconsistent playoff performances.
But it so happened that KAT became the best matchup for the league’s top defense to deploy on first Kevin Durant and then Nikola Jokic, two of the greatest offensive forces in NBA history. Against Durant and his Phoenix Suns in the first round, KAT wasn’t expected to contain Durant better than anyone else; he was martyred so that the Wolves could flex their chops on the other four Suns. It was selflessly commendable duty and KAT dug in and succeeded at it.
Matched up with Jokic, the NBA’s MVP three of the past four seasons, KAT’s role was similar in that his occupying Jokic enabled Gobert to both roam and protect the rim more capably, while closing off passing lanes that Jokic exploits better than anyone.
But KAT was meant to foil Jokic more than he could do with Durant. He has always had a knack for deterring Jokic better than anyone could reasonably expect, and make the phenomenal stats Jokic inevitably puts up a little less meaningful. The pair grew up together in the NBA and KAT has sussed far better than most how Jokic assures himself of positioning through initial collisions, the ways he likes to pivot, when pressure bothers him, and how to yield or contest when he spins and dribbles.
In one of his more grandiloquent moments, KAT called himself “the greatest big man shooter of all time,” the sort of passive-aggressive clap back at his many critics that usually doesn’t serve him well. By contrast, being the linchpin by which his team can throttle the effectiveness of Hall of Fame players in back-to-back playoff series is a checkmate rebuttal.
Best of all, KAT gets to silence his critics while engendering the love and appreciation of his teammates, the defensive dawgs who know what he is doing more profoundly than anyone else. And that’s a recipe for removing the PTSD that arose during his first six years with the Timberwolves.
For Ant, the blossoming happened in earnest a couple of months ago when he learned how to get off the ball and enable his teammates on offense. That provided momentum for extending his impact on the other side of the ball. The more palpable the challenge, the better Ant locks in. The higher stakes of postseason play – winning time – and the fact that the Timberwolves created a successful identity that could play in his this environment, sustained his focus and unleashed the player who has always been a phenomenal defender when devoted to it.
From KAT and Ant, you can continue on down the line. Gobert just won his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award and is still being ruthlessly mocked and criticized by peers like Draymond Green, who knows better but is hollowed by hate and the uncertainty of his own career twilight.
Then there is Conley, who has made no secret that his chances of playing on a championship team have nearly expired, and has injected his immaculate composure with small doses of desperation.
Jaden McDaniels is the tip of the Wolves defensive spear on the perimeter, whose intensity level welcomes red-line heat and combustion. He stokes his competitive nature beyond the norm, if not the pale – he’s endured a long history of lapsing into foul trouble, and of missing a postseason because his punched a wall last season. As the clock wound down on the Wolves vanquishing Denver in Game 7, McDaniels sought to bounce the ball high enough to punctuate the triumph with a slam-dunk, an incredibly rude gambit of disrespect, and a glimpse into the mindset he conjures to fling himself into the fray.
Off the bench are Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker, both highly-touted athletes in their teens who fell by the wayside and got paid relative peanuts while grinding to establish their value in this league. Not coincidentally, both have taken leaps in their defensive capabilities. And rounding out the eight-man rotation is Kyle “SloMo” Anderson, called the most important player on the team last season by Head Coach Chris Finch but plagued by shooting woes and caught in a numbers game this season, so that his veteran leadership and on-ball defensive capabilities, coupled with his playmaking, are where he earns his spurs this season.
All eight of these players have bonded to provide maximum versatility and minimum vulnerability for the best defense in the NBA. To a man, they have expressed love for their teammates both individually and as a unit, and have been the express recipient of that love by their teammates in kind at various points during this season.
With their proverbial backs to the wall in Game 6 of the Denver series, they allowed the Nuggets an absurd 70 points, a message wielded with a branding iron. And when the Wolves were down 15 at the half in Game 7, to a favored opponent playing at home, who had already been there and done that in terms of playoff advancement, the shared commitment of team defense shone through.
The average score for a team in the NBA this season was 114.2 points per game. The Timberwolves point total in the third quarter of Game 7 was 28, which would be 112 over four quarters, meaning their offensive output was a tick below average.
This comeback happened because the Nuggets scored just 14 in that third quarter. Great defenses succeed through attrition, and in that quarter the Wolves kept after it on their defensive rotations, their on-ball pressure, their thumb on the scale of a high-stakes situation that already tests composure and execution.
Denver’s two stars, Jokic and shooting guard Jamal Murray, already celebrated for a history of raising his game in the playoffs, combined on 4 for 13 shooting in the period, including 1 for 8 from three-point range. The rest of the Nuggets roster was 1 for 6 from the field and 0 for 2 from distance.
It was a one-point game heading into the final quarter, and the Wolves defense closed it out, permitting just 23 points for a second-half total of 37 – not far off from the measly 70 they’d allowed in four quarters in Game 6. The defending champs were eliminated on their home court.
Throughout this postseason, the greatest player in Timberwolves history, Kevin Garnett, has tweeted and podcast his support this 2023-24 edition of the Wolves. KG was celebrating his 28th birthday when he produced 32 points, 21 rebounds, five blocks, four steals and two assists to lead the Wolves into the Western Conference Finals for the first time on May 19, 2004. A feud with Wolves owner Glen Taylor has kept him at arm’s length from the franchise for many years now. But as one who has known the love, passion and intoxication of a locked-in team defense, those barriers were being at least temporarily lowered.
During the second half of Game 7, the icon now celebrating his 48th birthday was reduced to tweeting out emojis of Wolves and saying he was at a loss for words. Ant and KAT were doing their two-man show on the podium. Gobert sat on his stool, patiently taking on all questions. Once again, the Wolves are in the Western Conference Finals. It is rare for a team with a mediocre offense – the Wolves ranked 17th among the 30 teams in points per possession this season – to get this far.
Up next are the Dallas Mavericks, who feature the NBA’s top scorer this season, Luka Dončić. Alongside Dončić in the backcourt is Kyrie Irving, whose phenomenal dribbling and crafty shot arsenal has made him one of the best bucket-getters in the history of the league. They will try to put an end to this storybook Timberwolves season.
Perhaps they will. But at this point, whatever happens to the Wolves is no longer “too good to be true.” The truth of this goodness is impossible to deny.
Britt Robson
Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.
