It can be easy to get deflated.
After allowing a 44-point third quarter Wednesday night to the defending champs, a stretch reminiscent of some of the gloomiest times the Timberwolves experienced in Tom Thibodeau’s first year with Minnesota, his team looked down. And with the bad quarter came similar symptoms of a bad stretch being played by a young team: lethargic transition defense, questionable decision making on offense and a lack of desire to win.
It may remind some of last season, but last season doesn’t matter.
Don’t get it twisted; it’s still important to look at the loss to Golden State. The way the Wolves opened with one of the best defensive quarters they’ve had all year was impressive. To let that game go with bad transition defense and laziness should be concerning, especially considering it’s happened before. When Jimmy Butler was injured, and his team lost two games to “inferior” opponents Indiana and Detroit, transition defense and slow feet were again the culprit.
When Butler was out, the reaction was to blame the lopsided losses on his absence. Against the Warriors, the one outlier team in the NBA, it’s hard to fault anyone other than the complexion of the opponent.
Still, three games with similar problems resulting in blowout losses are almost certainly troubling to someone as obsessive as Thibodeau. His team has given up the most fast-break points in the NBA through 11 games, and the margin between 30 and 29 is an unsettling one. They’re also in the bottom three in points allowed off turnovers, and the bottom six in points allowed in the paint.
In a way, all of these numbers are connected.
But Thibodeau still wants to take this one game at a time, and that’s important. The circumstances that led to the Golden State defeat, while different by some statistical measures, aren’t the same ways in which they lost to the Spurs, Pistons or Pacers. Each loss brought forth a new challenge, and a new item to look at for his squad.
And, as Butler pointed out in his interview with USA Today’s Sam Amick, the team is still getting to know each other.
“Everybody’s happy, for the most part, and we’re only going to get better because we’re only learning more and more about each other.”
That might be the key to all this. No, not that they’re learning about each other, and taking the season on a day-by-day basis. The fact that they’re happy.
Few teams react to bad body language as much as this team. When they’ve been up, they’ve looked ready to take on anyone, including the Warriors. That’s how they held the legendary offense to just 22 first-quarter points on Wednesday. But when they gave up 44 points two quarters later, they didn’t look the same.
Take Wednesday’s game against the Warriors as just one example.
This was the point in the game when the Warriors would begin to pull away, and it was clear the Wolves could sense the run was coming. The body language of Butler, Taj Gibson and Andrew Wiggins might be as telling as anything else. The fifth player in the Wolves’ lineup never even shows up in the frame.
In short, when the Wolves are down on themselves, they tend to play lazier basketball. A team that plays lazy basketball in the NBA is going to give up a lot of points, and fast-break points might be the easiest kind to acquire on a team with bad body language and slow feet.
Taking another Wiggins example, just look at his body language in last Sunday’s game against Charlotte. The Wolves had a huge lead, and frankly, weren’t in dire need to stop a fast-break score at this point. But Wiggins’ ability to sprint and catch up to Treveon Graham here stopped a bucket from happening. His quickness getting into proper position even made it harder for Graham to dump it off to the trailing Malik Monk.
Somehow, Thibodeau is going to have to find a way to get his team – especially Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns – to realize how important it is to exert the kind of effort displayed above, no matter what the score of the game might be.
Regardless, it’s hard for any long-time follower of this team to look at the first 11 games and do anything but rejoice at what they’ve seen. Despite some glaring flaws, they’re still 7-4.
They’ve accumulated multiple crunch-time wins against projected high-end Western Conference opponents, like Oklahoma City and Utah. They’ve won big against teams they’re supposed to win big against, like Dallas and (injury-plagued) Charlotte. For the most part, it’s been a successful start for this team, especially considering how much turnover the roster has experienced.
Each game has brought its own bit of new information. The Utah win proved Jamal Crawford still has some fire left in him. The Oklahoma City wins proved the Wolves can handle a fiery “Big Three.” The New Orleans win proved they can win without Towns doing much of anything.
The list goes on, but each win also proves something much bigger: the loss to Golden State was frustrating, but should not result in a subsequently new outlook on this team. It can be easy to get deflated, but there’s just no good reason to. Just like the wins, a loss only brings a new nugget of information Thibodeau’s coaching staff should be able to use to their advantage going forward.
By the end of the regular season, each win and loss will be the only thing that matters. This early on, the only thing that matters is what you can learn from them.
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