Fixing rotations isn’t an easy task.

For Tom Thibodeau and the Minnesota Timberwolves, the minute load for the starters and the subsequent fatigue have seemingly become a problem.

Or at least a story.

Jimmy Butler’s initial worry about big minutes broke storylines all over the place. From The Ringer to ESPN, it became a national headline. Eventually, more starters were asked about it. Butler wasn’t alone in this thought.

“It’s a lot,” Andrew Wiggins said last week. “We have some older guys on this team. We also have some young guys. I don’t really get tired. I’m only 22, so I could run forever — for now.”

They currently have four starters – Butler, Karl-Anthony Towns, Wiggins and Jeff Teague – in the top 25 in minutes per game, with their fifth starter – Taj Gibson – sitting in the top 40.

The Wolves starting lineup players more minutes together than any other team in the NBA, and the disparity is staggering.

The regular starting five – Teague, Wiggins, Butler, Gibson and Towns  – has played 575 minutes together. Second place has played 179 fewer total minutes. Fifth place has played 338 fewer minutes.

Keep in mind, Butler and Teague have both missed time at different points in the season.

Since Nov. 22, when backup big Nemanja Bjelica went down with an ankle injury, all five players are in the top 22 in minutes per game. As a result of the injury, Gibson has gone from 40th in minutes per game to sixth. He, Butler, Towns and Wiggins make up 40 percent of the top 10.

Before the injury, the minutes were a bit more evened out, with only Butler, Wiggins, and Towns sitting in the top 30.

This impacts the bench, too, especially ones who might have signed here with different ideas in mind.

And while Butler’s comments, said to FSNorth’s Marney Gellner, seemed to strike a chord, the same player sees the importance in fighting through the pain. Especially early in the season.

“I think everybody in this locker room wanted to be a professional basketball player and play 48 minutes if they could,” Butler said last Sunday. “I don’t think minutes has anything to do with it.”

Towards the end of Wednesday’s overtime loss to the 76ers, Gibson — Butler’s former Bulls teammate — had 40 minutes under his belt and it showed. On the tail end of that stint, he struggled to even stand up. Eventually, his play fell off, he fouled out and looked out of sorts in the locker room following the game.

Even so, he had no complaints about the minutes.

“Minutes are minutes. You’ve just got to go out there and play through them,” he said on Wednesday. “The coaching staff sees what’s going on. The game is about runs but I don’t know. You can say it’s the minutes, you can say it’s a lot of different things. It’s gonna happen when you’re playing hard, so we played hard.”

This idea was brought forth by FSNorth analyst Jim Petersen in a string of tweets earlier in the week.

Petersen’s point is correct. In the era of Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Allen Iverson, big minutes weren’t a topic of conversation. Players like Iverson, as Peterson points out, wanted more minutes than he got. He played over 40 minutes per game for several seasons.

In addition to their tangible on-court greatness, they were tough.

But toughness is impossible to quantify; some players are able to display it via the eye test than others. But production after a big supply of minutes is quantifiable, and has been done.

Dating back to his time in Chicago, Thibodeau has been known for his short rotations and starter-heavy minutes. But, as David Naylor pointed out earlier in the week, they didn’t always result in bad fourth quarters.

In fact, they were the league’s best at certain points.

Between now and when Naylor wrote his piece, the fourth quarter numbers actually improved slightly, despite not moving above last in overall league rankings.

Part of this had to do with Thursday night, when the Wolves beat the lowly Sacramento Kings in convincing fashion. What separates this game was the impressive fourth quarter, where the Wolves held their own and looked fresh.

And part of that was the re-inclusion of a ninth member of the rotation. No, not Bjelica. Marcus Georges-Hunt.

When Thibodeau decided to take Shabazz Muhammad out of the rotation, it left Jamal Crawford as the lone wing off the bench. That eight-man rotation is what drove all this to begin with.

“Just I wanted to see if we could get some minutes from him,” Thibodeau said after Thursday’s matchup.

Thibodeau liked what he saw.

“He compliments Jamal too, in terms of Jamal’s gonna give us good offense and Marcus can give us good defense, so it’s good.”

With the inclusion of Georges-Hunt, the minutes went slightly down for Butler and Wiggins. Additional minutes for Gorgui Dieng allowed the previously tired Gibson to take a longer rest as well.

In a lot of ways, Thursday night’s game is the ultimate proof of how tricky rotations can be. If the starters are going to play fewer minutes, it implies switching different lineup combinations that the Wolves have seen success in.

To put in a guy like Georges-Hunt implies he trusts him to not just play, not just relieve Butler and Wiggins, but to add to the team’s success.

If he didn’t trust Georges-Hunt, or Muhammad, it implies coach Thibodeau didn’t necessarily trust all the decisions GM Thibodeau made.

If the impulse is to criticize Thibodeau’s coaching, one should look at the person who put the roster together first.

In this case, it’s the same person.

But even if Thibodeau truly likes the end of his bench, that doesn’t mean using all of them all the time is the best way to win. What he’s done this season with the rotations have brought the Wolves their best start in over a decade, en route to their first playoff berth in nearly 15 years.

Players like Butler, Wiggins, Towns and Gibson have played major minutes, but they’ve also produced and won games for a fanbase that hasn’t seen wins in a long time.

It might not always be pretty, but fixing rotations never is.

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Tim Faklis

Tim Faklis is a senior editor and the Timberwolves beat writer for Zone Coverage, as well as an NBA contributor for Sporting News. He's written about basketball and music for A Wolf Among Wolves, VICE, City Pages, Fansided, Growler Mag, Hardwood Paroxysm, The Classical, and others. As it stands right now, he remains the world's biggest Trenton Hassell fan.

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