At this rate, Tom Thibodeau will either save the Minnesota Timberwolves, or he will destroy them. This year, the second year of his five-year, $40 million contract, he’s going all out, using his power both as team president and head coach to try to turn a perennial loser into a playoff team as aggressively as possible. He’s creating separation from the competition in the West, but he also might burn out his players at the end of the season.
Thibodeau’s methods inspire both excitement and recall baggage. His credentials as the defensive coordinator of the NBA Champion Boston Celtics in 2008 and the fastest coach to reach 100 wins in Chicago earned him a five-year, $40 million contract.
But his reputation for long, gruesome minutes also merited pause. Derrick Rose was a 22-year-old MVP who suffered an ACL injury and never was the same. Joakim Noah and Luol Deng also showed signs of fatigue at a young age. And, generally speaking, observers of the Thibodeau Bulls felt his team was weary come playoff time due to playing so many minutes in an already tiring 82-game regular season schedule.
On the day that Thibodeau was named head coach and president of basketball operations, he was ushered to a podium in the middle of the Target Center court. In front of him sat a gaggle of media and season-ticket holders. Before he could even get seated, someone shouted, “Are you gonna make the playoffs this year?” Thibodeau, not yet at the podium, flashed his signature smirk and answered, “Might as well get started.”
That’s all he really needed to say.
Thibodeau wanted to win right away, despite inheriting a team deeply entrenched in a culture of losing. Following the Flip-KG era that brought a run to the Western Conference Finals in 2003-04 following seven consecutive years of first-round exits, the team had not had a winning season since 2004-05.
The die-hards stuck with the team, believing the Wolves could turn things around.
Target Center was starting to show its age. The post-Garnett uniforms reeked of his trade, the failure to build around Al Jefferson and Kevin Love and nearly 500 losses from 2010-17. Seattle had lost the Sonics and wanted NBA basketball again.
Flip Saunders started to resuscitate the Wolves with a masterful trade that shipped Kevin Love to Cleveland in exchange for Wiggins, then stealth-tanked to get Towns. But his tragic death stymied any momentum his return, as well as his courtship of Garnett as a player in his twilight and potential co-owner of the team, had generated.
Thibodeau arrived in Minneapolis demanding power, and got it from the same organization that gave him his first shot in the NBA. He had gone from a young assistant coach with a mullet and tracksuit who got his break by joining the expansion Wolves in 1989 to a balding, boisterous man dressed to the nines with a raspy voice and Cheshire smile, ready to finish what Flip had started.
In his first year as the Wolves head coach, Thibodeau applied the medical shockers early and often — yelling incessantly at his young team even though anyone paying attention to the Timberwolves that season would recognize that any hope of an immediate turnaround was futile. They started with five losses in the first six games.
They were 6-14 after 20.
They were 9-21 after a Christmas Day loss in Oklahoma City and 31-51 at the end of the year.
But Thibodeau kept yelling. So much so that he was widely criticized for it. Even after a year-long hiatus during which he visited the best minds in basketball — Gregg Popovich and the Spurs, Steve Kerr in the Bay Area, etc. — and had his pick of vacancies to choose from, he realized that his team was undermanned and in need of a makeover.
It appeared he had underestimated how bad the situation was in the NBA’s frozen tundra.
Thibodeau stole the show on draft day with his trade for Jimmy Butler. No longer were Minnesota’s headlines about potential — Towns and Wiggins being named rookie of the year and dominating the freshman vs. sophomore game, Zach LaVine defying gravity with a Looney Toons jersey at the dunk contest — but about what could happen right away. He was praised as a “vengeful god” that had swindled his old team that he left after a feud with the front office.
But the narrative shifted immediately once the season started. The Wolves started to play an absurd amount of minutes, and while questions continue to linger as to whether Butler and Wiggins are redundant, Jeff Teague’s defensive deficiencies and a lack of 3-point shooting — everyone, locally and nationally, is fixated on the time Thibodeau’s starters remain on the court.
Deadspin’s Albert Burneko, in a piece titled “Tom Thibodeau is Destruction,” lays out how Thibodeau’s defense was innovative in the late 2000s, and how other NBA teams have now adjusted both their offensive and defensive schemes in order to counter his defensive system. Burneko argues that Thibodeau has “has another trick up his sleeve,” however, “one he developed during his time with the Bulls. “It isn’t really an X’s-and-O’s thing; in fact, the Timberwolves don’t really do anything innovative or even particularly sharp, basketball-wise. It’s just: When the other team takes its starters out of the game to get some rest… Thibodeau, uh, doesn’t.”
Burneko then goes on a screed about how Thibodeau is disregarding his players’ human traits, like fatigue and injury, in the name of winning basketball games. “In video game parlance, it’s a cheap exploit,” he writes. “The opposing coach will regard his players as human beings, if only insofar as recognizing that they might get tired and start bricking shots by the fourth quarter if they don’t get some rest, and Thibodeau refuses to do the same for his.”
Heavy minutes can be justified through youth, familiarity that leads to on-court chemistry and endurance that comes as a result of intense cardiovascular activity. And many great players play expanded minutes early in their careers. Furthermore, Thibodeau is unlikely to hamper the team’s long-term potential by trying to pick up a few cheap wins in a season in which Golden State and Houston are dominating the Western Conference. He ultimately has the most to lose if he burns out his players, since he’s under contract for three more years and will not get complete control like he has now if he does not succeed in Minnesota.
The more pressing issue is that the Wolves have already suffered humiliating fatigue-induced losses this season to a Washington Wizards team without John Wall, a Memphis Grizzlies team that had fired its coach and had lost 11 straight games and a young Philadelphia 76ers team that was coming off a four-game losing streak and lost its next four games.
In each of those games, the starters played an absurd amount of minutes, but could not finish off their opponents late. And in each of those games, the starters, especially Butler and Towns, insisted that they are able to play big minutes. Towns may be 22, and Butler may have an offseason workout routine that is a “serial killer’s dream,” but something has to change. The Wolves are losing games they should win, and some bench players are being underutilized.
Jamal Crawford has demanded more minutes and stepped up while Wiggins tries to find his shot again. Tyus Jones played well in Teague’s absence when he was injured. And Gorgui Dieng earned a $64 million extension in the offseason but hasn’t seen the court very often.
Thibodeau also needs to use the Oklahoma City first-round pick and Cole Aldrich’s contract to add wing depth. But in the end, he is who he is.
He’s going to play the starters a lot of minutes.
He’s going to scream and shout.
And he’s got the Wolves hanging onto the fourth seed in the West come Christmastime.
He’s also got both the nation’s attention, as well as that of cynical Wolves fans. With increased attention has come criticism, and rightfully so, but he has options to make winning more sustainable and the levers of power to do so. He’s just got to adjust to the league, now that the league has adjusted to him.
Maybe under a different circumstance, like if the Wolves had a reputation as a perpetually .500 team like Detroit or Milwaukee, they would have tried to lure a local guy — like Fred Hoiberg or Dave Joerger — or plucked a former coach out of the announcer’s booth like Jeff Van Gundy or Mark Jackson to try to form a contender. But Thibodeau’s the right guy for the job right now.
After all, it’s better to burn out than fade away.
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