Once free agency has settled down and the NBA Draft has come and gone, we get a glimpse at what the oddsmakers are feeling about each team. For the Minnesota Timberwolves, the win total for next season has been set at 33.5, via betonline.ag.
Hammer the over.
Chris Finch will be in his first full season with the Wolves and his blueprint was starting to come to fruition at the end of the regular season. Minnesota went 9-7 in their last 16 games, which included wins over the Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors, Miami Heat, and Utah Jazz (twice).
Sure, carrying over momentum from one regular season to another is difficult, but what isn’t hard to believe is that this Wolves team started to buy into Finch’s message. And it coincided perfectly with the team getting healthy.
Karl-Anthony Towns, D’Angelo Russell, or Malik Beasley were out for large portions of last season. Often there was plenty of overlap. With Beasley suspended for the tail end of the season, it was a trio of Towns, Russell, and Anthony Edwards that really hit a stride together on the court. That trio will be largely expected to carry the load next season, too.
It isn’t all fine and dandy for Minnesota, though. They had a super quiet offseason, where their most significant move was trading for Patrick Beverley. The Wolves were cap-strapped and lost their first-round pick to the Golden State Warriors via the Andrew Wiggins trade. That and their history of losing will scare people away from the 33.5 win total, which is understandable.
Take into account that the Wolves have won over 33.5 games just three times since the 2004-05 season.
Those looking at the Western Conference will still expect plenty of teams to be far better than the Wolves this year. It’s a list that includes the Utah Jazz, Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Lakers, Denver Nuggets, Portland Trail Blazers, Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors, Memphis Grizzlies, and even a Kawhi-less Los Angeles Clippers. That math doesn’t bode well at a glance.
But this isn’t a “Will the Wolves make the playoffs or not?” bet. It’s a win total, and it’s set at a fairly low 33.5.
Here’s math that does make sense.
Chris Finch went 16-25 in 41 games as the head coach a season ago. Double that, and you get 32 wins in an 82-game season. But Russell only played in 22 of those games, and Beasley was only in uniform for six of them. That’s two of Minnesota’s best four players absent from half of, or most of, those contests.
Injuries are impossible to predict and adding potential COVID-19 complications makes it even trickier. But a healthy Wolves team that went 9-6 in its last 15 games could undoubtedly see 34 wins next year.
That 34-win mark would not be high enough to clinch a playoff spot in the Western Conference. Last year, the eighth-seed Grizzlies had 38 wins in shortened 72-game schedule. Yes, the Wolves only had 23 victories a year ago, but all factors have to be taken into consideration.
- They switched coaches.
- Their best player, Towns, only played 50 games.
- The schedule featured 10 fewer games, and their second-best player, Edwards, was a then-19-year-old rookie who was often carrying the brunt of the offensive workload by himself.
That’s no easy series of events to try and overcome. They aren’t excuses, it’s the reality of what happened.
Finch will now have his first full season as the head coach and an entire offseason to prepare the team. Edwards will try and peel back more layers to his game while Towns and Russell will finally share the floor consistently. Beverley will bring the bulldog mentality to the defensive side of the floor, something Minnesota desperately needs. This isn’t a title-contending team; it likely isn’t even a playoff team in the stacked Western Conference. But nobody is asking for that yet.
Looking across the board, it’s an incredibly pivotal year for many faces of the franchise.
- Towns is entering his seventh season in the NBA. It’s time for him to show he can be a franchise pillar on a winning team.
- Edwards is trying to follow up a dazzling rookie campaign with an encore in his second year.
- Finch is trying to show Gersson Rosas and the rest of the front office they made the right hire for their head coaching vacancy.
- And the domino effect even reaches Rosas. He now has his hand-picked coach along with many roster pieces he has helped put into place. Expectations for his plan to show results will intensify in 2021.
Nobody is asking for the world from this team next year. If they go even 34-48, they will have hit the over for the oddsmakers’ projected win total. That’s not too big of an ask at all.
