Chris Finch is an affable coach. He’s Finchy to his players and has endeared himself to most of the fanbase. But he also can be incredibly candid. It’s probably the old man in him. He’s a small-town Pennsylvanian who went to college in Amish country and traveled around the world honing his craft. Finch cut his teeth behind the bench of teams in England, Germany, and Belgium before getting a job in the NBA. He’s seen a lot and says it as it is.
Therefore, he wasn’t hesitant to say that the Minnesota Timberwolves didn’t play hard in the first half of the Miami Heat game. He says they won 105-101 because they had better effort in the second half. “Sometimes when you come back from a road trip, that’s how it is,” he said, referring to Minnesota’s four-game trip where they won the final three games. “It’s one of the things in the NBA that happens. We just had to play hard.”
So was he upset that the Timberwolves nearly let a Heat team sans Jimmy Butler beat them at home?
“We’ll take wins right now, man, when we’re trying to figure things out,” he said. “Still improve on our habits, we’ll take all the wins we can. No time to be picky. We’re a long way from where we think we can be, and we have to keep pushing in that direction.”
The Wolves have taken care of business against undermanned teams so far, and they picked up a win over the pesky Indiana Pacers to improve to 10-8 on Wednesday night. A promising sign from a team that had a slow start to the season.
Conventional wisdom in the NBA is that nobody knows what a team is until they’ve played 20 games. I predicted they could be 8-12 through 20 games earlier this year. I sold them short. But while it’s early in the season, and there’s always room to make up ground, they must grab the games they can. The Western Conference is tight, and nobody knows how good the Wolves can be. Their two-big experiment is novel in the modern NBA.
Minnesota should beat the Charlotte Hornets on the road, and the Golden State Warriors don’t look as formidable as they did when everyone first saw the schedule. They’ll face the Memphis Grizzlies to finish out the month. While they could make a statement by beating the team that eliminated them in the playoffs last year, it’s not imperative that they win that game. The Timberwolves would be 12-9 at the end of November if they beat Charlotte and Golden State – in the mix in a tight Western Conference.
The schedule gets tougher in the second half of December, though. They will play the Dallas Mavericks in back-to-back games at home and have a road trip that will take them to Boston, Miami, New Orleans, and Milwaukee. They won’t beat teams like the Boston Celtics and Milwaukee Bucks in their current state. It’s one thing to beat four injured teams in a row; it’s another to battle contenders when you’re still figuring your chemistry out. Therefore, they need to start building a cushion while they can.
It’s still hard to evaluate how the Rudy Gobert experiment is coming along. How much are Minnesota’s shortcomings related to the players developing chemistry with one another? And how much are they related to trying to win in the modern NBA with two bigs? One is a first-half problem. The other is a franchise-altering one.
The best place to start is to look at how they fare against non-contending teams. In other words, are they beating themselves? Minnesota’s early-season results are difficult to parse because their schedule was a Trojan horse. Experts expected the San Antonio Spurs and Utah Jazz to miss the playoffs, but the Timberwolves had trouble against the well-coached Spurs and a veteran Utah squad. Still, things are starting to settle in now, and we should know which teams are good and which aren’t by December.
Do the Timberwolves take care of the Portland Trail Blazers in back-to-back games on the road? Do they win both games against the Oklahoma City Thunder next month? There is more parity in the NBA than ever, so there are fewer easy games. But if the Wolves are going to become an elite team, they need to beat teams like Portland and OKC. They didn’t go all-in to hover on the playoff bubble. They can start working toward home-court advantage in the playoffs right now.
More pertinently, pay attention to the little things. Are the Wolves playing hard? They should; you spend your time and money watching them play. Are they grabbing rebounds? Defending adequately? Fighting for loose balls? To use a player-specific example, Anthony Edwards’ highlight-reel dunks and clutch three-point shooting put butts in the seats and get fans to leap out of them. But will he live up to his defensive ambitions? Is he willing to hit the deck? That matters, too.
“We always say he’s a home run hitter,” Finch says of Edwards. “He makes big plays, and it feeds everything around him. In general, he’s done a good job of finding his moments ever since I’ve been here, finding his moments, and putting his stamp on the game.
“But you’ve gotta make all the little plays all the time, too. I thought there were a number of times tonight we could have put our body on the line for charges, and we didn’t, stuff like that. But we’ll get better.”
The Wolves should be able to fortify their record if they play hard against inferior teams. It will give them the leeway they need once their schedule gets tougher in December. We won’t find out if the Gobert experiment worked until later in the year. But we can find out how much heart they have after including Patrick Beverley and Jarred Vanderbilt in the package to get him.
