The Minnesota Timberwolves weren’t who we thought they would be for the first half of the season. Before the 2021-22 season began, most fans assumed the law firm of Towns, Edwards, and Russell would lead one of the best offenses in the NBA. Last year’s breakout shooting star Malik Beasley, up-and-coming 3-and-D prospect Jaden McDaniels, and incoming stretch 4 Taurean Prince and career 38 percent three-point shooter Patrick Beverley flanked Minnesota’s big three. Therefore, we assumed the Wolves would stretch the floor and kill teams from beyond the arc.
We were wrong. Or at least the Wolves had not proven us right yet. Minnesota was 16-20 through the first 36 games of the season and ranked 27th in field goal percentage and 23rd in three-point percentage. But the offense is finally hitting its stride since the starters began to trickle back into the lineup following the team’s COVID outbreak. Minnesota lost to the Los Angeles Lakers on Jan. 2. Since then, they are 10-5 on the back of the best offense in the league over that stretch. Led by should-be All-Stars Karl-Anthony Towns and Anthony Edwards, the Wolves are pounding opposing defenses to the tune of 119.2 points per 100 possessions. That’s the best offense in the league in the last 15 games and would be four points per 100 better than the Utah Jazz’s league-leading offensive unit.
Minnesota is finally hitting threes, just like we thought they would before the season began. That should terrify the rest of the league. They’re up to 11th in three-point accuracy since Jan. 3 and still launching more threes than any other team. On Tuesday, they hit 19 of their 42 threes in a decisive win against the sixth-seeded Denver Nuggets. That’s the equivalent of the “Happy learned how to putt” moment in Happy Gilmore when it all comes together, and he eventually beats Shooter McGavin in the Tour Championship.
Does that make Nikola Jokic the Shooter McGavin in this scenario? Giannis? Glen Taylor? Chris Finch as Chubbs? We must make sure he stays away from alligators and open windows. Do Lakers fans think they’re Bob Barker? Is Pat Bev for sure the hired gun that calls Happy a jackass? All I know for sure is that Tom Schreier was definitely taking baseballs to the chest just to feel something sometime around the Luke Ridnour era.
Moving on. Before this offensive renaissance, only Towns proved to understand that the three-point line wasn’t just there for decoration. Beasley, McDaniels, Beverley, D’Angelo Russell, and Taurean Prince were all clustered shooting between 26.8 and 34.6 percent from deep, well below their career averages. They couldn’t shoot their way out of a bad date and cost the team some early-season wins thanks to their dependence on the three-point line.
Since then, Prince has been Michelangelo from deep, shooting a 47.4 percent masterpiece from three. DLo is just under 40 percent, Ant is up from 35 to 38 percent, and McDaniels has found his stroke hitting 32.7 percent from three over the last 15 games. Heck, even Josh Okogie is hitting threes at a league-average rate in his spot minutes over the previous month. (Beasley has been worse, but we can’t all get what we want.) It’s a scary thing when eight or nine guys can make a shot in crunch time of big games. The Wolves have knocked down 15 or more threes as a team eight times in the last 15 games.
That shot-making consistency will be critical. The Wolves appear capable of playing their way out of the play-in purgatory and attempt to leap the Nuggets into the sixth seed. After the important win against Denver on Tuesday, the Wolves are only two games behind their Northwest Division rivals for sixth place in the Western Conference. Minnesota is also only 2.5 games behind Dallas for the fifth seed.
The Wolves enter a winnable stretch of games, starting a home-and-home against a Detroit Pistons team vying for the first pick in this year’s draft. Then they travel to California for a back-to-back against the Sacramento Kings, who currently sit in 13th in the West. If Minnesota wants to be taken seriously in the playoff race, they will look to sweep the next four games to extend their win streak to six. For that to happen, the offense needs to be there so the Timberwolves don’t overlook bad teams. It’s something they’ve done too many times in the past. The Wolves dropped a winnable game against the Orlando Magic earlier this season by shooting just 37 percent from the field and 27 percent from three.
But it’s not just threes that are finally falling in the Target Center. The Wolves are first in two-point field goal percentage during this 10-5 stretch, third in true shooting percentage, and sixth in total field goal percentage and mid-range efficiency.
If the shooting troubles that plagued the Wolves for the first half of the season were some kind of fluke, and the team that’s finally caught fire over the last month is the real Timberwolves, look out. A team boasting the most efficient offense that continues to play above-average defense has a shot at making some real noise in the playoffs. The Wolves offense is in its happy place right, and the way I see it, we’ve only just begun.
