The Minnesota Timberwolves were leading the Sacramento Kings 63-61 with 7:57 left in the third quarter when Kyle Anderson stepped to the line to take his free-throw shots. Anderson engaged with the referee after making his first free throw, and another one came from behind him and gave him a technical foul before his second shot.
Everyone moved to the other side of the court. Kevin Huerter missed the technical foul free throw, and everyone shuffled back to where they were. Anderson made his second free throw attempt to put Minnesota up 65-61 in a game they’d lose, 118-111. “I don’t know why he got it between free throws,” said Chris Finch, who shook his head when I asked if he’d seen something like that. “I don’t know what he said.”
It was a fittingly weird moment in a strange season. The Wolves kicked things off by mortgaging the future for Rudy Gobert in a trade that the national media has widely panned. It’s hard to fully judge their two-big experiment because Karl-Anthony Towns and Gobert have only played 19 games together. However, it didn’t look great at the time. Therefore, it’s hard to fully appreciate what they’re doing now.
Towns hurt his calf on Nov. 28, and the Wolves have remained at .500 since then. It’s too early to know if the team can succeed at a high level with Towns and Gobert together, but the immediate returns haven’t been favorable. Most fans miss last year’s team, a scrappy underdog led by Patrick Beverley, who did his best Kevin Garnett impression when they won the play-in game.
Fortunately, Anthony Edwards has continued to ascend and will be the player who drives winning for Minnesota. He’s scoring 26.4 points per game on 47.0/39.7/77.5 shooting splits while occasionally giving us shades of Michael Jordan. He’s in command of a team built for Towns that hasn’t seen consistent winning since Garnett left. Towns’ return may hamper Edwards’ game. Towns and Gobert might clog up Edwards’ scoring lanes, and Towns could take possessions away from him.
Perhaps things will coalesce like the Wolves expected they would when Towns returns. But doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is insane. Towns and Gobert have not built chemistry while Towns has been out, and the team hasn’t gotten any more experience playing with two bigs. Towns is a dynamic offensive player. But his defensive shortcomings and tendency to be distracted by poor officiating have prevented him from growing as a player. None of that changed before his injury this year, and it’s unlikely to change when he returns.
Similarly, the Timberwolves created a Groundhog Day sequence early in the year. They’d go up big at halftime, blow the lead in the third quarter, then fight for their lives in the fourth. Sometimes they’d survive; other times, they wouldn’t. Regardless, they’d end up back at .500.
They seemed to have fixed that issue after a players-only meeting before the new year, except another issue emerged. The Wolves recovered from a six-game slide to end 2022 and are 11-5 in 2023. However, they’ve lost to the Detroit Pistons, Utah Jazz, Denver Nuggets, Houston Rockets, and Sacramento. They nearly beat the Nuggets on the road and split a home series against the Kings – hardly devastating results. But poor third quarters doomed Minnesota against Detroit and Houston, two tanking teams, and Utah traded them Gobert. Worse yet, none of the players can explain why they play down to their competition.
“We got guys that want to take on that challenge, play the big names,” says Anderson. “I always tell people and kids who always ask about the NBA, getting up for the [Kevin] Durants and the Kawhi Leonards and LeBron Jameses, that’s easy. We’re all here for a reason. We want those matchups. No disrespect to those other teams, but it’s the teams that are not as good, or their record isn’t so good, that you got to be able to bring it. We got a young team. We’re learning that, and we got to take every matchup seriously.”
“I guess it’s just a mindset thing,” echoes Nathan Knight. “We come into these games with some energy. It’s a different energy, a different vibe. We come out here with something to prove. When you play like this, it’s always exciting.
“I try not to approach a game like that, but that’s just how it unfolds sometimes.”
The best quality of last year’s team is that their unpredictability provided hope. You could go to a game on any given night and expect to see something unique. One night Beverley would be firing off a t-shirt cannon; the next, Edwards would deify himself. For many people, Basketball is a primary form of entertainment in the depths of Minnesota winter. Last year’s team felt like a reprieve from February’s frigid temperatures, even if they faltered once spring arrived.
This year’s team has experienced its fair share of strange incidents. Finch inadvertently discovered an odd quirk in the rule book at the end of the Toronto Raptors game, and Domantas Sabonis left a game where he fouled out – only to discover he hadn’t. But the results often feel too familiar. The Wolves beat the Kings 117-110 on Saturday to move to 27-25. Then they took them to overtime on Monday, only to lose once Sacramento spread them out in overtime. The split moved them one game closer to .500 just as they had ascended in the Western Conference standings.
Negative temperatures greeted fans as they left the Target Center, and it’s hard to see a shadow in the cold, dark night.
