Team culture in the NBA or any sports league has always felt like a hard-to-define concept. Theoretically, every team has a culture, whether it’s good, bad, intentional, or accidental. It’s like every other workplace or group of people who regularly gather to create or work on things.
Unfortunately for Timberwolves fans, much of the team’s history has been plagued by an unstable, constantly changing culture. During the Kevin Garnett and Flip Saunders era, the two Minnesota Timberwolves legends created an identifiable culture of toughness and defensive effort. However, that culture mostly left when they did, and it has fluctuated almost yearly. Every hired, fired, or resigned coach and front office member attempted to influence the team’s culture positively. However, they were all mostly unsuccessful. And every time the revolving door swept out one problem, it simultaneously sucked in another.
But for the first time in a long time, the Timberwolves feel like they are developing a stable long-term culture. Everyone on the team seems to like each other. Players constantly praise each other in interviews and defer credit when it’s due. The players respect the coaching staff and have lovingly called head coach Chris Finch “Finchy” for over a year. Finchy has run with it and does a great job of relating to players and coaching them hard to get the most out of them.
Of course, it’s easy to be happy when you’re No. 1 in the Western Conference and have been for the longest stretch of time in franchise history. The vibes are great now. Still, we witnessed this team bend under frustration last year. Rudy Gobert punched Kyle Anderson on the sideline, and the Wolves suspended him before a Play-In game. Jaden McDaniels punched what he thought was a curtain, but he actually hit the wall and broke his hand on the same night. Players who weren’t bought into Minnesota’s bigsperiment created tension in the locker room.
So what then makes me believe this culture is sustainable long term? The Timberwolves have stable leadership with a process that we can trust, which has quickly netted positive results. Part of this stability in leadership seems to come from new Wolves owner Marc Lore. The CEO of The Genesis Company, Dan Bowling, has discussed why team ownership matters. He has made a strong case for why Wolves fans should be excited about Lore as the new owner of the team in his appearances on the Dane More NBA Podcast.
I’ll let Bowling handle the business operations analysis. Still, there’s one pertinent thing he pointed out that shows Lore has already contributed to improving the team’s culture while also upgrading the on-court product. Lore has stated that he wants to make the Timberwolves organization “the best of the best — with separation.”
I’m wary of phrases like this when they come from a team owner. But Lore has spent enough money to indicate that he wants to make the franchise better. After he started taking ownership control, Lore influenced several decisions that changed the face of the organization. Ownership fired Gersson Rosas for creating a toxic workplace environment and having an extramarital interoffice relationship. In his opening press conference, Rosas preached about wanting the Wolves to be a family. However, he didn’t maintain family values in his personal or professional life, directly contradicting the culture he professed to want to build.
However, it’s not just the owner’s job to fire the bad apples. It’s also part of their job to hire the right candidate to take their place. Lore and the ownership group made a list of five general managers they wanted to pursue: Tim Connelly, Masai Ujiri, Daryl Morey, Bob Myers, and Sam Presti. At one point, the list also included Pat Riley. All the GMs they pursued were among the league’s best; maintaining Lore’s goals of the names felt impossible to obtain because they all had stable jobs with good franchises. Still, Wolves ownership put together an offer Connelly couldn’t refuse. They gave him a large pay raise and bonus incentives based on the franchise’s growth in value after Minnesota hired him, which is almost sure to be a fortune by now.
Lore and Rodriguez didn’t stop there when trying to achieve their goal of creating a “world-class” front office. They also gave Connelly the resources to expand the front office staff. Connelly almost doubled its size from the previous year, adding Dell Demps and Matt Loyd to the existing core staff, including Sachin Gupta and Manny Rohan. There’s no salary cap on front office members, so it is ultimately the ownership’s prerogative to spend as much money on front office staff as they want. The fact that Lore and Alex Rodriguez were willing to spend big money on the front office to try to get a competitive advantage in the league demonstrates that they genuinely want to be “the best of the best — with separation.” They aren’t here solely to collect a paycheck.
Having an ownership group with a plan to create a more competitive organization is the first step toward building a sustainable team culture that doesn’t leave when the best player does. Still, having the right front office might be more important. It’s uncertain whether this supergroup front office is truly world-class. However, they have already done a lot in their short time to improve the team’s standing in the league and their chemistry as a group.
When the Timberwolves hired Connelly, he talked about wanting to seek out great players and high-character people. I was skeptical of that at first. We’ve seen plenty of teams in NBA history not get along and still be successful. However, we’ve learned that this is important for smaller market teams that can’t attract stars through free agency and must acquire most of their talent through the draft and trades.
Last year, the Wolves endured a setback after trading for Gobert. It’s fairly normal for teams to struggle to immediately incorporate a star player, especially one who requires teammates to learn how to play to his strengths, as Gobert does. Jon Krawczynski reported that chemistry issues developed between D’Angelo Russell and Gobert during the team’s rocky start to the season. “DLo wore those issues on his sleeve,” Krawczynski told KFAN’s Dan Barreiro.
DLo tried to make it work, but it was uncomfortable at times. We would come into the locker room, and you could hear him actively bemoaning the situation. I’ve talked to coaches and players from other teams who heard him getting down on Rudy during games. There was this perception that D’Angelo Russell was very frustrated with Gobert and didn’t seem as open to working with him or trying to find a happy medium as maybe some of the other players were trying to do, to make what has so far been a disappointing trade, try to make it work somehow.
People who regularly express their discontent in the locker room instead of searching for solutions can destroy a team’s ability to hit their ceiling. It can bring down morale amongst the team and result in players not giving full effort. Additionally, if you’re not open to working on what you need to improve as an individual, then the team won’t improve either. He may have spread his discontent further if the Wolves had kept DLo around longer. He also negatively influenced those who believed they could make things work with Rudy.
When Connelly and Minnesota’s front office traded DLo, they removed someone who wasn’t helping foster the culture of collaboration they were trying to build, just like the ownership did with Rosas. In return, they got Mike Conley, one of the best team culture-setters in the modern NBA. Conley fit many of the team’s needs perfectly. Last year, the Wolves occasionally struggled to keep their emotions in check and got whistled for many technical fouls. Conley has never gotten a technical foul in his storied career and appears to be a calming influence on the Wolves on and off the court.
Conely played with Gobert in Utah, so he immediately knew how to play with Rudy upon arriving in Minnesota. He also actively helped his teammates learn how to play with Gobert. Conley has talked about his own process of learning how to play Utah, noting that it took him a year or so because he had to learn where Rudy liked to get the ball on lobs and cuts to the rim. You can see how much their time together has paid off. Conley’s passes are almost always perfectly in Gobert’s catch radius. As a result, Gobert catches it practically every time Conley dishes it to him. That’s somewhat ironic, given that Rudy’s ability to catch is one of the main things DLo complained about.
James Harden’s most recent legendary quote, “I’m not a system player, I am a system,” also feels appropriate for The Stifle Tower, at least on defense. Now that Minnesota’s roster has learned how to play to Gobert’s strengths, the Wolves have become the best defense in the NBA and lead the league in defensive rating at 106.7 — 1.5 points ahead of the second-place Boston Celtics. Fans and media are no longer hyper-focused on Rudy’s weaknesses. Instead, his strengths are now motivating his teammates to be better defenders. That’s a highly influential part of creating such strong team chemistry and a collaborative team culture this year.
Finally, Connelly seems to do an excellent job of listening to what players want, and he has provided good contracts to all the guys who deserve to get paid. Karl-Anthony Towns got a supermax, Anthony Edwards got a max, and he extended McDaniels and Reed. “Everybody’s here to win,” Naz said, expressing how this has helped the team. “Everybody has one goal. Everybody’s got their money situation out of the way. Now we’re here to play basketball and win the game. We’re not really too much worried about anything other than that.”
Connelly has always rewarded his best players, dating back to his time in Denver. He gave Michael Porter Jr. a max deal despite the critics who were concerned MPJ’s lingering back injuries would prevent him from playing enough to earn that contract. Connelly stuck with his guy and trusted his own process. Porter was a huge reason the Nuggets won the title last year. Similarly, Connelly paid KAT a supermax despite some of the public’s negative opinions of him. ESPN’s Tim Bontempts called it a “public show of support to the team’s star from its new president of basketball operations.” Connelly also listened in the offseason when Timberwolves players told him that “we gotta get Naz done” and signed Reid, even though they already had Towns and Gobert.
These are examples of how the Timberwolves front office and ownership group contribute to creating a sustainable team culture. Remember when many people thought that losing Patrick Beverley would result in the Wolves losing the grit and competitiveness that made up the team’s culture two years ago? Well, it’s still here and stronger than ever, and that has largely resulted in minor tweaks to the roster made by the front office that brought in high-character players, something that Connelly stressed the importance of since the day he arrived. By creating a sustainable team culture, they have created an environment that I believe can give their young superstar Edwards the best chance to reach his ceiling and win the Wolves a championship because they have put great players and mentors around him.
