When I was in nursing school a decade ago, one of the professors used a phrase that I’ve carried with me throughout my career. It also applies to the Minnesota Timberwolves’ recent surge.
“Nursing is a profession all about productive manipulation,” they said.
Sounds sketchy, right?
Especially for a profession in which Gallup polls found 75% of the public rates their trust in nurses as either very high or high, compared to just 56% for doctors.
The reason it’s so trusted is that nurses and nursing assistants are the front-line workers. We’re with the patients the most. We catch the medication errors. We provide the teaching, and most importantly, we are the advocates for the patients. In basketball terms, nurses are the coaching staff, while the front office is the medical staff. Tim Connelly is a fantastic front office leader, but you see Chris Finch a whole lot more.
So what is productive manipulation in nursing?
In essence, it’s the art of convincing a patient that the correct thing to do medically was their idea. A new diabetic should check their blood sugar, especially if they are on short-acting insulin.
Typically, we advise them to do this four times a day, immediately upon waking and before every meal, to know how much insulin to take. Most people, diabetic or not, don’t like poking themselves with a needle to get blood to test it for anything. Human beings also generally don’t like being told what to do.
That’s where the battle of education in healthcare begins. Somehow, some way, a nurse has to convince the person that this is an imperative part of their new life, and that checking their blood sugar is vital. The best nurses know how to deliver this education so well that the patients themselves believe it was their idea to check their blood sugar.
It’s basically a Jedi mind trick that nurses are taught, whether it’s diabetes, wound treatment, or medications. Regardless, we all deploy the art of educating a patient in such a way that we never really have to tell them what to do. They “come up” with the idea themselves.
It all sounds kind of familiar to the Wolves situation, right?
Chris Finch has been educating the players about the importance of ball movement and connectivity all season. He does this every season, dropping hints, showing film, poking and prodding the players into buying into a concept that the Wolves seemingly rally around after every All-Star break.
This season, the difference seems to be how well Finch has perfected this task. It’s gotten to the point where, dare I say, he’s productively manipulated the team into thinking his taking points are their ideas.
In the first clip, Finch says, “You’re coming out, 25-26 games, you’re not going to greatly affect your average. Nothing like this is going to happen, so we just have to settle in and winning has to be first and foremost.”
Finch made that statement after Minnesota’s victory over the Dallas Mavericks on February 20.
The second clip is Anthony Edwards from March 3.
“After All-Star [Break], there’s 20-something games [left],” he said, “[and] your average can’t change.”
“That sounds like something your coach might say,” Dane Moore told Edwards in jest.
“No, no,” Edwards responded. “I’ve told my teammates this, your average, it doesn’t change.”
Finch has pulled it off again. He appears to have implanted into his players’ minds after the All-Star break that the stats don’t matter and only winning does. So much so that Edwards believes it was his message in a clear example of productive manipulation.
The Wolves have won five in a row and are the 3-seed in the West. They have the fifth-toughest remaining schedule in the NBA, but they now all believe in the same mission. It may have taken a while to get to this point. Still, Finch has learned which levers to pull to get his team to lean into areas of the game that aren’t as much fun as scoring, much like a nurse gets a diabetic to prick their finger.
