At best, team names and the playstyle match perfectly for a memorable season. However, the Minnesota Timberwolves are playing too much like Wolves right now.
The Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens in 2000 and 2012 fit this mold. Ravens can be solitary creatures, living their lives without a mate. Seeing a single raven is possible in the wild. However, when they form a flock, known as a murder of crows, they become a formidable force. They scare off larger predators with the swarming defense of their prey, much as Baltimore’s defense did at its peak.
It gave rise to the term “Play like a Raven,” which the team stitched onto the players’ jerseys.
However, some teams just don’t play as their name would suggest. Take a Timberwolf, for example.
Wolves are pack hunters that rely on the closeness of their brethren. They coordinate hunts, live together, and create a hierarchy that determines everything in the group. Then you have the Minnesota Timberwolves, who occasionally can play basketball as a unit, as their mascot exemplifies. However, especially in their 116-105 Game 1 loss to the Denver Nuggets on Saturday, they couldn’t look more disjointed and less like Wolves.
While the metaphor may seem like a stretch, it’s easy to see the coordination of Wolves hunting an animal. Likewise, it’s easy to see the difference when watching the basketball team try to get itself going offensively. Instead of trusting the pack or the pack leader, they get erratic and start calling their own numbers, something that rarely would happen in the animal kingdom. Simply put, when the Wolves hit adversity in the basketball world, they lose trust in each other.
That primarily manifests in their ball movement, which was the largest and most significant issue on display in the 116-105 Game 1 loss to the Nuggets.
“Guys were trying to get themselves going a little bit there, ball didn’t move,” Chris Finch said after the game. “Played a lot of shell offense, a lot of guys stuck on the perimeter, not punching in the gaps, no movement. I thought we had really good ball movement in the first half, too, and it just kind of dried up. It really cost us, because it led to a lot of easy baskets for them being able to run out of our poor offense.”
As Finch alluded to in his answer, the ball movement was superb in the first quarter. Four players had four or more shots in the quarter, and eight players had at least one shot attempt. Jaden McDaniels led the way, going 3 for 5 and scoring ten points.
The Wolves finished the quarter with eight assists on 12 makes, shooting 52.2% from the floor and 50.0% from three. The good offensive movement led to increased defensive pressure, and the Wolves ran out to a 33-23 lead. Denver shot just 6 of 22 from the field.
However, the first cracks began to show in the second quarter. The offense was getting sticky, as Finch has called it in the past, and McDaniels is the barometer. After having 5 shots in the first quarter, McDaniels finished the second with just one shot, which he would take with 1:10 left in the quarter.
McDaniels played the final 7:53 of the second quarter and only had four offensive touches. Of those four touches, he turned two of them into assists, scored on a third, and made the right pass on the fourth.
The lack of movement also bore out in the game log. From the beginning of the quarter to the 1:44 mark, the Wolves had just two assists: a pick-and-roll between Mike Conley and Rudy Gobert and a McDaniels assist to Edwards for a layup. For Wolves fans, these stretches are all too common.
The script played out in the middle of the second quarter, Julius Randle pull-up with 7:26, clang, Anthony Edwards pull-up three at 6:55, clang. McDaniels to Edwards for the layup at 6:27 in an open floor. Here’s what happened in the next few minutes:
- Randle iso, draws the foul.
- Edwards step back three, clang.
- Edwards iso draws foul.
- Edwards iso layup.
- Edwards step back three, clang.
- Randle step back three clang.
Finch pulled Randle for the rest of the quarter, and the Timberwolves managed to get the offense moving enough to tie the game. The second quarter would end with every Wolves player who played logging a minus net rating, and just six assists on eleven baskets. The dam broke in the third quarter, though, when the Wolves logged two assists on six made baskets.
The box score tells a similar story to the first quarter. Four Wolves players had four or more shots, and seven players logged an attempt. The Wolves played eight consecutive minutes without a single assisted basket. Both of Minnesota’s assists came on made threes: a fast-break pass to set up Donte DiVincenzo and an easy read for Edwards to hit Conley in the corner. Other than that, the ball movement was non-existent.
That would also bleed into the fourth. The Timberwolves had five assists on 11 makes, giving them 21 assists on 40 made shots, but if you take out the great first quarter, it left the Wolves with 12 assists on 28 makes, a 42.9% assist percentage in the final 36 minutes. For reference, Minnesota averages 62.0% in wins this season.
That’s the reality for the Timberwolves. When they move the ball and execute on offense, it inspires all-world defense on the other end. It turns the team into a championship contender capable of building a 10-point lead against the Nuggets. When the trust and movement falter, the Wolves’ offense sputters until their defense inevitably follows suit. The Wolves show they can lose to anyone. With game two on the horizon, Minnesota’s best shot is to play like the Timberwolves and trust their pack.
