Chris Finch said something earlier this year that has been stuck in my mind all season. After a November practice, he discussed how to use Mike Conley’s minutes more effectively, balancing how to avoid wasting them. At the end of his explanation, Finch offered up a very direct and honest assessment of his team.
“These guys got to learn how to play basketball,” he said, “without Mike Conley on the floor.”
Fast forward five-and-a-half months, and this assessment still rings true for the Minnesota Timberwolves in their series with the San Antonio Spurs. Conley had a team-best plus/minus at -3 over the 70 minutes played across the five games, which equals only -0.6 per game. He sits at a -3 over 149 minutes in the playoffs, which is second only to Terrence Shannon Jr. in Minnesota’s rotation.
Plus/minus ratings can be flawed depending on lineups and runs. However, it’s just one of many data points that show the Wolves never figured out how to play without Mike Conley.
Against the Spurs, Conley is leading Minnesota’s rotation in three-point percentage at 53.3%, shooting 3.0 threes a game. He has yet to miss a free throw in the series. His 2.6 assists per game are the second most on the Wolves despite playing the eighth-most minutes in the series.
His assist-to-turnover ratio is 6.5 against San Antonio’s stout defense. He leads the team in true shooting percentage at 74.2%, ranks third in offensive rating against the Spurs at 104.0, and leads the team in defensive rating at 108.1. He’s doing all of this at age 38 while playing as often as Rudy Gobert.
Conley’s series has been impeccable. Meanwhile, the team around him seems to be crumbling. Julius Randle is in the midst of one of the worst playoff series of his career, averaging twice as many turnovers as assists and shooting just 21.1% from three. Teams are occasionally playing Gobert off the floor due to his offensive struggles against Victor Wembanyama and the spacing problems that create. Anthony Edwards, Naz Reid, and Ayo Dosunmu are all battling through injuries, and Jaden McDaniels has been averaging 4.5 fouls per game in the series.
Even Shannon has fallen off since his spectacular Game 1 performance against the Spurs. That has left Conley as the glue holding a banged-up, broken team together. Due to his age, he isn’t able to give the team the minutes they have desperately needed as he did in the previous two seasons. Conley explained how nerve-racking that experience has been after the Game 4 win in Minnesota.
“I told Kyle (Anderson), ‘I’ve never been so nervous’ just sitting over here. I was like, ‘I don’t know how to handle this,’” Conley admitted. “Watching it late and we turned it over, I’m like, ‘God, I just wish I could get out there.’
“[Anderson] said, ‘Trust the guys,’ and we just trusted them, and we got plenty of guys, like I said. Ayo came in and took that role and won the game for us, I believe, with the way he was able to handle the pressure.”
The reality is that the Wolves still rely heavily on him because they never really learned to play without him throughout the season. Instead, they learned to make do with him at his age and abilities, relying on his brain.
“Mike, in the two months I have been here, has definitely helped me a lot,” Dosunmu explained before Game 6 on Friday. “Just being a mentor and somebody who’s always there for me, giving me tips and defenses or whatever it may be, I’m asking him a thousand questions about his path.”
Don’t just take Dosunmu’s word, though. McDaniels said something similar on Thursday when speaking about Conley’s value.
“I mean, Mike has been through everything, seen all the coverages,” said McDaniels. “[Finch] just trusts Mike the most, I mean, I would too, knowing he’s been through all this. I mean, he’s our general/ He’s our OG, he’s a vet, so he knows all the right answers.”
Finch also spoke about Conley’s value on Thursday ahead of Game 6.
“Mike is outstanding at this time of the season,” said Finch, “because he doesn’t make any mistakes on the defensive end of the floor.”
In March, Anthony Edwards also spoke candidly about what Conley says to him on the sidelines to get him going.
“Yeah, he’s just telling me what he sees out there, how they are guarding me, how I should play,” he said. “Today, it was more that first time out we were down like 12 or 15 points, and he was like, ‘Alright, 5, it’s time to be aggressive.’”
The reality for the Wolves is that their best player in the Spurs series is the same player they have been trying to figure out how to play without all season. That’s partly because of Conley’s age and partly because the Wolves need to grow as a team.
With a close-out game coming Friday night, the Wolves are facing elimination and still need Conley. Therefore, they might need him to defy the odds and turn back the clock.
