On Sunday, the Timberwolves played their final game of the 2024-25 regular season. They beat a depleted Utah Jazz team, the last of many such late-season matchups where the Wolves needed to win, and the opponent did not. The win earned them a 49-33 overall record and – just barely – an escape from the play-in tournament. They earned the 6 seed in a clustered Western Conference that has one powerhouse, in Oklahoma City, and a whole bunch of teams hoping to compete as long as they possibly can.
The season that was just completed is not an easy one to define, or distill down to prevailing narrative.
Was it a success?
Nobody paying close attention would say that it was. There were far too many disappointing losses, leaving a clear sense that a little bit better coaching, or a little bit better execution and consistency could’ve netted them one of the top seeds in a wide-open (after OKC) Western Conference. Because there were so many wins down the stretch (more about those, in a moment) it is easy to forget just how many TERRIBLE losses this team incurred during the real meat of the season.
The home loss to Miami, when Jimmy Butler sat out but Spoelstra rattled us with full-court defense. The consecutive losses to the Blazers (before they started playing decent basketball) that immediately followed the Heat debacle. Losing in overtime to the Rockets, when Mike sat out, Rob was incredible, but Finch couldn’t bring himself to keep Rob in the game for overtime. Losing to the pre-Butler Warriors, at Target Center, when Draymond sat out. Losing to the pre-Butler Warriors, at Target Center, again, when Draymond sat out, again. Losing to the Wizards, who hadn’t won a game in ages. Losing to the Bucks when both Dame and Giannis sat out. Losing to the Jazz. Losing to the Pacers, at Target Center, when most of their team sat out. Losing to the Pelicans, at Target Center. And, most recently, losing to the Bucks after blowing a 24-point lead in the 4th Quarter.
That’s a dozen bad losses, several of which were downright inexcusable. If they’d have taken better care of basic business, the Wolves would have had a 50+ win season and home court advantage for at least one round of these upcoming playoffs.
Further cutting at the idea of this season having been a success is how many of the wins down the stretch of the season were of the “gimme; the other team ain’t trying” variety. Broken into 20-game increments, the Wolves went 10-10, 11-9, 11-9, and then 15-5 (and then 2-0 to round out the 82 total). What that kind of was, was a team hell-bent on hovering around .500, until the Springtime Tanking Season arrived, and with it lots of very un-lose-able games. In that 17-5 close to the season were wins over Philly, Charlotte, Miami, no-Wemby San Antonio, Utah, NOLA, no-Cade Detroit, Brooklyn, Philly again, Brooklyn again, and Utah again.
To perform like a slightly-better-than-.500 team and then clean up on the late-season tanking scraps is not something that a reigning conference finalist would, or should, aspire to. There is a reasonable case to be made that this regular season was not a success.
But… was it really a failure?
There are some ways to spin this thing more positive.
Let’s start with some Wolves Fan Relativism. Forty-nine wins and a 6-seed is almost a top-5 season in franchise history. We don’t need to do the full rehashing of the dark days, because we’ve done that enough, but it is sufficient to say that we are not yet in a place where medium success is taken for granted. Yes, last year was very fun. Yes, last year was better than this year. Yes, everything I wrote above about terrible losses is still true.
And yet, the Wolves won a lot more than they lost, and finished ahead of some pretty decent competition – teams like Steph Curry’s Warriors, and Ja Morant’s Grizzlies. The Wolves statistically ranked out well. They were 6th in defense, which is worse than last season’s domination, but still very good. They were 8th in offense, which is a big leap upward from last year’s 17th ranked finish. Point differential is a good predictor for team quality, and the Wolves had the 4th best net rating in the league, trailing only the 3 tier-one juggernauts, Cleveland/Boston/OKC.
And just because the Wolves lost a lot of bad ones, and won a lot of easy ones, it doesn’t mean they had no impressive wins either. They swept the (rival?) Nuggets. They beat OKC a couple times. Avoiding the play-in was on the line in Memphis in Game 79, and the Wolves prevailed. There were legit wins along the journey.
It’s tempting to use the word “inconsistent” to describe a season like the one we just saw, but to me that does not quite capture it. Going 10-10, 11-9, and 11-9, over the first three quarters of the season seems pretty consistent to me. A better word to describe the 2024-25 Timberwolves would be TENSION.
The first area of tension for this year’s Timberwolves team was the tension between itself, and last year’s team. The Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle & Donte DiVincenzo trade happened out of nowhere, right before the break of training camp. Despite its logical rationale, there was no escaping the hard feelings it would generate amongst a segment of the fan base (particularly any time Randle played poorly, or KAT played well for the Knicks, each of which happened a lot in the early part of this season) or the framing that would be all set to describe exactly why this team performed worse than last year’s team did. Coming off of that conference-finals run and then making that huge trade, there was lot of tension. It surrounded Randle most acutely, as his ball-dominant style of play at Towns’s power forward position made for an easy blame target, even on nights when it was pretty clearly “not his fault.” This lessened over the course of time – Randle’s play improved, and he was missed dearly for a stretch when he was out with a groin pull and the team struggled in his absence. It seemed as if he and Finch – a mutual admiration society, if there is one, here – stayed true to each other, and found better offensive ideas to unlock his passing. But even with those relatively good games, people will look back on this season as one of difficult accommodation of new players, Randle especially.
Speaking of new players. The second area of tension would be between the roster’s youth versus its experience. We could do a double dip here, and say tension between Chris Finch and Tim Connelly, at least if we assume that Connelly joined Wolves fans everywhere in enjoying the Rob Dillingham and Terrence Shannon Jr. minutes more than Finch seemed to. Hell, we can triple dip, and just add the specific tension between Chris Finch and Rob Dillingham. Almost every team, on some level, wants to have its cake and eat it, too. They want to win now, and they want to have some future talent upside within the roster somewhere. Sometimes it works out wonderfully – OKC seems well positioned to dominate for a very long time – and other times it causes problems. Denver just canned both coach and GM because of a failure to sync up present and future priorities, in this way. (Golden State’s situation with Jonathan Kuminga is another example of young-old tension gone awry.)
With the Wolves, if you were told before the season that Finch would largely leave all of his young guys on the bench, how many wins would you have wanted to see manifested from that approach? I think even reasonable people would probably want to have seen more than 49, even if just a few more, like 52 or so. Early on in the season, when Conley was struggling with injuries, role adjustments, and Father Time, two things seemed painfully obvious to anyone paying attention: (1) Rob Dillingham was a better option at that point in time; and (2) Rob had some real flaws, and his confidence was vulnerable to Finch’s quick hook. As the season wore on, Rob fell entirely out of the rotation, replaced instead by more segments of Donte and NAW at point guard, and small stints from Jaylen Clark. (Clark would be the clear exception to the Finch vs. Youth tension on the roster, and just so happens to be THE feel-good story of the season. If he averaged more than 4.1 points per game, I’d write more about him.) While this hardly means that Rob’s future was harmed by Finch, it represents something of a season failure that the team needed (still needs!) more playmaking juice from Someone Not Named Ant, Rob seemed to have the tools to be that sort of guy, and instead he was cast aside. Considering the draft pick Connelly traded away to acquire Rob, one presumes he is a Rob fan. I just assume those two have at least some degree of disagreement on that item, even if it’s far below “rift” territory.
A third area of tension would be in the interweaving issues raised by the frontcourt trio of Rudy Gobert, Julius Randle, and Naz Reid. In some order, those are 3 of the team’s best 6 players, if not best 4 players. Why is there tension? Let’s count the ways.
First, Rudy causes tension simply by virtue of who he is. He’s an incredible defensive player who by himself forges his team’s identity as one that relies on Defense First. At the same time, he’s a horribly unskilled offensive player who takes up the lane space that otherwise might be filled by a Flying Anthony Edwards, or at least more drive-and-kick offensive flow. The net balance is easily in the black win column, but with Rudy there is a fair amount of red in there, too, by virtue of the ways he slows and bogs down the offense that sometimes exists when he’s on the bench.
Second, there is the Rudy & Randle tension in how each functions in a half-court offense. While Randle can and does do some things on the perimeter, his “bully ball” identity is foremost about physical play near the hoop, either looking for his short fadeaway jumper, or firing it out to shooters on the perimeter. There is less room for that with a non-shooting big like Gobert on the floor. Randle sometimes finds Rudy for dunks, but probably not often enough to make it a synergistic pairing. Their early-season blow-up when Randle looked Rudy off under the hoop was a legitimate panic moment, but seems to have been a one-off, at least in how they get along.
Third, there is the Randle versus Naz existential issue. Both are up for new contracts this summer, both will want big extensions, and Randle holds the nuclear codes to “opt in” for his guaranteed $30 Million, if he’s not satisfied with any alternatives here or elsewhere. Finch has prioritized Randle as the better player in his rotation, all year long. Naz has been a good soldier, by all accounts. Naz is incredibly popular. Randle is not, even as he seems to have grown on at least some of the fans. They sometimes play together, which makes for fun offense and scary defense. The lineup stats suggest that a Naz-Rudy pairing is best of all. The Naz skeptics out there might suggest those stats result at least in part from facing bench units, but there is a large enough sample that it can’t explain all of it. I think the common feeling is that Naz will be a Timberwolf for several more years, Randle might be gone as soon as next season, but Finch has not shown any real sign of feeling that way himself, by his coaching decisions.
Fourth and finally, there is the tension between Ant being recognized as a top-tier superstar, and what it will actually take for him to warrant that type of recognition. It’s funny if you listen to Bill Simmons or Stephen A. Smith, or some of the other enormous-audience pundits who cannot realistically pay close attention to the Wolves. The narrative surrounding the team would be that it’s “Ant Man’s Team,” and with that, probably some implicit or even explicit criticisms of his supporting cast. You can bet that Rudy Gobert will take some more shit during the playoffs. Randle probably will too. While Ant is the team’s best player, it is not by as wide a margin as the casual outsider perspective suggests. It might shock some of those people to learn that the Wolves performed slightly better with Ant on the bench this season (+5.1) than they did when he was on the floor (+4.8). Again, he did have a huge year, and he will make 2nd Team All-NBA, and his prolific three-point shooting was a tangible addition to his already-formidable arsenal. But for him to improve going forward, he needs to clean up his decision-making, especially when double teams arrive. From last year to this year, his assists went down and his turnovers went up. He turns it over kind of like he’s D-Wade, while setting teammates up with playmaking like he’s Ray Allen. He’d do well to try to flip that around.
The best thing about Ant (well, besides his personality) is that he always does improve. Again, he did improve this year, with the heavy volume of accurate three-point shooting. He announced that was his offseason improvement plan, and came out and delivered on the talk. This was his best season as a pro. But there was no big “leap” this year, and for that to happen, he’s gotta become a guy that can be trusted to handle the ball for a lot of the game, and especially in big moments, and be trusted to get a good shot for either himself, or for a teammate. Right now, he’s an explosive shooter and scorer who very clearly needs a fellow playmaker on the floor to help or even just carry that burden, for significant stretches.
The playoffs begin at Los Angeles on Saturday night, primetime TV. Whatever criticisms people might have for Finch, he has a proven track record of coaching his team up to a higher level in the playoffs than in the regular season. Ant likewise steps up in the playoff spotlight. There is certain to be a great deal of “tension,” once things tip off against LeBron and Luka. If nothing else, we know this team should be used to that feeling by now.
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