The Wolves are off to a great start. They now embark on a difficult stretch of 5 games in 7 nights: Sunday night at home versus Toronto; Monday night at Cleveland; Wednesday night back home versus Golden State; Friday night at home versus LA Clippers; and Saturday night at San Antonio. I’d imagine the Wolves will be favored to win the home games and lose the ones on the road.
A stretch like this brings a few thoughts to mind.
Talent depth in a roster is a good thing. Even if it forces a coach to make the difficult decision to DNP some guys that deserve NBA playing time, the straight proposition of having more talent is better than having less of it. This is not exactly rocket science here, but you can see around the league, and right here in Minnesota, how winning tends to shed a roster of some of its good players. The Wolves had to let Nickeil Alexander-Walker go, and he’s now a borderline star player in Atlanta. That’s a local example. The OKC Thunder, by far the best managed roster in the NBA if not professional sports, are beginning to see their former players thrive elsewhere. (Aaron Wiggins, a Punch-Drunk favorite, is averaging 17 points per game in his new Hawks jersey; last year for the Thunder he was getting DNP-CDs.) Having more good players means a lot of good things: insurance against injuries; options against different opposing lineups; more competitive practices and scrimmages. On that last point, Jon Krawcynski just posted a great column that detailed the extra-intense captains practices the Wolves put themselves through this past fall before training camp, with Finch emphasizing how much “bad blood” he was seeing, between the team’s own players, in those runs.
So, yeah. More talent is better than less talent. Not super controversial.
Next thought is more Wolves-specific, and specifically how Chris Finch has handled talent depth in the past. I think it’s fair to say by now that Finch is a believer in a regular rotation of players, minimal deviations game-to-game, and that players suit up every single game in which they are not injured. Put differently, Finch is not an advocate for load management; he wants to see his “real team” on the floor as much as health allows. He’s not entirely unique with this approach, but he’s bucking modern NBA trends that seem to prioritize the optimization that might come with fresher legs over the optimization that might come from more reps with the best players. (If it needs to be said, Finch is in clear solidarity with Tom Thibodeau on this philosophy.) In the past, I think it’s fair to say that Luka Garza was under-utilized as a low-minutes bench option. In 2024-25, Garza logged merely 219 minutes for the Wolves, and many of those would’ve been in garbage time. Per-minute, Garza had always been highly productive and efficient, but had clear limitations as a defender that would’ve prevented him from ever being a heavy minutes sort of guy. Still, it seemed to me (there are thousands of tweets to this effect) that an opportunity was missed by Finch in not using Garza for little bursts of points and energy off the bench. The ’25 team (much like the ’26 team) seemed to leave some regular season wins on the table, too. Garza left after that ’24-25 season, and joined the Boston Celtics. They went on to win 56 games, with Garza logging 1,118 minutes of helpful playing time.
The Garza of Finch’s current rotation is, without a doubt, Jaylen Clark. Clark has the opposite problem of Garza – instead of defensive concerns, it’s offensive ones. But like Garza, you watch the guy play and are instantly convinced that this guy needs minutes. Finch himself in the past has referred to Clark as “the personality of our defense.” He meant that in a good way, to be clear. Injuries and the 82-game slog will undoubtedly get Clark on the floor in real action — I’d be shocked if it doesn’t happen in this 5-in-7-days stretch ahead. But Finch right now has set a regular rotation, and history tells us that he will lean on it as much as he possibly can, rather than trying to deploy his depth as a weapon to maximize win count.
A broader discussion can be had about how we assess NBA coaching performance. Maximizing regular season win totals has the tangible benefit of improving playoff seeding, which allows for more home-court advantage and an easier path to the Finals. Sometimes, however, it seems like coaches end up getting punished for doing too well in the regular season, before reality sets in on the true quality of the team, come playoff time. JB Bickerstaff is a guy who’s won more games than his teams were expected to, only to lose in the playoffs a little too early (relative to that win total), and that always seems to lead to critiques of his coaching ability. I think to some extent this dynamic has worked against Thibs as well — see how he was fired by the Knicks after building them from nothing into a fringe contender.
Finch has kind of developed a reverse dynamic here in Minnesota, where for the last couple seasons his teams have underwhelmed in the regular season, only to advance past strong opponents in the postseason. Two years ago, a 49-win Wolves team stomped the LeBron and Luka Lakers, and then the Jimmy & Draymond Warriors, before losing to the OKC champs in the conference finals. Last year, a badly injured Wolves team, also fresh off a disappointing 49 wins, ousted Jokic and the Nuggets. Finch is deservedly viewed in a favorable light for winning when it matters most. But if the conversation is flipped from “look at how great they do in the playoffs” to “why isn’t their record better than it is?” it feels a little bit different. Maybe the commitment to the rotation cements some sort of habits that come out in playoff basketball, when opponent scouting is sharpest, and teams have to rely more on ingrained skills and less on nightly tactical tinkering?
I don’t know, honestly. My sense is that the Wolves could be every bit the tough playoff out they have been, with a little bit more regular-season optimization. In that vein, it would be good to see greater utilization of the full roster.
Go Wolves.
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