We’re now 10 games in, and the vibes are good. The record is 7-3 versus reasonably difficult competition that already included a couple of clear “schedule losses” (at Cleveland on road b2b; at San Antonio also on a road b2b). It’s hard to be anything but pleased with how things are going for our Timberwolves.
A major part of the early-season story is the Anthony Edwards knee surgery. He’s now missed 6 of these 10 early games. He will miss many more, over the next couple months. The Wolves have managed to go 4-2 without Ant in a stretch that has involved one great win (at Houston) and 5 out of 6 performances that anyone would call great efforts. (The letdown loss at home versus Golden State, the day after the Ant-surgery news, was the lone stinker.) Last night at New Orleans, they won again, with strong performances from LaMelo Ball and Ayo Dosunmu.
It seems this Wolves team will be able to compete reasonably well without Ant in the lineup. With the early play of Jonathan Kuminga as the starting power forward, and Joan Beringer as Rudy Gobert’s backup, major questions about frontcourt depth have been answered, and answered positively. The backcourt was always going to be the strength of the team, and LaMelo and Ayo are each playing above expectations. Terrence Shannon Jr., Jaylen Clark, and Bones Hyland, all contribute in their own unique ways to make the bench minutes rather enjoyable as well. Jaden McDaniels will, for the first time in his career, be at least in the conversation for an All-Star spot.
I’ve had issues for a while now with the way the Timberwolves have been categorized as “Ant’s Team.” This is more predominant in national NBA media coverage and narratives, but it’s certainly the prevailing description of things locally, too. My problem is not that it’s a completely unfair or untrue short-form label for the Timberwolves of the past several years – Ant has undeniably been the team’s best player and locker room leader, almost dating back to his arrival. My issue, I guess, is one of degree. See, this team at its best has won primarily with defense more than offense, and the defensive greatness has been more attributable to Rudy Gobert and Jaden McDaniels (and even Nickeil Alexander-Walker, before he left) than Ant, whose effort on that end of the floor has always waxed and waned. The very best Chris Finch/Anthony Edwards season – the ’23-24 group that won 56 games and dethroned the Nuggets – had by far the best defense in the NBA, and merely the 17th best offense. In that season, Ant made 2nd Team All-NBA, and Rudy made none of them. (I thought both guys should’ve been on the 3rd team that year.) In the years since, no Timberwolf besides Ant has made an All-Star Team. Ant is routinely described as a Top 10 or even Top 5 player in the league. While his teammates are praised in their own ways, it is implicit that the Wolves have not had any sort of star duo or trio — it isn’t described as a Big 3 of Ant-Jaden-Rudy or anything at all like that. The narrative is “Ant + supporting cast.”
Last year, the Wolves once again knocked Jokic out of the playoffs, and this time they effectively did so without Ant’s help at all. He was hobbled and playing poorly before he suffered the gruesome looking left knee injury, which KO’d him from the remaining 2.5 games of the series. After he went down in Game 4, Ayo stepped up with 43 points for what was one of the most inspiring Wolves wins in history. (Donte had blown his Achilles in the same game, and the early thoughts on Ant’s own injury were not promising.) Back home in Game 6, Jaden and TJ led the way to the series-clincher. I’m not sure that people realize how incredible it would be to eliminate a team as good as the Nuggets in this fashion without an extremely good group of players doing it.
This history is laid out just to emphasize how the Timberwolves are perhaps more of a collective-effort roster, deep with talent, than a one-man show. Most good teams are more of a “team” than distilled narratives suggest, (see: the ’94 Bulls winning 55 games immediately after MJ’s sudden retirement) so this isn’t all that unique or interesting a set of circumstances, but still feels worth pointing out.
And yet.
And yet, there is also a part of me that’s wondering just how much this team’s vibes are very much rooted in their star player’s personality.
In a preseason video with LaMelo Ball and others, Ant laid out the Timberwolves’ attitude for the coming season: they were going to talk plenty of shit and make sure opponents knew they were there. “When y’all see the Timberwolves come to town … they on bulls–t,” he said, adding, “Yeah, we on that.” Whatever these videos are exactly, this was less season preview than declaration: the Wolves were not going to be a fun team to face this year. Edwards then turned the warning into a sales pitch: “Get your season tickets because s–t’s going to be turned up this year. If you miss a game, you’re going to miss out.”
The video itself was hilarious, but the more we read about this year’s preseason captain’s practices and scrimmages, the more it seems like some of it was just honest and accurate proclamation, too?
In Jon Krawczynski’s October 24 article in The Athletic, Chris Finch described listening from his office as the players went at each other in September scrimmages. The trash talk and intensity made him wonder whether things had possibly gone TOO far. “I thought at times there was a lot of kind of bad blood there,” Finch said. “There were a lot of times I thought it had boiled over.” But the players enjoyed the intensity, he explained, and carried that edge into camp and the season. Ayo was right in the middle of it, picking up Ant full court and celebrating stops in his face. The Finch quotes and Krawcyznski pair neatly with Ayo’s recent Players’ Tribune essay, where he described his own comfort level with trash talk, borne out of his South Chicago upbringing. Ayo detailed a specific type of back-and-forth with Ant that became so heated and ridiculous that he compared it to the Spider-Man meme: two guys pointing at each other, each insisting he was the guy, until the boasts almost stopped making sense.
The Wolves’ talk about their talk… isn’t just talk? It seems like an ingrained part of the team’s culture and identity that is both: 1) helping them approach each game with high-level competitiveness; and 2) traced back to Anthony Edwards, as the leader of the movement.
The Ant Wolves trash talking isn’t new, of course. There’s the famous clip of Ant trash-talking to KD in the ’24 playoffs, and KD smiling along with him. There’s Jaden at the end of the same series straight up taunting Devin Booker, instead of – you know – celebrating with his teammates. There’s Jaden explaining in plain cold monotone how all of the Denver Nuggets are bad defenders. (And then backing up the talk, and becoming a fan favorite around the country.)
What’s different so far this season, from past seasons, is that the Wolves seem READY TO ROLL from the moment the ball tips off, each and every night. How many times in the past few years have we lamented a poor first half effort, just hoping a switch might flip (and, to be fair, it often would) so they could avoid a preventable and regrettable loss?
If you were to go back and rate Chris Finch’s job performance season by season, it would be a bit of a roller coaster.
- 2021-22: the Pat Bev & Vando fly-around boyz, shocking 46 wins and competing admirably versus the Grizzlies. Great Finch season.
- 2022-23: Rudy’s arrival, Twin Towers awkwardness, KAT’s injury, just 42 wins. Not such a great Finch season.
- 2023-24: 56 wins, elite defense, winning at Denver Game 7, excellent Finch season.
- 2024-25: 49 wins, adapting to Julius. Eh.
- 2025-26: 49 wins again, too many regrettable losses. Not great.
Thus far, 2026-27 is shaping up to be one of Finch’s best performances, if not THE best. An NBA coach’s job security is tied tightly to the respect that he commands from his veteran and highly-paid players in the locker room. Larry Bird was extremely successful coaching the Pacers for three years, and he quit after three years because he said that’s when a coach’s voice goes stale in the locker room. It’s not a crazy theory, that the same adults would eventually get sick of the same guy yelling the same stuff at them, over and over.
And that was part of a much bigger preseason question: would this version of the Wolves be mature enough to reach its potential? Without Mike Conley around to be the old sage veteran, and without even Joe Ingles, there was understandable concern about who would keep things steady. Rudy was still here, of course, but more of the responsibility now rested with Ant and the rest of the returning core. Could they carry themselves like professionals, bring the necessary urgency every night, and hold each other accountable? Or would all the trash talking and silliness become too much, with no proverbial “adult in the room” to settle things down?
Finch’s answer wasn’t simply to hand Ant the keys and disappear into the background. In Part 1 of his preseason interview with Britt Robson for MinnPost, he said, “I’m excited about kind of putting myself forward again.” He had spent the past few years developing his assistant coaches, giving everybody a voice and a role. Now he wanted the newcomers to hear more directly from him and defensive coordinator Elston Turner: “I think LaMelo and Jonathan and these guys need to hear me front and center a little bit more.” More involvement from Finch and more ownership and cultural tone-setting from Ant weren’t necessarily competing concepts. They seem to have worked in tandem.
Ant is away and rehabbing right now, but this discussion is less about day to day specifics than the vibe about this team that has it more prepared, and more inspired, than it had been for the past couple seasons. Ant has more fully established the team’s competitive culture — the relentless trash talking, the willingness to go at anybody, including each other — while leaving plenty of room for fun and outright silliness. The important distinction is between being loose and being careless, or even lazy. Those September scrimmages suggest that the jokes and the intensity can come from the same place: guys enjoying each other, but refusing to let each other off the hook. Finch can make the professional expectations clear without trying to suffocate the personality out of the room. (Eds note: In a basketball-specific way, LaMelo Ball might be the absolutely idealized representation of Finch’s famous Turnovers Tolerance. Ball makes turnovers, some of them are bad-looking ones, but if you watch a full 48 minutes, you quickly appreciate how you don’t get the good without the mistakes, and this is a very good situation, on balance.) And Ant can make the room his own without treating accountability as somebody else’s job. Ten games isn’t enough to declare that balance settled, but it’s an encouraging start.
The Wolves are perhaps a bit more of an egalitarian enterprise than the lazier narratives might suggest, and Ant’s teammates are actually more responsible for the success they’ve had than some would like to believe. Yet there still remains a good-faith argument that it is, in a major sense, “Ant’s Team.” He’s established a real culture and vibe here, and they seem to have a collection of players that respond to both that leadership, as well as Finch’s instruction.
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