The Minnesota Timberwolves are out of the NBA playoffs. It’s a miracle it took this long. In their first-round series against the Denver Nuggets, they saw two starters and another key reserve suffer significant injuries. The Nuggets entered the series on a 12-game winning streak and were favored from the jump. After somehow winning that series in six games, finding Denver’s weak points and pummeling them until they broke, the Wolves met an even more daunting opponent in the San Antonio Spurs. Though they’d have been forgiven for tiredly accepting a sweep, the Wolves swiped Game 1 on the Spurs’ home floor, then a close Game 4 at home. After that, the tank finally ran empty. But even in the losses – including Friday night’s in Game 6 – the Wolves found ways to frighten. They’d go down 18-3 and then tie the game by the end of the first quarter. They’d tighten a 29-point deficit to 12 entering half-time. The tenacity and spite they played with was a finite resource, but at times this postseason it was potent enough to convince me otherwise.
The Wolves were not the deepest team in these playoffs, nor the most consistent. They may lie closer to the bottom of those categories than the top. After their elimination, coach Chris Finch and players alike admitted they’d failed to take the regular season seriously enough, failing to set themselves up well for the high-stakes games of April and May. (My old teachers probably shared a similar sense of disappointment in me before finals.) And yet this odd bunch regularly play some of the most soulful basketball in the NBA. Anthony Edwards can take over a game at any time, either by shooting deep threes or acrobatic layups. French albatross Rudy Gobert anchors the defense, which the team plays with astonishing vigor at its best. The best athletes are sometimes so clinical that they produce a rather emotionless watching experience, but certain passages of Timberwolves basketball inspire in me feelings of pure glee.
The Wolves are also mercifully resistant to caring about how others perceive them. A segment from a press conference after Game 2 against Denver played out like a scene from The Office. Edwards chose the phrase “beat that shit” to describe his aspirational rebounding performance, making teammate Julius Randle dissolve into giggles. During the Nuggets series, Wolves forward Jaden McDaniels announced the team’s plan: they would go right at the opposition, attacking the rim, because Denver’s players were “all bad defenders”. McDaniels then proceeded to list several Nuggets, including those who are generally considered good defenders. (Naturally, he wore a black hoodie while delivering this quote, hood up.) At the end of Game 4, McDaniels hit a layup with two seconds left, the Wolves’ lead already safe, which angered the Nuggets’ Nikola Jokić into sprinting down the court to get in McDaniels’s face with a vigor rarely seen in his defensive efforts. McDaniels simply laughed, untroubled by the seething 300lbs man-mountain. Then he coolly scored 32 points in Game 6, the best performance of anyone that day, to close out the series.
Even against the Spurs, the Wolves showed their cunning. After losing the opener, the Spurs took the next two games and appeared in full control. “I’m built for this,” an elated Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs’ irreplaceable 7ft 4in dynamo, said of the challenging physicality of the playoffs. “I love this more than anything else.” Just as everyone was talking about Wemby’s implacable calm, his God-given mindset, the Wolves made him snap. In Game 4, McDaniels and Naz Reid picked and poked away at Wemby’s inflatable-bendy-man body until the typically calm Frenchman nailed Reid in the face with a vicious elbow. Wemby was ejected, and in his absence the Wolves secured a narrow win. “Today is Mother’s Day,” Edwards said after the game, his mother having died in 2015. “I couldn’t lose this game for her.” As for Reid, don’t worry about his neck. “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” he declared, to chuckles from his teammates.
It’s a small tragedy that the Wolves almost certainly won’t win a championship without drastic changes to their roster. The Oklahoma City Thunder, who eliminated the Wolves en route to winning the Larry O’Brien last year, are primed to begin a dynasty. The Spurs are young and have almost no playoff experience; they may already be good enough to win the title this year, but they’re still nowhere near their final form. In those transcendent moments when the Wolves are operating with full intensity in sync with one another, they can match those teams. But they can’t do it over the course of a seven-game series. Talk now will turn to trading Randle, who could rarely get his offense going during these playoffs.
Still, the Wolves’ legacy as an occasionally brilliant motley crew who delight in upset victories is a good one. Very few analysts picked them to beat the Nuggets this year, or the Lakers in last year’s playoffs, or the Nuggets the year before that, but the Wolves won all those series. Though they don’t have the silverware to show for it, they’re as responsible for injecting entertainment into the playoffs as any other team. I look forward to furiously defending their honor when NBA fans of the 2040s blame them for not going deeper into the playoffs during these years.
The Wolves’ run ending here is probably for the best. Oklahoma City were waiting in the next round, and since December, it’s been clear that only San Antonio are capable of asking the Thunder potentially unanswerable questions. The entire season has been building towards that dialogue spread over a series, and now we’ll get to see it. I’ll relish those games when they come, but for now, I’m sad I won’t get to watch the playoff Wolves again until next year.