The Minnesota Timberwolves are up to their old tricks, or pranks, or deadpan mining for fool’s gold. They intrigue, excite, exasperate, before stirring just enough to mollify. 

The Wolves are prone to putting themselves in high-pressure situations, where they exhibit the composure of a cucumber, play-acting as cool and ready to refresh their way into the mix, but too frequently diced into something drab and in dire need of oil and vinegar.

On Wednesday night the Wolves beat the sorry remnants of the Dallas Mavericks by a single point. Mike Conley played like he was back in President Trump’s first term, Rudy Gobert mostly stayed out of his own way, Jaden McDaniels continued his recent spree of meaningful menace, and Naz Reid drew the short straw that designated he be the one to act the fool in his angst toward the officials. 

The Mavs were missing superstar Luka Doncic and four other members of the top nine in their rotation, which didn’t prevent them from scoring 66 points in the paint against a Wolves defense that now ranks 20^th in defensive efficiency during the month of January. Minnesota is now 6-6 in 2025, 23-21 overall, good enough to participate in the play-in tournament to decide the bottom two seeds in the Western Conference playoffs, should the season end today. 

The 2024-25 Timberwolves season is too reminiscent of the team’s 2022-23 campaign, when an off-season trade by President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly both elevated expectations and concussed the status quo into a fugue state that made it difficult to retain what was good before making it better.

Almost exactly two years ago, I described the 2022-23 Wolves this way: “(T)his team lacks character. They have not demonstrated the type of focus and commitment necessary to discover and sustain the elements of teamwork that create synergy and produce an identity. … everyone knows, or least strongly suspects, that the main components comprise an awkward fit, creating fundamental obstacles to the synergy necessary for a happy, productive, environment.”

But there are also important distinctions between the situation now and what was occurring with the 2022-23 Wolves. 

Two years ago, the issue was pretty cut-and-dried: How do you effectively incorporate the sterling but dilapidated skill set of Gobert, who had spent the previous nine seasons with a franchise that molded its entire style of play around him, into the catalyst for a makeover of a different franchise with a track history of ineptitude? 

The answer was a February trade that brought in Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW) and sent out D’Angelo Russell, the continued maturation of Anthony Edwards, and extended time and tinkering to synergize the frontcourt fit of Gobert with Karl-Anthony Towns. 

Many people, including me, concluded after that mediocre 2022-23 season that the Gobert-KAT pairing would never truly pan out, and urged a trade of one or the other. But Connelly and Head Coach Chris Finch were steadfast in their faith, and via patience, creative schemes and buy-in from the players, put together one of the two best seasons in the Wolves’ 35-year existence in 2023-24.

That’s one crucial distinction between now and two years ago: The team’s glorious journey to the conference finals last season raised an already rising bar on expectations (and on the payroll). No one cares that the Wolves are currently over .500 after 44 games for only the third time since 2005. The fans want to keep dancing to the club music of the 2023-24 defense and swoon to the diva arias of Ant’s soprano-soaring slam-dunks.

But the defining demarcation between 2022-23 Wolves and the 2024-25 edition is the added complexity of the task, due to the contrary forces at play. 

After the Wolves acquired Gobert, total attention could be paid to his integration. But the maturation of the “second line” rotation players in the pipeline and the greater restrictions in the new collective bargaining agreement compel Connelly and Finch to yo-yo back and forth in an attempt to sustain success both this year and beyond.

Let’s get specific. Using salary figures from basketball-reference.com, the Wolves paid Ant $10.7 million for the 2022-23 season – this season he is getting $42.2 million. McDaniels earned $2.1 million in 2022-23; this year it is $23 million. Naz Reid was still on his “Gupta special” undrafted rookie deal in 2022-23, getting $1.9 million. This season it is $14 million. And a primary reason KAT is in New York is because his salary jumped from $33.8 million in 2022-23 to $49.2 million this season and keeps rising all the way to his player option season at $61 million in 2027-28.

Yes, Connelly got important discounts on Conley ($22 million in 2022-23, just $10 million per season this year and next) and Gobert, who signed for $12 million less than he could have made exercising his player option next season, but leveraged the concession into a package of three more years at a total of $109 million.

There are plenty of fans who would have wanted Connelly to wait at least one more season before trying to trade KAT, and we’ll never know what he could have fetched for him, now with a $53 million salary, at the end of this season. But it was always going to be that the Wolves would have to trade KAT or Gobert next year to have any hope of being able to re-sign Naz. And you don’t have to be too enmeshed in social media to realize that Gobert is a player too many NBA fan bases love to hate, and would almost certainly not have brought back even close to equal value.

Enough about the numbers, except to say that this is the price of NBA success, made even more acute by the restrictions on roster management for high-payroll teams under the new collective bargaining agreement. You win big, you pay your players. But the salary of the total roster is capped, and successful teams are squeezed out of retaining all their talent. 

This is the new, unfamiliar reality for a Wolves franchise that rarely, if ever, won big. Under Finch, and especially Connelly, they are trying to win as many games as possible this year, next year, and three or four years out. 

Using that lens, it is fascinating to view how the Wolves have prioritized players within their rotations. For example, ever since the KAT trade was made, Finch has sought to maximize Julius Randle’s value to the current team. Yes, that also makes him more valuable to any team that might want to trade for him before Feb. 6 or try to sign him this summer, when he can either exercise his player option to stay with the Wolves for $31 million or become an unrestricted free agent. 

The point is, Finch has attacked the awkward fit of Randle in rotation with Gobert and Naz in the frontcourt as diligently as he did the awkward fit of KAT, Gobert and Naz two years ago. And to his credit, Randle has bought in. Consequently, Randle has become increasingly valuable by promoting more pace in the offense with his faster decision-making on ball movement, and enhancing his defensive capabilities by guarding opposing bigs in the paint more effectively. 

As I wrote in last week’s column, the relationship between Randle and the Wolves is still likely to have an unhappy ending. The size of his player option and the way his style of play is increasingly at odds with the modern NBA were always going to be sticking points, especially if the Wolves want to hold on to Naz, who has his own player option, at terms he can exceed on the open market. 

But the Wolves have not allowed that noise to get too much in the way of probing the best current fits in their frontcourt. Yes, Randle and Gobert continue to start, despite a still-awkward fit. But Randle and Naz have improved their tandem by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the season, and all three have distinctive ways, individually and as pairs, in which they help the team. Consequently, over the past few weeks, Finch has increasingly flexed who gets to finish games or log high-leverage minutes, according to game situations. 

Another striking, season-long example of Finch’s roster management has been his preference for a tight rotation. Again, the priority seems to be embracing a win-now philosophy. 

It was easy to limit the rotation to eight players when the Wolves were enjoying extraordinarily good health. But now that Donte DiVincenzo (DDV) is out indefinitely with a strained big toe, we see an uptick in minutes for last summer’s top draft choice, Rob Dillingham, but not to the level DDV or Conley were mostly sharing point guard duties this season. 

Dillingham has played every game of the three DDV has missed, but his minutes per-game have only climbed from 9.7 to 14.7 in that span. Meanwhile, time on the court for Conley and NAW have both ticked up; ditto Ant and Randle (the two scoring playmakers) and McDaniels, who has earned the extra burn. 

Meanwhile, former ninth man Josh Minott is mysteriously missing-in-action, and was even disastrously replaced by an infamous return of Joe Ingles against Cleveland. Clearly, Finch doesn’t believe this underperforming roster can afford the unreliability of too much untested youth, which of course is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The coach has said kind things about both Dillingham and Minott, but actions speak louder than words and, as I said last week, the ninth and 10^th players in the Wolves rotation log far fewer minutes than their counterparts on the other 29  NBA teams. 

I am on record favoring Naz over Randle in the starting lineup and finding more minutes for Dillingham and Minott even if and when the Wolves return to their remarkably good roster health. And Finch sure seemed ripe for criticism when the Wolves were outscored by 14 points in the 8:43 Ingles played in what used to be Minott’s stead in a seven-point loss to Cleveland last Saturday; or when he benched a productive Dillingham in favor of Conley and watched the Wolves cough up the lead in the final four-and-a-half minutes of a two-point loss to Memphis on Monday. 

But then Conley responded Wednesday night with his best game of the season and was an absolutely vital component of the Wolves eking out that one-point victory in Dallas.

Meanwhile the standings are a jumble, to the point where realistic scenarios can be made for the Wolves finishing anywhere from fourth (which would give them home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs) to 12^th (out of even the play-in scenario, and without their first-round pick, sent to Utah in the Gobert deal). 

Through it all, the variables are fluid, the situation complex. Since signing that three-year extension (two if you assume he would have opted in next season anyway), Gobert’s play has fallen off at both ends of the court this season. Conley’s throw-back excellence on Wednesday was a boon, but how repeatable can he make it? Would Dillingham and Minott capsize the Wolves fragile place in the standings or would they improve sufficiently with added burn to help the Wolves perhaps this season and most certainly down the line? 

What happens if Randle isn’t traded and opts in? NAW is thus guaranteed to be gone, and perhaps Naz too. Then the KAT trade looks infinitely worse. 

Less than a month after I wrote those disparaging words about the 2022-23 Wolves, Connelly executed the best trade in Timberwolves history, swapping out the polarizing D’Lo (Russell) for the platinum teammate Conley and the underrated gem NAW (plus some second round draft picks). 

The point is, there are times and places for significant overhauls to be made, before the Feb. 6 trading deadline and in the remaining 38 games of the season, depending upon how the Wolves perform in the ensuing weeks and months. And if there is one thing the Connelly-Finch tandem demonstrated in the 2023-24 season, sometimes standing pat sets up the best possible scenario.

Britt Robson

Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.

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