Did somebody say continuity?
Wasn’t that supposed to be the magical theme song of the 2025-26 Minnesota Timberwolves? After the trading of Karl-Anthony Towns disrupted the team’s player rotations and relationships at the onset of the season prior, compelling coach Chris Finch to accommodate the oblong skill sets of Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo (the bounty for Towns) on the fly for much of the autumn of 2024, wasn’t the hard part supposed to be in the rear-view mirror?
The Wolves entered this season buoyed by back-to-back appearances in the Western Conference Finals. The 2023-24 campaign unlatched the cage on a marauding defense that ravaged the rest of the NBA. It had taken a minute, but the synergy of the seven-footers Towns and Rudy Gobert in tandem for a second season alongside wing-stopper Jaden McDaniels helped take the pace, space and starch out of opponents in a super-sized frontcourt crew that included Sixth Man of the Year Naz Reid and the deceptively efficient octopus Kyle “Slo Mo” Anderson as other “skilled bigs.”
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Slo Mo was shorn as a salary-cap casualty but the budget still pinched any future roster flexibility and so KAT was unloaded less than a week before training camp, scrambling the prep for the 2024-25 season. More than halfway through the season the Wolves were barely above .500 with a record of 22-21. The once-elite defensive efficiency had slipped from first to seventh, while the offensive efficiency languished at 16th in the 30-team NBA.
Then Finch and his team figured it out. Despite injuries that cost Randle 13 games and Gobert 10 (they were both out for six), the Wolves posted the NBA’s 4th best record the final three months of the season, 27-12, including a 17-4 closing burst with a healthy roster. The offensive efficiency soared to 2nd in that burst, while the defensive efficiency held steady at seventh. In the playoffs, both the Lakers and Warriors were vanquished by 4-to-1 margins before the Wolves ran into the Oklahoma City buzzsaw in the conference finals in a similarly-decisive five games.
This season’s salary-cap casualty was Nickeil Alexander-Walker (NAW), like Slo Mo an invaluable linchpin between the starters and reserves. Yet every other member of the 8-player rotation was intact and a trio of young reserves (Jaylen Clark, Rob Dillingham and especially Terrence Shannon Jr.) seemed primed to collectively fill the void.
During the Media Day interview sessions that inaugurated training camp for the 2025-26 season, the Wolves spoke of the previous year’s acclimation like surfers who had successfully negotiated the chop and churn of inhospitable tides and now expected the continuity of their hard-earned prowess to further tame the turbulent energy of inclement weather for an exhilarating ride into championship contention.
The subsequent ineptitude through the first eight games of the season has cast those vows and assumptions into embarrassment.
The only continuity the Wolves have shown thus far is an ability to scratch out wins against hapless opponents and a mortifying tendency to fall apart when trying to prevent quality offenses from scoring. Three of their four wins have come against the dregs of the lesser Eastern Conference, who have a collective record of 5-19. And all four of their losses have been to foes who rank among the top five in offensive efficiency — in part because they had the pleasure of encountering Minnesota’s porous defense.
Specifically, the Wolves have lost to Denver, New York, and twice to the L.A. Lakers. The overall offensive ratings — points scored per 100 possessions — of those three teams are 120.3 for Denver, 119.3 for New York and 117.7 for the Lakers. The Wolves defensive rating in those four losses — points allowed per 100 possessions — is 129.9, more than seven points above what any NBA offense has mustered. Overall, the Wolves are allowing 119.4 points per 100 possessions after eight games, which ranks 27th in the NBA. The three teams allowing more than that have a combined record of 4-20.
The latest indictment of the Wolves’ inability to get stops occurred Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks lambasted them 137-114, scoring a whopping 83 points in the second half. The detailed numbers from those final two quarters are damning. The Knicks shot 72% from two-point range (23-for-32), 46% from beyond the three-point arc (11-for-24) and 80% from the free-throw line (4-for-5).
The Knicks simply owned the boards in the second half, more than doubling up the Wolves in overall rebounds (29-to-14) and outhustling and -muscling Minnesota on its own defensive glass, 13-to-9. Those 13 rebounds contributed to 22 second-chance points (remember this is just one half of play). The Wolves forfeited 18 more points through their nine turnovers, a ratio that demonstrates a feeble response toward limiting the damage from their miscues.
“Tonight we stood around and watched,” Finch said after the game. In the locker room, as quoted by Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic, DiVincenzo added, “You can talk about it until you’re blue in the face, but you’ve just gotta go out and do it. Right now we’re a ‘sometimes’ team. We need to be an ‘always’ team in that regard.”
In our conversation before training camp, Finch said a priority for this team heading into the season was improving the defense when Gobert wasn’t on the court. Well, time to go back to the drawing board — or, better yet, get a new drawing board.
Gobert has played exactly two-thirds of the Wolves 2025-26 season thus far. In the 256 minutes he’s been on the court, the team has allowed 109.7 points per 100 possessions. In the 128 minutes he’s been on the sidelines, the team has allowed 134.8 points per 100 minutes. The disparity is even larger if you remove “garbage time” when the score is so lopsided late in the game that the minutes won’t affect the outcome. The website Cleaning the Glass eliminates garbage time and calculates that the Wolves allow 32.9 fewer points per 100 possessions with Gobert on the court versus when he subs out.
It’s a small sample size — 384 total minutes played, vs. eight games with no overtimes — but the size of the chasm in defensive competence nevertheless highlights an obvious problem. When Gobert is out, a pair of 6-foot, 9-inch forwards, Randle and Naz, are the most frequent frontcourt duo. In their 93 minutes together thus far this season, the Wolves allow 136.8 points per 100 possessions. And that unsightly number is very slightly mitigated by the 4 minutes when Naz, Randle and Gobert have all shared the court this season and posted a defensive rating of 100.0.
Or you can ditch the stats and see for yourself, because the eye test has also not been kind to the Wolves defense. The bread-and-butter necessity of any team is a capable pick-and-roll defense and the Wolves have been dreadful at it: The player defending the ball-handler gets hung up on the screen and help via a switch or rotation is woefully slow in coming. Conversely, a defender wills himself through the screen but the teammate guarding the would-be roller wasn’t convinced that would happen, switches off and lets the roller go free.
Elsewhere, the Wolves too frequently get exposed in rotation, resulting in one of their smalls — most painfully Mike Conley or Rob Dillingham — needing to furiously foul a leviathan in the paint before it becomes a layup and/or an “and-1” three-point play.
The irony here is that Naz and Gobert have been a superb defensive tandem for the past 2-plus seasons. In 2023-24 and 2024-25, the pair gave up fewer points per possession than any 2-player lineup combination logging regular minutes together. Sure enough, of the 16 two-player lineup combinations together for at least 80 minutes thus far this season, Gobert and Naz again top the defense by allowing a stingy 98.3 points per 100 possessions in 81 minutes. Among the top 20 most-deployed duos, Gobert and Mike Conley are next-best together at 106.8 points allowed per 100 possessions in 126 shared minutes.
What skews the stats in Naz’s favor is that Gobert is dominant in rotations against the opponent’s second-unit personnel. Guys coming off the Wolves bench who have generally been abysmal on defense get well in a hurry when Rudy is beside them.
Minnesota’s points allowed per 100 possessions is 101.4 in the 36 minutes when Rob Dillingham is with Gobert and 124.4 in the 77 minutes Dillingham plays overall. For Shannon it is 97.7 points allowed in 60 minutes he alongside Gobert and 121.3 in the total 115 minutes he has played. Even the superb defender Clark has his 112.3 points allowed in his total 97 minutes on the court significantly impacted by the 98.1 points scored against the team in his 51 minutes with Rudy.
It is probably too early for dramatic changes to the status quo — Finch has demonstrated that patience and minor tweaks that don’t involve abrupt challenges to the existing rotation can and usually do pay off. But that doesn’t stop me from again suggesting that Naz and Jaden McDaniels flip their roles.
Granted it is a small sample size, but McDaniels seems the least vulnerable playing defense without Gobert. In fact the Wolves have allowed 121.8 points per 100 possessions in the 226 minutes they have shared the court and 120.4 points in the 260 minutes McDaniels has logged overall — it is just 34 minutes, but the defensive numbers are better for the team when he is without Rudy.
The argument is buttressed by the increasing evidence that the offensive prowess of McDaniels is being throttled by his presence in the starting lineup when everyone is healthy. Consider that in the five games that Ant was injured (he played just 3 minutes against Indiana), McDaniels averaged 20.4 points per game on 56.5% shooting from the field, 50% from three-point range and 83.3% from the foul line. (His 15 made free throws was second on the team to Randle during that span.) His usage was 21.4, behind only Randle and Naz among the 9 members of the regular rotation.
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When Ant returned from injury Wednesday against the Knicks, McDaniels attempted 10 shots, down from 14 when Ant was out, and scored just 13 points. His usage was down just slightly, to 20, but then again Ant logged less than 29 minutes easing himself back into action, and attempted only 13 shots himself.
Before the game, Finch was honest about the fact that Ant’s re-entry into the rotation was destined to diminish the scoring and playmaking of other players on the team. This is acutely true for McDaniels, who is not a catch-and-shoot three-point shooter a la DiVincenzo and thus finds his creative space (not to mention his touches) on the floor eaten up by Ant, Randle and Gobert.
By putting Naz in the starting lineup and bringing McDaniels off the bench, Finch would be better spacing the floor on offense while protecting both of the bigs, Naz and Randle, who suffer without Gobert beside them on defense. The move would put more onus on Ant to guard the other team’s top scorer — as he did Wednesday on Jalen Brunson of the Knicks — retaining his focus at that end of the court.
Meanwhile, McDaniels’ ever-burgeoning skill set on offense would be allowed more freedom to evolve, even as he would become more of a big on defense, another eye-opening aspect of his versatility that has been showcased when the opportunity has been there to flex it.
At this point it might just be better than continuity.
The post So much for continuity: Timberwolves’ embarrassing regular season start scrambles expectations appeared first on MinnPost.
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