Because Donte DiVincenzo walks his talk, he’s not afraid to speak his mind.
When the Minnesota Timberwolves performed like privileged brats in lazy, disengaged losses to Brooklyn and Atlanta four days apart in the final week of 2025, DiVincenzo — whose Italian heritage, red hair and feisty, hot-sauce demeanor earned him the affectionate nickname Big Ragu from the New York City fans when he played for the Knicks — squared himself up for any questions proffered by the media after the games.
These postgame occasions are not a time for pearls of wisdom — just plainspoken truths.
“They just played harder. Played with more force. In every category of things we need to do, they beat us,” Ragu said after the embarrassing display against Brooklyn. “You can’t disrespect them — they are a hard-playing team. If they don’t play hard, they get blown out. We have talent up and down the roster where we can come in and win some games totally based on talent and shot-making. But we can’t rely on talent. Every night the energy and the competitive spirit has to be there.”
It was there two nights later, when the Wolves stomped the Chicago Bulls by 35 points. It was gone again two nights after that, in a 24-point loss to an Atlanta Hawks team that had been defeated in seven straight games. When Star Tribune beat writer Chris Hine reminded DiVincenzo of his words after Brooklyn and wondered what the challenge was in converting that talk into action, Ragu’s reply was terse but even-keeled.
“Just do it. There’s only so much you can talk about. How many meetings, how many film sessions, how many times does Finchy (head coach Chris Finch) have to talk to us?
“It’s the compete factor. If you compete, you give yourself a chance to win every single night. If you don’t compete, you’re relying on talent and sometimes the shots don’t fall. The compete factor is the biggest thing: If you compete, it covers up so much. And it’s just not there.”
Make no mistake, top-end talent remains the primary prerequisite to vie for an NBA championship. Without the extraordinary athleticism of superstar Anthony Edwards, the stalwart defense of Rudy Gobert, and the playmaking of point forward Julius Randle, the Wolves would be as irrelevant to playoff hoops this season as they’ve been the majority of their existence as a franchise.
But when those foundational building blocks are in place on a roster, a quality team needs a combination of scrap, glue and kindling from “the other guys” to function with a competitive edge and a cohesive purpose — to create teamwork with an attitude, fueled by an abiding desire.
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In the past five seasons with Finch as coach, the Wolves have been greatly enhanced by players internally wired to sacrifice and synergize for the sake of wringing a stronger character and a more sustained competitive zeal out of the existing talent on the roster. This honor roll includes Patrick Beverley, Jarred Vanderbilt, Kyle Anderson, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker.
As their fleeting tenure with the franchise attests, these players are necessarily expendable in the modern NBA economy even as they fulfill a vital role for their team throughout the course of the season. Yes, they are often journeymen — their changing sceneries ironically enriching their storehouse of experience about what makes a team click — but they are highly respected both in the front office and with the fan base for the infectious example they set.
The play of DiVincenzo thus far this season puts him in that company. You can reel off the highlights — playing through a garishly broken nose incurred in Charlotte on the first of November and following it up with 25 points, 9 rebounds and 5 assists with his blackened eyes beneath a mask two nights later; or erupting with a bevy of clutch buckets in a tight victory over Golden State in mid-December.
Big Ragu and scrappy team play
But highlights aren’t the point. Ragu’s most valuable asset is setting the tone for scrappy team play. He is at his “best” when his teammates follow his lead, but the only real control he has over that situation is consistently providing that lead example for them to follow. His statistics were nearly as dreadful as the rest of the Wolves players in the debacle versus Atlanta, but anyone watching could notice the depth of his hustle amid the ongoing futility.
In his pregame press conference before the Wolves played Milwaukee in late December, Finch endorsed my suggestion that DiVincenzo set the tone for scrappiness this season, adding that “he is probably our best at the ‘next play’ mentality, which allows him to stay scrappy regardless of what happens. He has a propensity to gamble at times but he is getting back into plays better and sticking with his pursuit better (this season). He gets on with whatever he needs to do better, without worrying much about what did or didn’t happen.”
Played on the final day of the 2025 calendar, the loss to Atlanta was hopefully the low point of the Wolves 2025-26 season. After the humbling pratfall against Brooklyn on December 27, Ant seemed genuinely flummoxed as to why he and his teammates stubbornly can’t get out of their own way, attitude-wise, this season. After a series of shrug-implied answers, he produced an ominous quote, calling the Brooklyn game “Timberwolves basketball,” which took on added resonance when he walked off the court less than halfway through the fourth quarter when discovering Finch was emptying his bench as a sign of surrender.
The next game on the schedule was Saturday evening in Miami against a 19-14 Heat team that plays hard and is always well-coached by Erik Spoelstra. Consequently, this 35th game in a long 82-game season carried extra weight in determining whether the Wolves really were dabbling with toxic dysfunction, treating the discord as a needed wake-up call, or still hovering in an unreliable twilight zone between those two poles.
The good news is that Saturday in Miami and the next night in Washington D.C. against the Wizards were the best pair of games the Wolves have played thus far this season, in terms of adhering to the game plan and performing with a cohesive, energetic purpose. The competition didn’t match the wins they registered against the Thunder, Bucks and Knicks in mid-December, but for a change the Wolves were more concerned about meeting a high internal standard than they were about the caliber of opponent. They were crisp but passionate, brimming with ball movement on offense and diligence on defense, greater than the sum of their talented parts.
Related: Timberwolves mailbag: Your questions on point guard, playing time, and Coach Finch’s ‘let them figure it out’ approach
The dominant weekend was also a testimonial to intangible values Ragu brings to the Wolves. His three-point shooting was rotten — he converted just two of 17 treys, with many of the attempts wide-open looks stemming from smart, energetic set-ups by his teammates. That is a full handful fewer than his typical accuracy, 15 points clanked away.
And yet over the course of those two games, the Timberwolves were +52 in the 54 minutes Ragu was on the court, and -16 in the 42 minutes he sat. The next best individual impact on the Wolves performance in that regard was Gobert, who had his team at +36 in the 61 minutes he played compared to a net zero in the 35 minutes he sat.
In the middle of that tidy three-game winning streak against the Thunder, Bucks and Knicks a few weeks ago, this is what Finch had to say about DiVincenzo: “What he is doing more for us right now that I really appreciate and like, is he is making a ton of hustle plays, momentum plays. He’s getting steals, and just kind of playing with, as we called it the other night, the most scrappiness on the team. He is rebounding in traffic and doing a lot of those type of winning plays.”
That’s what happened over the weekend. Less than two minutes into the Miami game, Ragu missed a midrange jumper off the front iron — then dashed in, wrestled the rebound away from the Heat’s 7-foot center Kel’el Ware, and flipped the ball behind his back to Gobert for a slam dunk before his momentum took him out of bounds.
Two minutes before halftime, he aggressively jumped in front of his man for a pass at midcourt (he currently leads the Wolves with 47 steals on the season) and drove down for an uncontested slam dunk.
Perhaps most impressively, with the teams separated by just four points four minutes into the third quarter, Julius Randle drove to the basket and kicked it back out — right into the hands of a Heat player. Ragu, who was crashing the boards for a potential rebound at the time, hustled back at full speed, coming out of nowhere to block a layup attempt after the ball-handler had maneuvered past two defenders.
DiVincenzo was also the primary defender on the Heat’s leading scorer, Norman Powell, who was held to 21 points, 3.4 points below his average. The Heat ran Ragu through a variety of screens and it was a rugged game overall at both ends of the court — he finished it with bloody scratches on his shoulder and a cut over his left eye. The Wolves were +24 in his 30:58 on the court in a 10-point victory.
The cakewalk over the Wizards on the tail end of a back-to-back Sunday was more of the same, albeit less dramatic due to the blowout. Once again DiVincenzo couldn’t make a shot (okay one, in nine three-point attempts) and yet once again his value was evident in the Wolves being +28 in his 22:35 of play. He was hardly the star: Gobert was magnificent, Ant had 35 points and four steals, and both had even better plus/minus totals than Ragu.
But there was one of those signature plays that he seems to make every game. It occurred halfway through the second quarter with the Wolves up by nine points. And extended joust under their offensive boards produced two missed putbacks, with Naz Reid falling to the court on the third try for an offensive rebound. The Wizards sped up the court hoping to take advantage of the 5-on-4 disparity. Three Timberwolves lined up to meet them just passed midcourt, leaving Ragu “guarding” a player in the corner and one cutting to the rim. He hovered between them, reading the ball-handlers eyes, then dashing hard and getting his shoulder inside the cutter to intercept the ball through anticipation and physicality.
Scrappy.
The post The scrappy, Minnesota Nasty of Donte DiVincenzo has been a constant positive for Timberwolves appeared first on MinnPost.
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