The Timberwolves played without their top defensive player in Monday’s Game 2 in Denver, yet turned in perhaps their best defensive performance of the season, suffocating the Nuggets to go up 2-0 in the Western Conference semifinals.
How do you explain that? Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said the performance without Rudy Gobert was actually a testament to Gobert’s impact.
“His presence and what he’s infused into the team, how important defense is and how great we can be when we play it,” Finch said. “Rudy’s driven the defensive culture here.”
The culture where everyone takes pride in the defensive end — paying attention to the details of the game plan and winning their individual matchups on a possession-by-possession basis. That’s how you sustain yourself as the top defensive team in the NBA.
“Our identity is defense,” Wolves big man Naz Reid said.
But really, it’s more than that. The Wolves’ identity is bringing a winning-level of effort to the court every game, no matter who is available or not. If you’re going to beat the Timberwolves, you’re going to have to make the plays to win it.
And making those plays is increasingly difficult to do when a defender — or two — is consistently occupying your airspace.
To beat Minnesota in the playoffs, you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You have to be willing to drop the gloves and exchange blows. You have to be willing and able to exert yourself to your maximum potential for 48 straight minutes — 48 minutes of hell.
It’s a miserable existence for a basketball team but — as these playoffs and the Timberwolves’ rising popularity have shown — an enticing watch for basketball fans. The Timberwolves are gaining supporters with each passing performance.
This team’s culture is one the sport’s fanatics can rally around.
“It’s always been … gotta learn how to compete, then you gotta learn how to always compete and then you gotta learn how to compete at the high levels,” Finch said. “When you do that, you give yourselves a chance to win no matter who is available on your roster. The goal has always been to put out a team that people like to cheer for. That doesn’t happen unless you play hard and it usually doesn’t happen unless you play defense and share the ball. We’re doing all those things right now.”
Giving yourself a chance to win regardless of the lineup. Putting out a team people like to cheer for. Playing hard every night. Those traits define the 2023-24 Minnesota Timberwolves. But this isn’t the first Timberwolves team that has exhibited those traits.
Those are exactly the characteristics you wouldd use to describe the 2021-22 Minnesota Timberwolves. That was a plucky bunch that first put the Wolves back on the map of the local sports scene.
That season featured a win over Boston with a COVID-depleted roster led by Jaylen Nowell and Greg Monroe. By season’s end, Target Center was the host of numerous basketball parties, including a raucous regular-season finale in which Minnesota played no one of note but still battled to the end with the likes of Nathan Knight in a tight loss to Chicago.
“This is a team a lot of people like to watch play. We play hard, share the ball. It’s pretty exciting,” Finch said that season. “Even our mistakes are interesting. It feels like we’ve got something growing here and we’ve just got to keep building on it. It’s our responsibility to keep giving them performances they can cheer on.”
The mistakes — which, as Finch noted, were interesting — were sometimes frequent, but they were generally made with the best intentions in mind. The 2021-22 Wolves were scrappy, hard-working and resilient. This year’s team hasn’t lost three games in a row all season; the squad from two years ago didn’t lose three in a row over its final 46 games.
That team just wasn’t as veteran and smart as this year’s edition, nor nearly as good. But it wasn’t for a lack of effort.
There was no Mike Conley, nor Rudy Gobert.
The roster was not built to play defense, but managed to survive — and at times thrive — on that end due to shear hustle. Anthony Edwards was 20 years old at the time, and Jaden McDaniels was 21/ Both were still NBA infants. Naz Reid was 22 years old and still in the process of refining his skill and sculpting his body. Karl-Anthony Towns was still learning how to play winning basketball.
But that team similarly bought into playing hard and conforming to an identity. It was also a group of guys who mostly like one another and had fun on the floor. Those players were also held to a certain standard, and strived to reach it.
It all resulted in a wildly overachieving team that won 46 regular-season games.
That season made it clear that Finch was both a motivator and a unifier. If he could get a team with a backcourt of D’Angelo Russell, Malik Beasley and Nowell to buy in, doing so with this year’s collection of talent has likely been a breeze.
At the end of that season, Patrick Beverley was asked what Minnesota needed to do to take the next step defensively. He responded with one word: “personnel.”
That has been upgraded in a big way over the past two seasons, via both transactions and development.
Minnesota’s current roster is elite — both from talent and depth perspectives. But that doesn’t always guarantee success. Better talent doesn’t necessarily equal better results.
The players, no matter how good and experienced they are, still must work together toward a common goal and supply the necessary sweat equity to reach the desired results.
When you can do that with championship-caliber players, you compete for titles, as the Timberwolves are primed to do this postseason.
When you can do that with two very different rosters in terms of quality and personality, you’ve achieved a sustained culture — one Finch and his coaching staff have cultivated for years now — that currently is producing a bountiful harvest.
“When I first got here, it wasn’t the best, it wasn’t perfect. But obviously we’re all humans, (and) over that time we gradually got better. We got more cultured,” Reid said. “Time (came) to where we kind of became a unit, a team where we trust each other. We’re selling out for each other. Even Rudy not being here (for Monday’s game), we love that he had his child, so just the trust and the love we have for each other is on another level.”
A championship level.
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