Now 38 years old, the public assumption seems to be that Minnesota will continue to wean itself off Mike Conley during the 2025-26 season. Every public comment from Wolves coach Chris Finch suggests otherwise.

Conley has been mentioned as a solution for jumpstarting the team’s transition play, improving point-of-attack defense and varying its late-game offensive approach.

That would all suggest a bigger role for Conley this season, not a smaller one.

Minnesota likely only has a championship-level ceiling if Conley is a heavy ingredient in the team’s formula. The floor general acknowledged as much, noting it’s why he put so much of an emphasis on making sure he was in good shape mentally and physically coming into the season.

A wrist injury effectively eliminated Conley’s offseason in 2024, and he struggled mightily coming out of the gates, never resembling his traditional form until midway through the campaign. Conley knows he wasn’t where he needed to be as a player for the Timberwolves to be at their best last season.

As soon as the buzzer sounded on Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals in Oklahoma City to seal Minnesota’s elimination, Conley had one thought: “Alright, how do I get back to who I was the year before that?”

Conley noted that players his age don’t generally make drastic improvements but added, “You can get back to who you are in certain facets of the game.”

It’s about “understanding I can be more of myself than I was a year ago and be closer to what I was in the first run we had to the Western Conference Finals,” he said, “and contribute in a way that it’s not just part-time or in the corner, but actually making plays and giving guys a rest and being aggressive. Those things don’t change.”

“I know people think I’m the oldest in the world, but I’m not too much older than the guys still playing, still productive,” Conley added. “You look at some of the best in the world — Steph (Curry), (Kevin Durant), Al Horford — guys who are really productive, they’re all the same age as me. … So I’ve still got a lot of juice and am trying to just add that to what we already have here.”

But returning to and maintaining past form requires commitment. Conley’s mind tells him he can put in the same amount of work as when he was 25 years old, but his body barks back. Pushing through to stack workouts through pain is a must.

A normal day in the offseason consisted of a 7:30 a.m. yoga session, 45 minutes of weights, conditioning and shooting drills.

“That whole time, I’m moving, I’m sweating, I’m in it. I’m tired, physically drained,” he said, “but I’ll do that every day.”

Then came the most important part: Treatment.

“I have to spend more time recovering. After 11:30 (a.m.), I’ve got to sit down in the cold tub, stretch, see all my people and whatever. I’m finally done at 1 o’clock,” Conley said. “That’s something that I’m used to doing, and used to be able to do that and not feel as bad. But as I’m getting older, you start to feel more. So, you start spending more time on the first or last session of the day.”

Conley endured a few bumps and bruises in training camp — in his preseason opener against Indiana, his leg bent awkwardly after he was fallen on by a Pacers player — but he played well in his final exhibition showing in Chicago and noted he feels “really good.”

Asked about the possibility of being the player he was two years ago, Conley responded, “I haven’t thought twice about not being that. It’s not even a worry for me.”

The veteran has been more vocal about wanting the ball in his hands, noting that role produces the best version of himself. And he clarified that having the ball does not mean shooting. Frankly, it’s usually the opposite.

“I want to play … all-time quarterback. That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to move. I want to throw it to you and let you guys just have the world,” he said of his message to prolific scoring teammates Anthony Edwards and Julius Randle. “We got a lot of guys who are capable of making plays and dominating that basketball. So it’s just trying to find a balance. I don’t want (the ball) too much, but I also don’t want to not have it at all.”

Finch begged for Conley to be more aggressive at various points last season, but the point guard never grabbed the reins with aggression. And when he reflected on last season’s shortcomings, Conley wondered if a more aggressive floor general would have opened things up for the Wolves.

“It’s not just a personal thing, where I want to be the best player in the world. No, (it’s) what can help the team?” Conley said. “If I’m being more aggressive or owning the ball more, maybe that cuts down on turnovers, maybe it gets guys involved differently, maybe it gets more structure in places that we need it. I’m all for it, and I want to do that to win.”

Aiming High

Timberwolves point guard Mike Conley wants to play the 2025-26 season the way he played in 2023-24:

Stat                 2023-24    2024-25
Points              11.4           8.2
Field goal%     45.7           40
Assists             5.9             4.5
Minutes           28.9           24.7

Minnesota Timberwolves guard Mike Conley speaks with referee Tyler Ford (39) during the first half of Game 1 of an NBA basketball Western Conference Finals playoff series against the Oklahoma City ThunderTuesday, May 20, 2025, in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Nate Billings)

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WASHINGTON — It is a truth generally acknowledged that Pete Hegseth is a muttonhead.

But I come not to bury the self-proclaimed “secretary of war” — rather, to praise him.

He is going to spur some superlative Pentagon coverage. Because nothing gets a bunch of reporters going like being forced out of the building where they work and being told they aren’t allowed to do their jobs.

The Pentagon has said it will deny credentials to reporters who seek information that has not been approved for release. Hegseth already cut off access to large swaths of the Pentagon to reporters without escorts.

Journalists have walked the Pentagon’s halls since its opening in World War II. They could stake out Jim Mattis, a defense secretary in President Donald Trump’s first term, when he picked up his clothes at an in-house dry cleaners and have an off-the-record chat as he walked back to his office, shirts slung over his shoulder. They might bump into the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Pentagon Starbucks and have a conversation that could turn into a story.

Pentagon officials liked it because they could clock what the reporters were working on, and the reporters liked it because they could get tips.

Mainstream news outlets have generally been careful, responsible, sometimes even overly deferential, about covering our military and handling sensitive information.

This crackdown on reporting supposedly would protect such information, even though the secretary himself personifies the motto “Loose lips sink ships.”

He was embarrassed by the revelations that the Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been mistakenly added to a chat about classified war plans on Signal; and that Hegseth had shared details of strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal chat that included his wife and brother; and that Elon Musk had been invited to a briefing on top-secret plans in the event of war with China.

And Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News anchor, does not like how the media covered him as he ascended — utterly unqualified and looking like the third lead of a cheesy spring-break movie.

As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote at the time, a trail of documents indicated that Hegseth was dumped from prior leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior and drinking on the job.

His tenure at the Pentagon has been marked by chaos as he pushed out several top Black and female leaders and derided “fat troops” and “fat generals.”

Knowing he’s in over his head, Hegseth has grown more paranoid and resentful — qualities we need in the supervisor of a nearly trillion-dollar budget, supervising troops and weapons all over the world.

When I covered stories in Saudi Arabia, officials attached minders to us. But imposing such undemocratic, restrictive protocols at the Pentagon makes it seem as if we’re run by tin-pot dictators.

Trump can seem more open with reporters. Attention is his oxygen, after all. But he continually maligns the media.

And there’s a creepy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feel to the press corps at the White House now as the perches of legacy media get filled with MAGA ringers — like the two White House “reporters” from Mike “MyPillow” Lindell’s “news” network.

One of the pillow reporters, Cara Castronuova, was among the handful of media representatives allowed in with Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine on Friday. Castronuova’s penetrating “questions” consisted of gushing over Trump, who “stuck out his neck” for a Middle East peace deal, and chiding Zelenskyy for wanting the weapons that Trump had suggested he might give Ukraine. “As he said,” Castronuova tartly told the Ukrainian president, “we need our Tomahawks, too.”

Trump dodged Vietnam with his bone spurs excuse, and he has called the Iraq War “the single worst decision ever made.” So, somewhere, under all that bombast and desire to be praised rather than challenged, he knows we need a vibrant Pentagon media corps to ferret out the truth when our leaders are lying to us to prolong or start wars.

America’s greatest fiascoes happened because there wasn’t enough sunlight cast on them. As a chastened JFK told The New York Times’ managing editor, Turner Catledge, after the Bay of Pigs, “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

After reporters — including those from Fox News and Newsmax — refused to agree to Hegseth’s 21 pages of conditions, the Defense Department’s official X social account trolled them with a puerile meme.

Hegseth, immature and unconfident, cannot accept that a free press is integral to democracy. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Hopefully, the defense secretary who will take over when Hegseth is undone by the press for his ineptitude and un-American diktats will understand that.

Maureen Dowd writes a column for the New York Times.

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Today is Tuesday, Oct. 21, the 294th day of 2025. There are 71 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Oct. 21, 1959, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum opened in New York.

Also on this date:

In 1797, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,” was christened in Boston’s harbor.

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In 1805, a British fleet commanded by Vice Adm. Horatio Nelson defeated a French-Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar; Nelson, however, was killed.

In 1940, Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” was first published.

In 1944, U.S. troops captured the German city of Aachen (AH’-kuhn) — the first German city to fall to American forces in World War II.

In 1966, 144 people, 116 of them children, were killed when a coal waste landslide engulfed a school and some 20 houses in Aberfan, Wales.

In 2013, a seventh grader at Sparks Middle School in Sparks, Nevada, shot and killed a teacher and wounded two classmates before taking his own life.

In 2014, Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius was convicted of culpable homicide for shooting and killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. The conviction was later upgraded to murder; Pistorius was released on parole in January 2024.

In 2021, Actor Alec Baldwin was pointing a gun on the set of the Western movie “Rust” in New Mexico when it went off, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza. Charges of involuntary manslaughter against Baldwin were dropped in July 2024.

In 2024, jury selection began in the trial of a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Daniel Penny, for placing a man who was acting erratically on a New York City subway train in May 2023 in a deadly chokehold. In December 2024, Penny was cleared of all charges, including criminally negligent homicide.

Today’s Birthdays:

Rock singer Manfred Mann is 85.
TV’s Judge Judy Sheindlin is 83.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is 76.
Former first daughter Patti Davis is 73.
Film director Catherine Hardwicke is 70.
Actor Ken Watanabe (wah-tah-NAH’-bee) is 66.
Republican Sen. Ted Budd of North Carolina is 54.
Actor Will Estes is 47.
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian (kahr-DASH’-ee-uhn) is 45.
Actor Glenn Powell is 37.
Country singer Kane Brown is 32.
Singer Doja Cat is 30.

TORONTO — George Springer put Toronto ahead with a three-run homer in the seventh inning and the Toronto Blue Jays advanced to the World Series for the first time since 1993 by beating the Seattle Mariners 4-3 in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series on Monday night.

It was the first go-ahead homer in Game 7 history when a team trailed by multiple runs in the seventh inning or later.

The Blue Jays will host Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 on Friday night when the World Series comes to Canada for the third time. The defending champion Dodgers swept Milwaukee in the NLCS.

The Blue Jays were playing in a Game 7 for the first time since losing at home to Kansas City in the 1985 ALCS.

Cal Raleigh and Julio Rodríguez each hit a solo home run for the Mariners in the team’s first Game 7 but Seattle failed to reach its first World Series, leaving the heartbroken Mariners as the only major league team without a pennant.

Addison Barger walked to begin the seventh and Isiah Kiner-Falefa followed with a single. Seattle right-hander Bryan Woo was removed after Andrés Giménez advanced the runners with a sacrifice bunt, and Springer greeted Eduard Bazardo with his fourth homer of this postseason, a 381-foot drive to left field that got the sellout crowd of 44,770 roaring.

Toronto went 54-27 at home in the regular season and 4-2 at home in the AL playoffs.

Making his first bullpen appearance since Game 5 of the 2021 Division Series, Kevin Gausman pitched one inning of scoreless relief, working around three walks, to earn the win for Toronto.

Fellow starter Chris Bassitt pitched a perfect eighth and Jeff Hoffman finished for his second save this postseason.

Rodríguez opened the game with a double and scored on a one-out single by Josh Naylor. Daulton Varsho tied it with an RBI single off George Kirby in the bottom half before Rodríguez restored the lead for Seattle with a leadoff homer in the third.

Raleigh, who led the majors with 60 homers in the regular season, made it 3-1 with a leadoff homer against Louis Varland in the fifth.

Raleigh has 10 home runs in 15 career games at Rogers Centre, three of them in the postseason. He also homered at Toronto in Game 1 of a 2022 Wild Card Series and Game 1 of this year’s ALCS.

Naylor was called out to end the first after umpires ruled he interfered with Ernie Clement’s relay to first base on a double play by jumping into the throw and deflecting it.

Kirby allowed one run and four hits in four innings. He walked one and struck out three.

Blue Jays starter Shane Bieber permitted two runs and seven hits in 3 2/3 innings. He walked one and struck out five.

Toronto slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. arrived at the stadium wearing a Maple Leafs hockey jersey with Auston Matthews’ name and number. The star forward is 0-6 in Game 7s with Toronto during his 10 seasons in the NHL.

Toronto Blue Jays players celebrate on the field after defeating the Seattle Mariners in game seven of the American League Championship Series at the Rogers Centre on Oct. 20, 2025 in Toronto, Ontario. (Photo by Mark Blinch/Getty Images)