Rachel Brattin believed her husband was lying to her, but it wasn’t until she looked in his sock drawer that she realized how big of a secret he was keeping.

Hidden in the drawer was a document saying they were behind on their property taxes and their Mounds View home was in danger of foreclosure. Her husband at the time, Nicholas Firkus, was in charge of their finances.

Brattin knew Firkus’ previous home had been foreclosed on years earlier and then there’d been a tragedy that ended with the death of his first wife.

Now, she had questions. “I wasn’t sure how mad he would be that I knew,” she said recently of finding the paperwork about their home. “I didn’t know how desperate he would feel. I just wasn’t sure and I wasn’t willing to risk the safety of my kids to find out.”

She woke the three children she had with Firkus, buckled them into their carseats and drove away while Firkus slept.

In the years that followed, prosecutors would charge Firkus with the murder of his first wife, Heidi Firkus. Jurors convicted Firkus earlier this year.

One person who jurors didn’t hear from was Rachel Firkus, who is now remarried and goes by Rachel Brattin. Prosecutors wanted her to testify, but defense attorneys argued before the trial that “whether Nick lied to Rachel is not relevant to any issue before the court. It does not suggest in any way that Nick lied to Heidi” and a judge agreed Brattin’s testimony could unfairly sway a jury.

Still, police and prosecutors credit Brattin’s information with helping propel their decade-old case forward before they charged Firkus. They’d been investigating what Heidi Firkus knew — or didn’t know — about the foreclosure and impending eviction of her and Nicholas’ St. Paul home.

Sgt. Niki Sipes, the lead St. Paul police investigator, said when she found out Firkus had kept financial information from his second wife, it showed her that “he was capable of lying about these things and of hiding them. His assertion was that Heidi knew all of these things, but it then began to look like it was a very real possibility he had hidden it because we had seen him hide it from Rachel.”

Brattin, who was included in recent “20/20″ and “Dateline” TV news programs about the Firkus case, said she’s decided to speak out because she previously felt silenced and she wants her story to be known as one of hope.

“For people who are stuck in situations where they don’t feel like they have any hope, I understand that part, but there is hope when you can stand up for yourself,” said Brattin, 38.

From neighborhood meeting to marriage

On April 25, 2010, the day before Nicholas and Heidi Firkus were to be evicted, 25-year-old Heidi was fatally shot in their Hamline-Midway home. Nicholas Firkus, then 27, told police an unknown man broke in. He said he armed himself with his shotgun, and Firkus said he and the intruder struggled. The firearm went off and Heidi was shot in the back.

Heidi Firkus (Courtesy of Erickson family)

In the summer of 2010, Firkus was living with his brother in Hugo. Brattin was staying a few blocks away with her sister, Sarah Olson, after moving back from California.

Olson and her then-husband were in Nicholas and Heidi Firkus’ close friend group. Brattin met Heidi a few times, but didn’t know her well. She remembers her as “very sweet and very kind, very down to earth.”

Nicholas Firkus was often over at the Olson house, and Brattin and Firkus became friends. They developed a relationship and married in a small backyard ceremony in August 2012. They went on to have three children in four years.

They’d decided Brattin would be a stay-at-home mom. Firkus worked for his family’s business, home project contractors, and Brattin also did some part-time work for the business from home.

At the beginning of their marriage, they agreed Firkus would be in charge of the family’s finances. Brattin knew of his past financial problems, but she said Firkus told her “it wasn’t that bad” and she believed he’d been young and hadn’t known how to manage money. She felt reassured because they completed a course together on financial management.

“I respected the fact that he got out of debt before we were married and I know that it’s important for men to feel that they can provide for their family, so I thought, ‘He proved that he can do this and take care of it,’” Brattin said. “I wanted to give him that chance to do that.”

Firkus’ parents bought Nicholas and Rachel their home in Mounds View, and the couple paid them for it each month, Brattin said.

As time went on, Brattin’s trust in Firkus wavered. She said she’d often find food wrappers in his car and would ask him about them. He’d say he gave someone a ride and they left the wrappers behind, for example, according to Brattin.

“It may not seem like a big deal, but for us, if you’re doing that daily, the cost comes out of the grocery budget that we have for our family,” said Brattin, who said there were times they were living paycheck to paycheck.

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Brattin started getting collection calls about medical bills. She asked Firkus to take care of them and he’d tell her, “Somebody messed up” or “I tried to call, but they didn’t call back,” Brattin recalled.

Sipes, the St. Paul police investigator, later testified at Firkus’ trial about email messages in his first marriage. In March 2010, Heidi asked Nicholas to take care of an Allina Health bill and wrote, “It just scares me that I got the call. It has to be messing up our credit.”

In a response, Nicholas told her, “Hey, got off the phone with U.S. Bank. They have flagged and sent our info to their auditing department to see where the discrepancies are.” But Sipes testified that they didn’t have a U.S. Bank account at that point.

‘Ashamed and scared’

It was 2018 when Brattin found the letter from Ramsey County in Firkus’ drawer about unpaid property taxes.

“I was shocked,” she said.

Jurors in Nicholas Firkus’ 2023 murder trial weren’t allowed to hear from Rachel Brattin, but behind the scenes, police and prosecutors credit her with helping confirm a motive for the killing of his first wife, Heidi, in 2010. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

After Brattin left with the children, she and Firkus talked and they also had conversations with his parents. Brattin used the voice recorder on her cellphone to record their conversations without them knowing. She said she did it to protect herself because she worried she’d be blamed for asking him to leave their home.

A recording was played in court during a pretrial hearing, when a judge was deciding if Brattin could testify. Jurors ultimately didn’t hear any of the audio.

In one conversation, Firkus told his parents that, when they gave him money twice in 2016 to pay their property taxes, he put the checks in their bank account instead of paying the taxes. At the time, “we were struggling really hard and I didn’t have the guts to talk to Rach about it and I didn’t have the guts to talk to anybody about it and I ignored it,” Firkus said. He said he had paid the taxes in 2017 and had just paid their past-due 2016 taxes.

He also said he’d been dishonest with Brattin — “some of it is financial,” he said in the recording. He told his parents that, when he talked to them the night before, “I was too ashamed and scared to ask for any help.”

When Firkus’ trial started in January, prosecutors Elizabeth Lamin and Rachel Kraker aimed to show that Heidi Firkus was unaware of the foreclosure and eviction. “Nick was desperate, ashamed and had run out of time, and reality was going to come crashing down on him,” Lamin said during opening arguments.

She no longer knew what to believe about homicide

In another conversation that Brattin recorded in 2018, she told Firkus and his parents that she no longer knew what to believe about what happened the day Heidi died.

“If Heidi did know all this was happening (with the impending eviction), why was there nothing packed in their house?,” Brattin asked them. “… That makes zero logical sense to me as a woman. … Neither parents knew … and they were going to tell their friends say one o’clock-ish to help them pack their whole entire house? That makes zero logical sense to me.”

Firkus responded soon after: “Heidi and I decided together that we would figure this out” because they thought they could and because “we were embarrassed and stuck.” There were things “crated up and easily ready to go,” Firkus added about packing the house.

Steven Firkus said his son’s attorney and investigator had determined in their own information-gathering process in 2010 that there was “proven documentation of Heidi having to sign documents saying she knows the foreclosure steps and the dates, and it was posted on the door with a date.” At Nicholas Firkus’ trial, his attorneys did not show foreclosure documents that had Heidi’s signature on them.

In a separate conversation between Nicholas Firkus and Brattin from around the same time, as she expressed increasing doubt about what happened to Heidi, Brattin told him, “I do not want to think these things, I don’t, but your actions have caused me to just distrust you completely. And the fact that your lying was so easy for you to do in front of me over and over and over makes me think …”

“That I could murder my wife?” Firkus asked.

“That you could lie about something,” Brattin answered.

“That I could murder my wife?” Firkus asked again.

“Yes,” Brattin said.

After Brattin spoke more, and Firkus cried and was silent, he told her, “Intellectually, I understand what you are saying. I don’t know where to go from here today.”

Police approached her

The couple separated. Brattin filed for divorce in 2019.

Sipes, the homicide investigator, heard rumblings about a separation and saw in public court records that the divorce was finalized in 2019. In 2020, she contacted Brattin.

Brattin said she didn’t know that police were still investigating Heidi Firkus’ homicide and she wasn’t sure at first if she would talk to Sipes because she didn’t think she had information that would be helpful.

“I gave it a few days, I prayed on it real hard,” Brattin said. “I could tell that she wanted to find the truth” and she agreed to meet with Sipes. She told her about the financial information she discovered Firkus had kept from her.

Sipes said she considers Brattin “a very brave woman who took a large risk in assisting us with the investigation.”

Prosecutors wanted Brattin to testify. Lamin argued at a pretrial hearing that it showed a pattern of Nicholas Firkus controlling finances, mismanaging them and lying about it.

But Firkus’ attorney, Robert Richman, said they “argued whatever happened in the relationship with Nick and Rachel, years after Heidi was murdered, it had no relevance to answering the question of who murdered Heidi. It was a different relationship, a different person” and Nicholas and Heidi Firkus’ financial circumstances were “very, very different. Whether or not Rachel knew (about her finances with Nicholas) tells us nothing about what Heidi knew.”

Conviction being appealed

Firkus, now 40, was sentenced in April to life in prison without the possibility of parole for premediated murder. Because of the sentence, the case will automatically be appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Nicholas Firkus (Courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Corrections)

Richman said he’ll argue that the case was based on circumstantial evidence and Minnesota law says in such cases “the circumstances proved have to be sufficient to be not only consistent with guilt, but inconsistent beyond a reasonable doubt with any reasonable hypothesis other than guilt. Our position is that it was a reasonable hypothesis that it happened exactly the way Nick said that it happened, namely that there was an intruder.”

Nicholas Firkus had told police that after Heidi was accidentally shot during the struggle, he and the unknown man continued to struggle and the gun went off a second time, shooting him in the upper thigh.

“A next-door neighbor heard the gunshot and heard a male voice yell, ‘You shot her,’” Richman wrote in a brief court document about the appeal. “In addition, there were tool marks in the door frame consistent with someone trying to jimmy the lock. The state’s case was entirely circumstantial.”

‘Hope is what I have chosen’

For Brattin, rebuilding her life was difficult. She spent years as a single mother. She’s now been happily married for a year to a man she’s known for more than 20 years. Her children are 6, 8 and 10.

A friend of Brattin’s started a GoFundMe to help with legal expenses that continue in family court and for ongoing therapy for her children.

Brattin has met Heidi’s parents, John and Linda Erickson, and they now count each other as friends.

“Because of knowing them, I know more of Heidi,” Brattin said.

The Ericksons said they’re grateful that Brattin “had the courage and willingness to come forward and talk about her own experience.”

Before Brattin knew Firkus, she was a licensed makeup artist. She previously started a makeup company, be Lovely, that she used to shed light on sex trafficking and to support organizations fighting against it. She recently made T-shirts with the word that means so much to her — Hope — that she’s selling through be Lovely’s website.

“I’m in a painful season of my life now,” she wrote on her website. “These products don’t come from a peaceful place when the storm has passed. They come from the deepest parts of my grief, fear, and injustice. Irrational hope is what I have chosen; the kind of hope that makes absolutely no sense based on my circumstances. I’m a firm believer that sometimes you have to speak out loud what is hard to believe in the moment.”

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As the lights go down on “Jersey Boys” at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, Frankie Valli rips off his bow tie and whips it around his head.

Backstage, actor Will Dusek transforms from the famous Four Seasons falsetto back into himself. Putting his costume away is almost automatic by this point, he said, so he’s thinking: Gotta go get gas. Gotta walk the dog, as a favor to his grandma, with whom he lives. Gotta run to the grocery store. Gotta eat something. He’s ravenous.

“After the show, I always need to get something in my system,” he said. “My nightly ritual is to eat my fridge and then stay awake for two hours because you’re just wired after the show.”

Actor Will Dusek sings as Four Seasons legend Frankie Valli during a 2023 performance of “Jersey Boys” at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. Dusek, 23, said it takes plenty of practice and lengthy vocal warm-ups to emulate Valli’s famous high-pitched voice. (Photo courtesy Dan Norman / Chanhassen Dinner Theatres)

Dusek, 23, grew up in St. Paul and graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in the spring. The leading “Jersey Boys” role is his first post-college gig — a big deal anywhere, let alone at a theater with as established and high-quality a reputation as Chanhassen.

And the accolades are rolling in.

One local reviewer praised his “rare, straight-from-the-soul falsetto,” and another said he “has the voice of an angel” and particularly commendable “vulnerability and openness as an actor.” The casting across the board is impeccable, the Pioneer Press’ Ross Raihala wrote in his review, but “the real revelation in the show” is Dusek, who conveys Frankie Valli as a character seemingly “effortlessly.” He’s the “perfect leading man.” He’s marking “the start of a brilliant future.” He was featured on the national theater site Broadway World.

“Jersey Boys,” which is based on the true story of singer Frankie Valli and the quartet The Four Seasons, is playing at Chanhassen Dinner Theater through February 24. The show is directed by longtime CDT artistic director Michael Brindisi, and the exceptional cast includes Dusek, Sam Stoll, Shad Hanley and Dylan Rugh, who took over from original cast member David Darrow at the end of the summer. Andrew Hey, the Frankie Valli understudy, plays the lead role twice a week.

Showtimes are Wednesdays through Sundays, and tickets are available at chanhassendt.com/jerseyboys.

On the one hand, the praise for Dusek’s performance has been exceptionally reaffirming that he made the right career choice. On the other hand, he said, “I like to remind myself that if I believe the good reviews, I’ve got to believe the bad reviews, too. I’ve got to remind myself that they are people’s opinions.”

What he knows for sure, though, is how welcoming and kind he’s found the local professional theater scene to be, especially at Chanhassen.

“I’ve spent four years away from home,” he said, “and I know that I always have here. The community is really amazing, especially the people that have been in this show.”

Dusek grew up near University Avenue and Wheeler Street, the oldest of three kids. His mom was a music teacher, and Dusek and his siblings were all in choir and band.

For a time, the family lived in the Washington, D.C., area, and in sixth grade, Dusek played Tiny Tim in the eighth-graders’ Christmas pageant. It wasn’t a full role — “I was just there to be a little guy,” he joked — but it’s his first memory of performing onstage.

Soon after, the family moved back to St. Paul, and Dusek continued doing plays throughout middle and high school. As a senior at Cretin-Derham Hall, in 2018, he was one of four students in the state that year to win a “triple threat” award for acting, singing and dancing from Hennepin Theatre Trust.

Several years later, as a theater student at Illinois Wesleyan, Dusek came across an audition call for CDT’s “Jersey Boys,” whose eight-month run is significantly longer than many other theaters’ productions. He was intrigued: Maybe he could land a spot in the ensemble or as a minor character, he thought, to get a little calmness and stability back after a stressful final year in college.

Well.

Singing and dancing auditions led to callbacks. At one point, director Michael Brindisi pulled him aside: Could he hear Dusek sing Frankie’s part in the song “Walk Like a Man”? After a couple of months, Dusek was invited to another round of callbacks — for Frankie.

The main quartet of Chanhassen Dinner Theatres’ “Jersey Boys” sing a Four Seasons song during a 2023 performance of the musical. From left to right: Sam Stoll as Bob Gaudio, Shad Hanley as Nick Massi, Will Dusek as Frankie Valli and Dylan Rugh as Tommy DeVito. (Photo courtesy Dan Norman / Chanhassen Dinner Theatres)

A few days later, the cast was almost finalized. Darrow was group leader Tommy DeVito, Stoll was lyricist Bob Gaudio, Hanley was bassist Nick Massi. And Dusek was one of two guys in contention for Frankie Valli. Brindisi brought the five performers back once more — both Frankie finalists sang “Sherry” with the other three cast members — and the director sent them home for the day.

Then, in February, Dusek got the email.

“I was like, holy (expletive)!” he said. “That’s crazy!”

So within days of graduating college and moving back to the Twin Cities, Dusek attended his first “Jersey Boys” rehearsal, in the lead role. And it’s an incredibly demanding one: Out of 32 songs, Frankie sings in 27 of them, Dusek said, many as the lead vocal part.

But, it turns out, because CDT’s evening shows start so late — after dinner! — even the lead role offers a level of calmness and stability that Dusek initially found disorienting. Occasionally, the cast will have afternoon recording sessions or impromptu rehearsals, but on non-matinee days, Dusek’s daytime schedule is generally pretty open. Early on, he almost got another job, just to fill up his time until the curtain call.

“I had a lot of castmates who have been out of college for many years,” he said. “They were like, ‘Hey, it’s really common for you, when you’re studying in college, to be always doing something — and then, right when you leave, you feel like you’re not doing anything. You feel like you’re not doing enough.’ They were like, ‘Take the time.’”

They were right.

“The constant pursuit” of Frankie Valli

Before the lights go down on “Jersey Boys” at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, Frankie Valli stands under street lamps. He looks out at the audience and delivers a final line that, to the actor, unlocks his entire character.

“Chasing the music…” he says, “trying to get home.”

Part of what made The Four Seasons so striking in the 1960s is that nobody besides Frankie Valli sounds quite like Frankie Valli. So what’s an actor to do?

“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, what about Frankie’s voice made him unique?” Dusek said. “And how can I emulate that in my own voice without directly imitating his sound?”

Voice coaches differentiate between a chest voice and a head voice, he said. Try singing increasingly higher and higher notes — you might notice your voice change from a full-throated sound to one that causes a little vibration between your ears.

Here’s where things get sticky: Trying to force too much singing muscle into those heady upper-register notes can sound nasally and hurt your vocal cords in the long run, Dusek said.

To emulate Valli, he had to figure out how to nail the high notes in a way that was both healthy and pleasant to listen to for several hours straight. The vocal cords are like biceps, he said; strengthening them takes plenty of steady effort. And, like the rest of the cast, Dusek does extensive vocal warm-ups and cool-downs before and after each performance, too.

“I think of it this way: If you’re doing weight training, you’re not going to hit your personal record to warm up for your personal record,” he said. “So I don’t go hitting any of the crazy high notes that I do during the show before the show.”

Let’s dig deeper into that final “Jersey Boys” line, though, Dusek said. Right now, the real Frankie Valli is 89, and the man just kicked off a yearlong tour this month.

If one of his goals is to ‘chase the music’ — to finally feel at home — Dusek asks, what does it say about him that he’s still out there, performing, after seven decades?

“It’s the constant pursuit of that, every single night, that’s life,” Dusek said.

Will Dusek (right), as Frankie Valli, poses in a scene with actress Andrea Mislan, who plays Valli’s wife Mary Delgado, during a 2023 performance of “Jersey Boys” at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. Dusek was cast as Valli in part for his ability to emulate the Four Seasons’ lead singer’s signature falsetto voice. (Photo courtesy Dan Norman / Chanhassen Dinner Theatres)

In the first act of “Jersey Boys,” Dusek plays a young Valli as wide-eyed and maybe a bit temperamental, as he phrased it. As the second act progresses — as Valli gets divorced, his new relationship cracks apart, his daughter dies, members of the Four Seasons fall out with one another — Dusek has masterfully transformed the character into a man who’s just… tired. More world-weary, and maybe more empathetic, too.

But not angry.

“It would be so easy for an actor to lean into the anger of what’s going on,” Dusek said. “It would be easy for him to have the same (reactions) he does when he was younger in the show.”

This development as Dusek plays it is believable, and human.

“The singing is great, and singing is obviously a huge part of the musical,” he said. “But I, as a person, would so much rather have someone convincingly take you through a story than sing the most impressive arias in the world. If you’re not emotionally available, and I’m not there with you for the journey, then why am I watching a play?”

Back to that bow tie.

During the show’s preview week, Dusek’s costume bow tie was a clip-on. It started to fall off after the final song, and David Darrow, who played the character Tommy DeVito at the time, tried to fix it but couldn’t.

Dusek just tore it off. The crowd cheered. Afterward, Dusek said, an audience member told another cast member that she’d once seen Frankie Valli live, and the move felt like something the real singer would do.

Now, Dusek wears a traditional bow tie to play Frankie Valli, but he still takes it off after the final goodbyes and whips it above his head in a sort of cathartic victory lap.

It’s the last the audience sees of Dusek, and Frankie, before he goes home.

And even if it weren’t what the real Frankie Valli would do — or even another actor’s Frankie Valli would do — it’s what Dusek’s Frankie Valli would do. That’s meaningful, too.

“That’s what I love about live theater,” he said. “In film, one person’s interpretation gets ingrained in your brain — this person is this character. But in theater, it can always be a little different.”

“Jersey Boys”: Performances at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres (501 78th St. W., Chanhassen) run through February 24, 2024. Tickets can be purchased at chanhassendt.com/jerseyboys or by calling the box office at 952-934-1525.

The main quartet of actors in “Jersey Boys,” at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, belt out the final song in the show. The musical, which dramatizes the real-life band The Four Seasons, runs at Chanhassen through February 2024. (Photo courtesy Dan Norman / Chanhassen Dinner Theatres)

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Most people seem to think that free speech means saying whatever you want without consequences. But that’s never been true — at least, legally speaking. The First Amendment stops the government from punishing you for your opinions. Beyond that, you’re on your own.

Some institutions, like universities, promise their members they won’t be punished for free expression. But for-profit employers rarely promise to protect employees’ speech, for market-oriented reasons. Because companies care about what customers and clients think, they typically reserve the authority to make workers comply with their preferred speech policies.

So-called “cancel culture” offers a clear example of how what you say can have consequences. Those canceled in recent years mostly found they had little recourse other than abjectly apologizing and hoping the cancellation would have a sell-by date. Consequences ranged from getting fired to losing work to simply being criticized — albeit brutally.

As it happened, most canceling initially came from the left. As a consequence, most leftists either thought there was nothing wrong with the practice or pointed out that “cancellation” was nothing more than the exercise of free speech by critics.

The right, for its part, complained bitterly but offered little in the way of a principled objection to the idea that people are free to criticize, even boycott, opinions they don’t like. In the end, cancellation emerged as a phenomenon enabled by the combination of free speech and free market forces.

Since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the political winds of intense public criticism have shifted. Left-leaning critics of Israel are now finding themselves the targets of calls for cancellation.

Paddy Cosgrave, the CEO of Web Summit, had to step down after a tweet that called out Israeli war crimes but never mentioned Hamas, let alone its intentional killing of noncombatants. Cosgrave tried to retract and contextualize, but his efforts were not sufficient to save his job. He’s only the most prominent example — others whose tweets have cost them employment include journalists and actors.

Meanwhile, at law schools including NYU, Columbia and Harvard (where I teach), several students have had job offers rescinded by corporate law firms on the theory that they — or organizations they led — excused or endorsed violence committed by Hamas. In some cases, this happened even after the students made it clear that they condemned Hamas and their organizations retracted their earlier statements.

Under principles of academic freedom, a university may forcefully disagree with its students’ views but must not not punish students for expression of political opinions. Academic freedom isn’t exactly the same as First Amendment free speech. Its purpose is to foster an atmosphere of open intellectual discussion in pursuit of truth under conditions of civility, not to impose the strict neutrality that bars government from picking winners in the realm of ideas.

That means universities may exercise professional judgment about the quality of ideas when making decisions about hiring, tenure or grades. It would be impossible for the university to be entirely neutral about the content of ideas when fulfilling these functions. (Public universities pose their own complex problems. They are both state actors for First Amendment purposes and also academic institutions.)

Private employers don’t adhere to the principles of academic freedom nor are they bound by the First Amendment. Their calculus is different: They have to weigh the reputational costs of hiring people associated with controversial political positions against the reputational costs of being seen as having a political litmus test for employees.

Our polarized politics mean that companies must tread carefully when they make expressly political decisions. They owe it to their employees, their customers and their shareholders to exercise good judgment after real thought. Companies do better when they have clearly stated values and transparent processes in place for sound decision-making.

As for individuals, we no longer have sharp dividing lines between our social media lives, our work lives, and our expression of political ideas. It follows that we had better realize that that the difference between contexts determines the consequences of our speech.

The First Amendment remains a bedrock of democratic values, but it protects us from the state, not from each other.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery and the Refounding of America.”

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He is a reserve player who happens to be a favorite of not only Timberwolves’ fans, but also the players.

The ovations he receives are starting to rival those of Anthony Edwards. For awhile there, Naz Reid was a lovable cult hero. But an entire Target Center crowd extends far beyond the reaches of the circles of Reddit.

Reid is simply, universally, loved.

“Naz is the best, man,” Wolves point guard Mike Conley summed up after Minnesota’s home victory Saturday over Miami.

As Reid beamed in the locker room, Kyle Anderson told him his 25-point, eight-rebound performance was some “6th Man of the Year (stuff).” Yet any praise he receives from his peers pales in comparison to what he’s showered with in his kingdom known to most as Target Center.

Every member of the roster is introduced individually prior to each home opener. When “At 6-foot-10, from LSU” was called out by Timberwolves’ public address announcer Jedidiah Jones, the crowd hit a new decibel level – it was time for Naz Reid. Reid’s roar matched that of his superstar teammates.

“That’s just love, man,” Reid said after the game. “I’m speechless. It’s crazy because it’s something that you dream of as a kid. It’s definitely special.”

As is the “Naz Reid” chants that echo throughout the arena as Reid takes over games, as he did in the second half of Minnesota’s win over Miami. An internet joke of sorts has quickly morphed into a rallying cry – a symbol of hope for franchise’s now, and its future.

“You never can really imagine something that special,” Reid said. “I appreciate every single person that was able to do that for me.”

But why does Reid invoke such emotions out of those who spend time with him and watch him play basketball?

It likely has something to do with the journey. Reid was an undrafted free agency, thought to be a talented player who wasn’t going to live up to his potential at the pro level. How wrong that’s been proven to date.

Reid demonstrated his wide array of skills from the early stages of his career. But, more importantly, he’s grown in every pivotal facet since then.

Timberwolves coach Chris Finch lauded Reid’s improvement as a rebounder, perimeter defender and attacker of switches this offseason.

He said Reid’s current confidence level is a “testament to what a great summer can do for you.” Later, the coach conceded every summer Reid has spent as a professional has been “great.” Reid is never satisfied with the current state of his game, but instead yearns for new ways to improve and, thus, ascend.

“Whether it was his body early and then finding his game and then his confidence,” Finch said. “He’s a worker.”

Timberwolves’ fans love workers. They crave effort. Regardless of performance level, Reid will give you his best every night. That was evident against Miami, as Reid chased the likes of Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson around the 3-point line when called upon. Whatever the challenge, Reid will do his best to meet it.

“I thought his defense tonight, particularly chasing and guarding and being up and being impactful, it was awesome,” Finch said. “And his rebounding has taken another leap. Fun to watch him play, for sure.”

Even more so on offense, where Reid is an agent of good basketball. Reid never stands still. He’s always moving his body or the ball. He is a read-and-instantly-react player. Stagnicity will not be tolerated in his presence.

“He does things quickly. That’s what we’ve always loved about him,” Finch said. “He’s just a catalyst in our offense. He creates next-action basketball.”
Which makes him a dream to play alongside.

“The way he approaches the game – on the court he’s easy to play with because he just moves and the ball is always just going somewhere and he doesn’t really think too much as far as what to do with it,” Conley said. “He’s just dribble, shoot, pass, he’s going right to it. Those guys are really fun to be around. He’s just a good teammate and a heckuva player.”

Conley said Reid is “one of my favorite guys that I’ve been able to play with as a teammate.” Partially because Reid is about the right things. No one wants to win as badly as Reid, something that’s been evidenced by the pain he exudes when Minnesota struggles. Much like how one is as pleased with the team’s successes.

Given all that, it’s no wonder Minnesota basketball fans – who take a strong liking to basketball played the right way – were so pleased when Reid signed a new three-year deal this offseason to remain with the team.

They have attached themselves to the 24-year-old center.

In return, he’s done the same.

“I wasn’t going anywhere (in free agency),” Reid said. “I love it here, man. It’s special. It’s definitely a place I want to be and develop. I’ve developed from year one to now. Each and every year, I’ve gotten better, so there was definitely no reason for me to leave.”