'We're after a championship': The Timberwolves believe this year is different
IT WILL NEVER AGAIN be this dark, this early. At least that’s what the rotation of the earth promises. It’s the darkest day of the year, though it’s all a matter of inches, seconds and minutes. Statistically, though, the proclamation is sound. The sun is already threatening its departure at 4:15 p.m. in downtown Minneapolis, hovering above the brown roof of the Target Center, pulling thick grey clouds over itself like a blanket. It would all seem especially doomed if not for the fact that Christmas is also four days away. Anyone who will talk to you here, in the spirit of polite Midwest conversation, will tell you that it’s cold, sure. But not really cold. Not yet. The worst is yet to come. For now, the outdoors is buzzing with a kind of general excitement (even though, to be clear, it is still 32 degrees).
Outside of the famed First Avenue venue, there is a lone dancing Santa. A man in a costume, who, initially, begins moving slowly, and then picks up in exuberance, almost like his own whirlwind. Even for those, like myself, averse to staring, it is irresistible to be an audience to this brief burst of pleasure, this person, immersed in whatever is playing in the massive over-ear headphones affixed to his ears, missing the walk signal once, and then a second time, before finally settling himself, and walking across the street as if nothing had been happening mere moments ago. The space he left is now empty, and so attention is drawn to what had been hovering over him the entire time: a massive black and white billboard featuring Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert. Black and white repetitive strips of their faces — Towns, glaring, looking sideways at the camera. Edwards smirking, Gobert, smiling warmly. In between their faces, language imploring fans and bypassers to vote for each of the players to get them into the All-Star game. The hype is deserved, at least at the moment. By this point, the Timberwolves have been sitting in first place in the Western Conference for a solid five weeks. They’ve won the hard games, they’ve coasted in the easy games, and they have, at times, flirted with a kind of both-ends dominance that longtime Timberwolves fans (of which I am one, to clear the air early,) haven’t seen since the early-aughts Kevin Garnett era.
Tonight, the Lakers are in town, and the Wolves are playing their second game in two nights, coming back home after a frustrating loss in Philadelphia the night before. For fans hovering outside of the arena early, most of the talk is about Joel Embiid, who got the Timberwolves bigs into early foul trouble before finishing with a dominant 51-point performance. “Nothing you can do about it,” a fan named Rick says to me, shrugging and rubbing his ungloved hands together with a level of ferocity that grows as he recalls moments from the game. “You can’t touch the guy [Embiid], and so of course he’s gonna have himself a night.” In the spirit of objectivity, I do point out that a 50 piece is a 50 piece, some of those points were pure work. Rick nods, slowly. “Yeah, OK, sure,” he says, slightly resigned. “But our guys don’t get those calls. Karl doesn’t get those calls.” To this, I say, he has a point — a point I found myself shouting at the television just 24 hours ago, though I don’t think anyone thinks their guys get the calls. He’s like me; been a fan since the ’90s. Can’t believe what he’s seeing. It doesn’t feel real until it does, and then it feels too real. We’re all there, in some way.
Inside Target Center, the spirits feel exceptionally high. The word has been out for a while: LeBron James isn’t playing tonight. Anthony Davis will likely play. Down in the tunnel, bass begins to rattle the walls, spilling out of the locker room, inside of which, the mood is subdued. Gobert lays his long frame out in the center of the room, contorting his body in a series of stretches along the Timberwolves logo at the center of the carpet. Shake Milton and Edwards exchange tips on rest and recovery. Mike Conley, the thoughtful vet, talks with a reporter about holiday plans, about Ohio State basketball. It’s the calm before the clash. It seems entirely impossible to me, and likely to any unfamiliar bystander, that a game is preparing to tip off in roughly 30 minutes. From seemingly nowhere, Towns ducks his large frame under the locker room door, bellowing the lyrics of 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” somewhat menacing at first, and then, bending them jovially, and then playfully, into a kind of ballad, a wide grin breaking over his face while he sings a song about death, about enemies.
This is what the vibes are and have been, point guard Jordan McLaughlin tells me as he leans into his locker. It’s McLaughlin’s fifth season in the NBA, all of them spent with the Timberwolves. He signed a two-way contract with Minnesota in 2019, after spending time with the G-League’s Long Island Nets. In his first year with the team, they won 19 games for the entirety of the season. His second year, they won 23. A win tonight would give the Timberwolves their 22nd win of the year before Christmas. While not in disbelief, McLaughlin has a hard time pinpointing what the difference is.
“Well, it’s not just one thing, I think,” he tells me, looking around the locker room. “I think last year, after the playoff loss [to the eventual champion Denver Nuggets in the first round], we felt like we played them tough. We felt like we could really build off of that and make something out of what we’ve got. Guys are locked in, and everyone is brought into what we’re trying to accomplish here.”
The “what” raises an inquiry. The Timberwolves haven’t won a playoff series since the 2003-04 season. They haven’t even gotten close to the second round since, having only held a lead in a playoff series once, for one game in 2021-22, before their multiple in-series collapse against Memphis. The team, in its franchise history, has only been out of the first round of the playoffs one single time, in that aforementioned ’03-’04 run. So, one might think baby steps would be in order. Win a round, and see what happens. But no one thinks like that inside this locker room, or I’d suppose any locker room of competitors, especially competitors who are at the top of their conference. The thing about this, which might be hard to understand to the outside world: Wolves fans are used to cheering for a directionless team, one that isn’t quite there, and isn’t going to get there anytime soon. Nothing is surprising here. In the lower level of Target Center, the walls slightly tremble with the echoes of bass, the ease of laughter from players filtering in through the locker room’s open door.
“I mean, we’re not just trying to win a playoff series,” McLaughlin says, leaning back into his locker. “We’re a championship team. We’re after a championship.”
THE REALITY IS, in any given year, only a few teams in any sport end up being great. Actually great. Great enough to truly contend. Sure, more teams are good, more teams can put up a reasonable fight. But it becomes known what teams have an actual shot. Sometimes it’s known early, and sometimes it crystalizes late, a revelation arrived at through bad or good luck — injuries, a player taking an unexpected leap. It also arrives through sheer reality. Looking at the roster, looking at what’s happening on the floor, and being honest with yourself.
Still, for many of us, we return every year with hope. I have seen Minnesota Timberwolves seasons end with a team that has won 15 total games, and I still went into the start of the next season telling myself they’d be a playoff team — and meaning it. (In this instance, the 2009-10 season, that following year the Timberwolves were, in fact, not a playoff team. Though they did improve from 15 wins to 17 wins.)
The commitment to these repetitive returns, the delusion it takes to believe that guy’s shot will come around, or that guy will figure out how to defend, or this coach will figure out a system that aligns with the talent on the floor. It’s a delusion that Timberwolves fans, specifically, have had to get comfortable with. The post-Garnett years feel like a fog. The Love-Rubio era, which boasted some of the more bizarre roster constructions in NBA history, along with some unfortunate draft misses (plus a very brief and earnest attempt to revive Brandon Roy’s career, which didn’t take, though I tried to believe.) The Karl-Anthony Towns era, which isn’t a single era, but an era in pieces. For all of the polarizing talk of Towns as a player, one thing that rarely gets mentioned is the lack of consistency he’s had to endure, and how hard he’s worked to adapt to it all. The Towns/Wiggins/LaVine dream that never materialized. The Jimmy Butler moment and the fallout. Massive shifts in coaches, in front-office personnel, in rosters. Through it all, Towns has remained, the most consistent face of the franchise since Garnett. He has weathered the bad years, taken considerable blame for them, and still come back, loudly expressing his commitment to the franchise.
Now, we’re here. After the Memphis series burnout, where the Wolves, despite a very notable collapse, played fairly well, it seemed like there was a core roster that could be built upon. Then, The Trade. The trade that emptied out the cupboard for Gobert, in a move that didn’t seem to, at the time, make much sense. Towns, again, was asked to adjust — this time to change positions entirely. The 2022-23 season was more of a disaster than the team’s 42-40 record suggested. Gobert and Towns didn’t get enough time in preseason to mesh. Towns got hurt and missed months of the season. While I dislike using a vague term like “vibes” as a metric, Gobert getting into a physical altercation with Kyle Anderson during the final game of the season and then being suspended for the play-in game suggested that the vibes were, in fact, off. It was an exhausting season to watch unfold, even when considering the few highlights within it.
I found myself in Toronto during the first game of the 2023-24 Timberwolves campaign, a game that was as sloppy and tiresome to watch as first games can tend to be. The Wolves looked sluggish and without enthusiasm. Towns and Gobert struggled to connect with any consistency. Edwards, the team’s most recent beloved star, couldn’t get into a rhythm, and the Wolves lost by three, in a game that ended with a closer score than it felt on the floor. On the sidelines, body language was deflated, sometimes seemingly puzzled. Two nights later, the Timberwolves blew a massive second-half lead to the Hawks, losing by 14 after being up by 19 at the half. It was the kind of loss that ignited a kind of trauma response in the hearts and minds of Wolves fans, who watched this team squander second-half leads for years now, many of us grumbling online about the same old undisciplined Wolves, destined for the play-in, if even that. The West is a gauntlet, after all. No way they make it out alive.
And then, November hit. The Timberwolves went 13-2.
MICAH NORI IS JOVIAL. He speaks in a way that suggests he’s always waiting for you to guess the punchline to a joke he’s telling, even when he’s not telling one at all. He’s gotten a lot of buzz this season for the way he adds flair to the otherwise dry halftime interview, sprinkling in his own unique sayings (“Our defense is like 7-Eleven, because we’ve been open in the paint all night”). Nori is also a unique coaching mind, one who — for Wolves fans who watch the broadcasts — breaks down defensive strategy in depth pre-game, with a real level of focus and clarity. When I catch Nori by phone a few days after the Lakers game, and two days after Christmas, it’s early in the morning, and the team is preparing to travel to Dallas. He’s subdued and thoughtful.
“Last year, we’d get big double-digit leads and give them away,” he tells me. “We lost to some teams we should have. And so we had to focus this year on two things: defense and maturity. Defense keeps you in games, of course. And maturity… well, we’ve just got to put teams away, and make sure they can’t get back into the game, we’re not interested in having any losing streaks.”
He praises Conley, which is not a unique stance. Everyone, when talking about this team’s maturity, nods to Conley, the Adult In The Room, the steadying vet, in his 17th season, who has found a role in Minnesota: leader, mentor, big-shot maker. His reliability on the ball is a big reason for the team’s ability to hold on to leads. He rarely turns it over, he’s a calming influence on everyone on the floor. That maturity, Nori says, reflects on Towns. Fans have wanted to see Towns firm up his game around the edges for several seasons now.
“Well, Karl gets a lot asked of him,” Nori says. “He has to adjust, all the time. He was an All-NBA player at the 5, and then we traded for Rudy, and he’s got to play the 4. He doesn’t get a lot of credit for it, but he’s grown. He’s had to change his game so much, on both ends. And Coach [Chris] Finch challenged him. He knows he’s special, and he can do so many things offensively, but he asked him to be better defensively, and he asked him to move on to the next play. You get fouled? OK, so what? Next play. Stay on your feet. Don’t try to sell calls. Keep going to the hole, you’re a great talent.
“He’s shown up. He’s matured. As good as he’s been, he’s gotten better.”
The Towns/Gobert pairing, Nori mentions, has flourished in the face of this growth. There were times last year when the two seemed completely out of sync on the floor, clogging the paint, which made it hard on everyone — particularly Edwards, who thrives on getting clean driving lanes. Other times, Towns would languish in the corner waiting for the ball while the rest of the team seemed to play without him. Other times, Gobert would raise his arm, frantically looking for an entry pass that would come a touch too late. This season, at their best, the two have found harmony on both ends. Towns’ heightened defensive approach allows him to chase players around the perimeter with some success, and at least be an eager pest to opponents. On the offensive end, the lob connection between the two is a delight to watch. Neither of them feel like they’re sacrificing anything for the machinery to work.
“It’s beneficial for us to have guys like Mike and Rudy who have won in this league,” says Nori. “They’ve won 60 games in the regular season, things like that. They teach us consistency. Everyone here is more about winning than they are themselves. We’ve got chemistry and continuity.”
“And look,” he adds, after a pause. “It’s never easy to win in this league, but it’s easier when you come home and you got 18,000 cheering for you every night. We play in a great sports town, a town hungry for a winner. And we’re trying to give them that every time out.”
Back at the Lakers matchup, the lights go dark in Target Center and the starting lineups are announced. The players themselves don’t wait for the announcers to say their names. They file out, in order, but a handful of beats ahead of the fanfare. It’s as if they’re all in a rush to get to work. But the traditions are there, the language between teammates which is a beautiful game within the game: Edwards and Conley unfurling their unique handshake. Towns and Gobert’s handshake, like two old business partners, firm, each one of their hands clasping over the other, while the two nod at each other. But it is Edwards whose name gets the loudest cheer when it is called out. It is Edwards whose name is on the back of most jerseys inside the Target Center. It is Edwards whom Wolves fans want to talk to me about in the hallways of the arena.
“I can’t believe we have a player like this,” says a fan named Amanda, standing next to her son, who tugs eagerly at an Edwards City Edition jersey that looks brand new. “I mean, we’ve had good players before. We had KG and Love and we all love KAT and…” she trails off here, as if trying to locate any other Timberwolves player who might have been worth mentioning in the same sentence as, arguably, the team’s three most iconic players. I assume going back to Tom Gugliotta may be too depressing. “… But we’ve never had a guy like this,” she continues. “He could be what Kobe was for the Lakers, but for us.” When she says this, her eyes widen, as if she’s considering it for the first time.
“You win championships with a guy like that,” a Target Center security employee told me, as we stood courtside watching the teams warm up. “I’ve seen a lot of NBA guys up close, and not everyone has it, you know? He’s just got it. He’s not afraid of anything. He’s not afraid of anyone in front of him. You win championships with those kinds of guys. You get banners up there with those kinds of guys,” he says, pointing to the largely barren rafters inside the arena.
And it is true — for all of the talk of team growth and maturity and renewed sense of purpose, it is also, simply, the reality of having an elite talent who can simply go out and get a lot of buckets. A guy who wants to defend in high-pressure situations. Against the Lakers, Edwards gets off to a hot start, getting to the basket at will, settling into the midrange, rebounding and distributing. Conley, playing against D’Angelo Russell — the point guard he replaced in a mid-season trade last year, is also looking exceptionally determined, seeking out his shot with a ferocity that suggests the typically reserved leader has something to prove.
This edition of the Timberwolves seems to have it all, in a way that is most illuminated in an in-person, home game setting. They have a beloved bench mob, led by extremely skilled fan favorite Naz Reid, who is in contention for sixth man of the year. Players like Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who have contributed in big moments. They’ve got a renewed and revitalized Gobert back in DPOY form, and on the perimeter, they’ve got the rangy Jaden McDaniels blanketing a team’s best wing. They win a tight battle with the Lakers, 118-111, which once again allowed the team to avoid a losing “streak.”
Outside, fans linger, despite the chill that has grown in ferocity since tipoff. I sit down and look up, again, at the All-Star billboard. I tell someone next to me that I can’t believe this is real, that this is the team we get to root for after all these years. Slight pessimist that I am, I mention that I’m worried that, at any minute, it won’t be like this. The dream will be over, and our guys will be back, fighting for a low playoff seed. I don’t know what I’m expecting out of this interaction, maybe comfort. Instead, the person shrugs and says, “Maybe, but it’s good now. It’s real good now.” And then, they’re off. I suppose they’re right. Now, anything feels possible. Now, it seems like it will never be as dark as it was, at least not for a long time.
IT’S EARLY MARCH, three months after the Lakers game, and Mike Conley seems steady but slightly uncertain over the phone: “We’ve had to deal with injuries before, and we’ve got guys who are ready to play and keep our level of play high, so… we’ll have to see how it goes.”
Earlier this morning, just about two hours before we got on the phone, it was announced that Towns had suffered a left meniscus injury. Later, news broke that he would undergo surgery, and hopefully return by the beginning of the playoffs in April. This puts an immediate damper on the vibrant mood around the post-All-Star break Timberwolves, still clinging to first place in the Western Conference. The conference is becoming tighter at the top, as it tends to do in the home stretch. There’s a panic setting in among Wolves fans this morning, though Conley, as is to be expected from the veteran leader, sounds confident. Conley is the clock that every watch sets its time to. His reliable hand in the fourth quarter seems to be what was missing for a Timberwolves team that constantly unraveled in late-game situations. Players love playing alongside him, and he’s found a home in Minnesota, a team that recently extended him for two years, which — it would seem — runs up against the conclusion of an excellent (if not sometimes underappreciated) career.
“It’s pretty fitting, I think,” Conley says of potentially rounding out his career in Minnesota. “I’ve always wanted to be a guy who goes to organizations that have aspirations of doing big things, and this is it. We have a lot of young talent, a lot of guys who want to win. I like being able to come in and implement my mind into the game.” He pauses briefly, before adding: “And my play, which I can still do at a high level.”
There is, of course, another reason for the urgency to secure Conley for two more years. People speak of timelines in basketball terms as if there is only one timeline, and not many timelines exist in tandem with a central, star-driven timeline, to enhance the whole of the team. That is especially true and urgent in the case of the Timberwolves who are now operating on Edwards Time. Conley, who is 14 years older than Edwards, is also reorienting Edwards to the task of committed leadership. “There’s always some challenges,” Conley stresses. “Just due to our age differences, there are some ways I’m not going to relate. Some things that once worked for me aren’t going to work for Ant. And so I’ve had to learn personalities, learn what buttons to press, how to get across to everyone, and how to communicate. Ant has been receptive, he’s been open to improving on the court, and it has been smooth.”
The renewed connection between Towns and Gobert, which was stagnant much of last year due to injuries before taking off thrillingly this season, has been a bit mystifying for some of the Wolves I spoke with. It wasn’t clicking, and then it was, but there’s no direct way to pinpoint the when and how behind what clicked. Conley insists it was the two playing for their respective countries in the offseason (Gobert is a stalwart on the French team, and Towns suited up for the Dominican Republic). This allowed them to have their own individual leadership roles. They came into camp seeing the game differently, Conley insists. Communicating at a higher level, making reads that weren’t there before, and figuring out how to cater to each other’s abilities on both ends of the floor. It has been one of the pleasures of watching the Wolves this season, from this fan’s perspective, at least. It’s a delight to be proven wrong, as a concerned skeptic of the trade when it first went down.
I refuse to allow myself to believe in sports curses, though there are plenty of good arguments to be made for them, and mythology is always fun to get lost in. There are Timberwolves fans now, in the midst of uncertainty around Towns, who was having one of the best seasons of his career, understandably bemoaning the curse of Minnesota sports. I believe there to be a thin veil between a curse and just bad luck, and the Timberwolves, this season, have thrived on largely good luck. In a league where a couple of injuries or a suspension can entirely derail a promising team (see: Memphis,) the Timberwolves have had health relatively on their side this season. Every time Towns would go crashing to the ground in a game, or every time Edwards would land awkwardly after swinging on the rim, I’d wince, assuming it would be over, there’d be an injury, a bad one, and there goes the season.
I don’t know how to be a fan except for being a fan this way: the kind who is always prepared for the worst possible thing to happen, because all evidence suggests that it can happen and will. It is certainly easier to call this a curse, but doing that, I think, would let my specific brand of fandom off of the hook too easily. I would like to believe that nothing is hovering over the teams I love that makes them so greatly fallible that they cannot ever reach some version of the promised land, and the promised land is relative. Today, the promised land is a playoff series victory, and then the promised land might become the NBA Finals, and then the promised land might become a championship, but I will take my promised lands inch by inch, letdown by letdown. I want no letdown softened by the belief in an inevitable curse.
Despite the cloud hovering over the Timberwolves fanbase this morning, Conley does come alive when I ask about Minnesota, the Twin Cities and their relationship with this team, which has been ever-evolving, but now has hit a crescendo in these recent years. Conley compares it to his time in Memphis. “You can just feel the energy,” he says. “It’s like those early playoff runs with the Grizzlies. The city is just beside themselves, you go out and people are thanking you and excited about the next game, people flood the arenas. I’ve played against Minnesota my whole career, and it was never like what I’ve seen now.”
Now, as the regular season winds down, the Timberwolves have already won more games than they won all of last season. With just five more wins out of the final 20, they’ll have won more games than they’ve won in two entire decades. You don’t get a trophy for outdoing the lesser versions of your past self, the regular season is just the regular season, but the very nature of unpredictability that hangs over every vibrant, pleasurable moment means that if you’ve lived through enough of the lean years, you’ll simply take a good one because it’s there to be taken, and then see what comes next.
