In pro basketball, the fourth quarter is known as “winning time.”
With each team having logged more than 60 of the 82 games in their 2023-24 NBA season, we are now in that final stanza. It is a point in the proceedings where body-part clichés begin to dapple the descriptions of squads remaining in the top tier or two among the 30 competing franchises.
It’s gut check time. How much heart do they have? Do they have ice in their veins and their heads on straight? It’s been a marathon, not a sprint – do they have the legs to get to the finish line?
For the first time in many a season, the Minnesota Timberwolves are a part of these conversations. They have continued to clamber to the top of the festering barrel of quality crabs that is the Western Conference; on their own or perhaps claw-locked in a tie with the reigning champion Denver Nuggets and/or the impudent, upstart Oklahoma City Thunder, depending on the latest results of this week’s games.
But having been absent from nearly two decades’ worth of these crunch time check-ups, the overall health of these Wolves is pockmarked with concerns. And their recent seven-game home stand coming out of the All Star break did little to quell them.
The Wolves won four games against terrible teams that as of Tuesday morning had a combined record of 75 wins and 169 losses. They have now won 16 times in 19 games against foes with a winning percentage below 40. But there are only three more opponents with such ineptitude among the final 20 contests of the regular season – and obviously none at all when the playoffs arrive next month.
In the three other games on the home stand, against teams with winning records, the Wolves lost them, by narrow margins, a combined 10 points in all. The gut check was checkered, the heart hard to locate, the venal ice puddled, the head on crooked.
Yes, perspective is important here. Only the Celtics have a better record than the Wolves, who have still yet to lose more than two games in a row over what is now nearly a five-month span.
But the home stretch of these final 20 games presents a more rigorous challenge, one that proven winners from prior seasons recognize takes another level of execution and intensity.
Last season the Nuggets won their first title by playing seven weeks beyond the time they eliminated the Wolves in the first round of the playoffs – finishing up on June 12. Their 2022-23 postseason record, 16-4, was nearly the same as the Wolves have registered thus far this season against the NBA’s patsies. Now that the All Star break is over, Denver is gearing up – undefeated in their first six games since – and have three games against a Wolves team standing in the way of their second straight season as the top seed in the West.
Meanwhile, the Wolves have reverted to bad habits, specifically their shoddy execution on offense. The starting lineup in particular has been notably lethargic, mostly in the first quarter but also in the all-important “clutch” moments, defined as when the teams are separated by five points or less within the last five minutes of a game.
Per John Schuhmann at nba.com, the Wolves scored just 26 points in the 30 “clutch” possessions by their offense in the losses to Milwaukee, Sacramento and the L.A. Clippers over the home stand. That included missed three-pointers by Anthony Edwards, Karl-Anthony Towns and Naz Reid. Ant (six-for-24) and KAT (six-for-23) are two of 11 NBA players shooting below 30% on more than 20 clutch three-point attempts, Mike Conley is barely over 30% at four-for-13, and Naz has made a clutch trey in four attempts.
Consequently, Minnesota is now 24th in clutch offensive rating (points scored per possession), even further down than their 18th offensive rating overall. And when it matters most, the defense hasn’t helped, ranking 18th in points allowed per possession in the clutch, a concerning plunge from their top-rated defense overall.
There is always noise that impedes direct explanations for why a team is surging or waning at various points during the season. For example, Ant missed the second half of Friday’s game against Sacramento because his girlfriend was having their first child. He has been noticeably distracted in the games immediately before and after the birth, and, like KAT, also was enmeshed in all the hoopla that comes with participating in the All Star game.
Having covered Ant for his entire pro career, I believe the looming arrival of his first child – and then going to be with it in the hospital – has affected his concentration and energy level.
Then there is Mike Conley, the most temperamentally reliable Timberwolf. The Wolves played seven games, including three back-to-back games. Members of the media have seen Conley walking around very gingerly in the locker room after a few of those games. At 36 years old, in his 17th NBA season, he and the Wolves might be better off resting a game every now and then.
Head Coach Chris Finch, a firm believer in playing if you are able, says Conley has the freedom to call himself inactive, but that if he wants to play, “I’m not going to argue with Mike Conley.”
But maybe he should.
Conley deserves plaudits for being a proud warrior, but he and Finch possess enough common sense to notice that after generating a net rating (points scored minus points allowed) of plus 9.3 points per 100 possessions with Conley on the court in games before the All Star break (versus plus 7.0 overall), the Wolves have been minus 3.3 points per 100 possessions in the seven games since the break (versus plus 3.3 overall).
Sure it is a small sample size, and Conley’s shooting accuracy isn’t far removed from his stellar pre-All Star performance and the drop in his assists from 6.4 to 4.7 could have as much to do with his teammates as Conley himself. But what stands out, especially when ratified by the eye test, is that after committing just 53 turnovers in 1,446 minutes before the break, Conley has 14 turnovers in 197 minutes since then – and a full handful have been the sort of flagrant miscalculations that are way out of character.
What’s more, since the February trading of Shake Milton and Troy Brown Jr. for Monte Morris, Finch has the most reliable backup floor general in Wolves history. Morris hasn’t shot well from two-point range – he’s 29.1% inside the arc, and 43.8% from long distance – but has turned the ball over exactly twice in 121 minutes while doling out 27 assists. The Wolves net rating with him on the court since the break is plus 10.0 per 100 possessions, second only to the plus 11.0 when third-string point guard and perennial net-rating kingpin Jordan McLaughlin gets some minutes.
At the very least, Conley should have been rested on the tail-end of back-to-backs against inferior teams, such as Memphis on Wednesday of last week, or the Portland game to close the home stand on Monday. Because the stakes are rising and more rested and healthy Mike Conley is one of the cards you want in your hand.
But the Wolves offensive doldrums predate Conley’s ginger walk – indeed, they have steadily accrued into a fairly chronic weakness in this otherwise spectacular season and thus will have the complete attention of the coaching staff who match up with Minnesota down the stretch and in the postseason. They are the opposite of a secret.
The money quote comes from Conley himself, which I used in a column last month when he explained why the offense was finally playing up to its talented potential.
“We work so hard on defense that we forget you have to have to put that effort in on offense – you have to cut, screen, drive the lane just to give up your body to make a play for one another. The last few weeks we’ve done that,” said the veteran point guard.
Flash forward to Finch’s pregame presser on Monday. Two nights earlier, the Wolves had squandered a phenomenal defensive performance, which had clamped down the Clippers to below 40% accuracy from the field, below 30% from three-point territory, and 89 points overall. But that was one more point than the punchless Wolves had managed to muster.
There were anomalies – Naz Reid and Conley aren’t going to collectively shoot 0-for-11 again – but also some familiar foibles. There was a lack of ball movement – the ball got sticky in the hands of the two top scorers, Ant and KAT – and the sort of sacrificial movement without the ball that Conley had described. Now Finch was yet again echoing the message.
Asked why the Wolves had been outscored by a whopping 38-0 in transition the previous two games (cleaved into a pair of 19-0 disparities that mightily contributed to close losses), the coach replied, “Running the floor, passing, these are the things you have to do all the time so that you can be successful some of the time. We are not working right now. We are expecting a return on investment – if we do it six times, we are not going to get six returns. So we have to do it 26 times.
“I think we need guys to get out and run the floor harder and not be waiting for the outlets – everyone wants to bring the ball up. We do have certain lineups that do run and they are noticeably different when they are on the floor. I understand that (the starters) are going to be slower by nature but they shouldn’t be as slow as they have been.”
Then the Wolves went out and defeated a terrible, injury-racked opponent from Portland by five points. Ant wasn’t ready at tip-off; forcing a delay-of-game violation as Nickeil Alexander-Walker (“NAW’) scrambled in to replace him. When he did enter the game 35 seconds of playing time later, he took passive-aggressive behavior literally. Having been instructed that ball movement was a priority, he mostly shunned any aggressive offensive move that would bring defenders toward him and passively got off the ball as soon as possible. The quarter ended with Ant scoring two points on a pair of free throws, zero assists, and bleeding his passivity into indifference on defense.
KAT got up five shots in less than six minutes before heading to the bench with two fouls. The Wolves trailed until four members of the bench unit – Kyle “Slo Mo” Anderson, Reid, Morris and NAW, combined with Ant to go on a run and put the Wolves up by two.
The second quarter was more of the same. The Wolves forged a seven-point lead because of the spirited, sharing style of the bench. Ant was somnambulant and KAT was shelved by fouls. Rudy Gobert shouldered the scoring burden for the starters, punishing the smaller Blazers who were forced to foul him.
Eventually, Ant found his passing game and finished with six dimes. Gobert was dominant with 25 points on 9-10 shooting and seven free throws and grabbed 16 rebounds before fouling out in the final seconds. Conley was more aggressive with his shooting and wound up with 19 points. But it was a game where the less talented backups hewed to the systems and schemes and got more consistent results.
When the game was mercifully over – Wolves 119, Blazers 116 – Jon Krawcznyski of the The Athletic and I both asked Finch what it will take to sharpen up the play of Ant and KAT. The coach talked about the need for Ant to share the ball without losing the aggression that forces reactions from the defense. And for KAT to shoot more from outside to create spacing and less midrange dribbles and drives that result in “wrestling matches.”
“They want the ball early and they try to play into the teeth of the defense too much. We have to get back to trusting our other structure, things that we had been doing well at other times and play out of that a little bit more,” he continued. “Looking forward to a good film session after our day off and building back in a better way.”
It is the winning time of the season and the Wolves are in the conversation. They boast a historically good defense, the best in the NBA at a time when points have never been so prolific. But until and unless their top two scorers – a pair of incredibly skilled All Stars – utilize their talents in service of a blueprint that yields a more potent, efficient offense, the 2023-24 Timberwolves will go down as a squad that delivered an immensely enjoyable regular season, but simply weren’t ready for the next level of achievement.
Britt Robson
Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.
