So much was working against the Timberwolves in their first-round playoff series against Denver, which ended in a 4-1 series defeat punctuated by Tuesday’s Game 5 loss in Colorado.
They were the No. 8 seed trying to topple the West’s best. They were attempting to do so without the likes of Jaden McDaniels, Naz Reid and, eventually, Kyle Anderson. This all came on the heels of Minnesota having to scratch and claw its way through the play-in tournament just to reach the playoffs.
Minnesota’s postseason mountain was steep, and the team received credit for the way it battled Denver tooth-and-nail over the final four games of the series under those circumstances.
But it’s difficult to feel too bad for a team that caused so many of its wounds. Certainly there are things out of a team’s control every season — Karl-Anthony Towns’ calf strain threw a major wrench in the season’s plans. Naz Reid’s wrist fracture stunted what Minnesota felt was legitimate growth occurring late in the season with the whole roster in tow.
But McDaniels missed the playoffs not because of anything to do with fortune. He punched a concrete wall out of frustration, a show of the immaturity that Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said plagued his team all season. That bad trait reared its ugly head at various points throughout the season, most notably when the Timberwolves consistently overlooked cellar dwellers. The Wolves dropped 10 games this season to the NBA’s five worst teams. That played a big role in why Minnesota had to endure the play-in rounds simply to work its way into the playoffs as the No. 8 seed.
The Timberwloves played well in the play-in games, narrowly falling to the Lakers in overtime before trouncing the Thunder in a win-or-go-home contest. Following that up with a series in Denver in which the Wolves pushed the Nuggets four times in five tries was the latest example of Minnesota’s greatest trait.
“I think that the defining characteristic of this team is that we’ve always played our best basketball while we’re in desperation mode,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “It’s not how you want to live. It’s all credit to us. We’ve had many points during the season to let go of the rope or give up on the moment, but we never, ever did. So I love that about our guys. They kept competing. But the more mature team doesn’t find themselves in those situations as much. That’s part of our growth. We’ve got to continue to do that.”
Wolves veteran guard Mike Conley said that “back-against-the-wall mentality” freed up players — particularly the team’s younger players — to perform.
“You just play hard, you play free, you play fast,” Conley said. “That plays well for our team, our youth with our guys, got a good feel for the game, so I think it helps.”
But the challenge for Minnesota moving forward is to bottle whatever zone it entered when the stakes got higher and utilize it throughout the regular season. There needs to be an urgency on a game-to-game basis. Having the proper approach over an 82-game season not only helps ingrain habits that you can rely on when the going gets tough in the playoffs, it also leads to more consistent results that can create a cushion in the standings for when things inevitably do go awry.
The Timberwolves could have used that this season for better playoff positioning to avoid the play-in round altogether and set themselves up with a more favorable first-round matchup.
That consistency probably starts with young guard Anthony Edwards. He had an all-star season, and yet his scintillating postseason heroics were another reminder that he always had an extra two or three gears in him. If he can tap into at least one of those on a regular basis — even in the non-marquee matchups — that would set an example for his teammates to follow.
“I think you gotta raise the level of consistency with the effort and the attention to detail all throughout the season,” Finch said. “If you’re a veteran, like Mike (Conley) or maybe Rudy (Gobert) or these guys, you might get bored with the regular season. But you know what the approach means and what it takes and what that looks like. And you gotta go out and you gotta do it every single night.
“But when you’re younger, there’s no room to be bored with the regular season. You gotta go out and you gotta keep building up your consistent habits.”
That’s how Minnesota, regardless of health or breaks, can set itself up for a better path to playoff success. What you can do in April in May is so often determined by how you handled your business from October to April.
“We fight. I think we just fight too far away, you know?” Karl-Anthony Towns said. “We always seemed to be a team that fights really hard when our backs are against the wall and things are not going our way. But we got to take that fight, utilize it early on in games, and stuff like that. We just got to be a better team, you know? We got to come out better, do better. All of us. … We got everything we need. Just got to continue to work with each other.”
