{"id":674267,"date":"2026-05-16T22:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T22:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/674267\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T22:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T22:01:08","slug":"the-minnesota-timberwolves-motley-crew-brought-a-burst-of-fun-to-the-nba-playoffs-minnesota-timberwolves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/674267\/","title":{"rendered":"The Minnesota Timberwolves\u2019 motley crew brought a burst of fun to the NBA playoffs | Minnesota Timberwolves"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Minnesota Timberwolves are out of the NBA playoffs<\/a>. It\u2019s a miracle it took this long. In their first-round series against the Denver Nuggets, they saw two starters and another key reserve suffer significant injuries<\/a>. The Nuggets entered the series on a 12-game winning streak and were favored from the jump. After somehow winning that series<\/a> in six games, finding Denver\u2019s weak points and pummeling them until they broke, the Wolves met an even more daunting opponent in the San Antonio Spurs. Though they\u2019d have been forgiven for tiredly accepting a sweep, the Wolves swiped Game 1 on the Spurs\u2019 home floor, then a close Game 4 at home. After that, the tank finally ran empty. But even in the losses \u2013 including Friday night\u2019s<\/a> in Game 6 \u2013 the Wolves found ways to frighten. They\u2019d go down 18-3 and then tie the game by the end of the first quarter. They\u2019d tighten a 29-point deficit to 12 entering half-time. The tenacity and spite they played with was a finite resource, but at times this postseason it was potent enough to convince me otherwise.<\/p>\n

The Wolves were not the deepest team in these playoffs, nor the most consistent. They may lie closer to the bottom of those categories than the top. After their elimination, coach Chris Finch and players alike admitted they\u2019d failed to take the regular season seriously enough, failing to set themselves up well for the high-stakes games of April and May. (My old teachers probably shared a similar sense of disappointment in me before finals.) And yet this odd bunch regularly play some of the most soulful basketball in the NBA. Anthony Edwards<\/a> can take over a game at any time, either by shooting deep threes or acrobatic layups. French albatross Rudy Gobert anchors the defense, which the team plays with astonishing vigor at its best. The best athletes are sometimes so clinical that they produce a rather emotionless watching experience, but certain passages<\/a> of Timberwolves basketball inspire in me feelings of pure glee.<\/p>\n

The Wolves are also mercifully resistant to caring about how others perceive them. A segment from a news conference<\/a> after Game 2 against Denver played out like a scene from The Office. Edwards chose the phrase \u201cbeat that shit\u201d to describe his aspirational rebounding performance, making teammate Julius Randle dissolve into giggles. During the Nuggets series, Wolves forward Jaden McDaniels announced the team\u2019s plan: they would go right at the opposition, attacking the rim, because Denver\u2019s players were \u201call bad defenders\u201d. McDaniels then proceeded to list several Nuggets, including those who are generally considered good defenders. (Naturally, he wore a black hoodie while delivering this quote, hood up.) At the end of Game 4, McDaniels hit a layup with two seconds left, the Wolves\u2019 lead already safe, which angered the Nuggets\u2019 Nikola Joki\u0107 into sprinting down the court to get in McDaniels\u2019s face with a vigor rarely seen in his defensive efforts. McDaniels simply laughed, untroubled by the seething 6ft 11in man-mountain. Then he coolly scored 32 points in Game 6, the best performance of anyone that night, to close out the series.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Nikola Jokic sprints after Jaden McDaniels layup highlights<\/p>\n

Even against the Spurs, the Wolves showed their cunning. After losing the opener, the Spurs took the next two games and appeared in full control. \u201cI\u2019m built for this,\u201d an elated Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs\u2019 irreplaceable 7ft 4in dynamo, said of the challenging physicality of the playoffs. \u201cI love this more than anything else.\u201d Just as everyone was talking about Wemby\u2019s implacable calm, his God-given mindset, the Wolves made him snap. In Game 4, McDaniels and Naz Reid picked and poked away at Wemby\u2019s inflatable-bendy-man body until the typically calm Frenchman nailed Reid<\/a> in the face with a vicious elbow. Wemby was ejected, and in his absence the Wolves secured a narrow win. \u201cToday is Mother\u2019s Day,\u201d Edwards said after the game, his mother having died in 2015. \u201cI couldn\u2019t lose this game for her.\u201d As for Reid, don\u2019t worry about his neck. \u201cPain is weakness leaving the body,\u201d he declared, to chuckles from his teammates.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a small tragedy that the Wolves almost certainly won\u2019t win a championship without drastic changes to their roster. The Oklahoma City Thunder, who eliminated the Wolves en route to winning the Larry O\u2019Brien last year, are primed to begin a dynasty. The Spurs are young and have almost no playoff experience; they may already be good enough to win the title this year, but they\u2019re still nowhere near their final form. In those transcendent moments when the Wolves are operating with full intensity in sync with one another, they can match those teams. But they can\u2019t do it over the course of a seven-game series. Talk now will turn to trading Randle, who could rarely get his offense going during these playoffs.<\/p>\n

Terrence Shannon Jr and the Timberwolves pulled a surprise upset of the Nuggets in their first-round playoff series. Photograph: Matt Krohn\/AP<\/p>\n

Still, the Wolves\u2019 legacy as an occasionally brilliant motley crew who delight in upset victories is a good one. Very few analysts picked them to beat the Nuggets this year, or the Lakers in last year\u2019s playoffs, or the Nuggets the year before that, but the Wolves won all those series. Though they don\u2019t have the silverware to show for it, they\u2019re as responsible for injecting entertainment into the playoffs as any other team. I look forward to furiously defending their honor when NBA<\/a> fans of the 2040s blame them for not going deeper into the playoffs during this era.<\/p>\n

The Wolves\u2019 run ending here is probably for the best. Oklahoma City are waiting in the next round, and since December, it\u2019s been clear that only the Spurs are capable of asking the Thunder potentially unanswerable questions<\/a>. The entire season has been building towards that dialogue spread over a series, and now we\u2019ll get to see it. I\u2019ll relish those games when they come, but for now, I\u2019m sad I won\u2019t get to watch the playoff Wolves again until next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Minnesota Timberwolves are out of the NBA playoffs. It\u2019s a miracle it took this long. In their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-674267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}