When The Minnesota Timberwolves edged the Sacramento Kings last week, coach Chris Finch was asked about his closing lineups and all the different options he seems to have at his disposal. It is a luxury, but one that he acknowledges will take some time for him to figure out.
“We have a deep and flexible team,” Finch said. “We want to give ourselves a chance to play situationally. Guys are just going to have to lean into that. Every night it could be different and every night I’m not going to get it right. We’re all going to have to figure it out together.”
If there is a theme in the first three regular-season games, including the 112-101 home opening win over the Toronto Raptors on Saturday night, it is that the Wolves are searching for chemistry and cohesion that was such a big part of their run to the Western Conference finals last season.
They made a huge trade just days before training camp started. Even though there are legitimate reasons to believe they can be a better team this season after sending Karl-Anthony Towns to New York for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo, it also is easy to see that coaches and players have a lot to work on before everything clicks together.
The opening night loss to the Los Angeles Lakers was bizarrely lifeless, but the energy and execution has ramped up in victories over the Kings and Raptors. The stretches of impressive play have been there to see, as have the lulls that come as Finch tests out different lineup combinations to see what works and what does not.
Like many coaches, Finch usually likes a 20-game sample size of data before drawing any real conclusions, and the opening week of the season was defined by his lineup tinkering that will likely continue in the coming games.
The Raptors were playing the second night of a back-to-back and were missing Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett, Bruce Brown and Kelly Olynyk with injuries, so the stage was set for the kind of get-right game that can help a team that is still looking to find itself early in the season. The Wolves rode playoff-level energy from the crowd for a 32-18 start but did let the Raptors hang around longer than they probably would have liked.
“Right now, I have a lot of really good players who play basketball, and they have to figure out how to play basketball together,” Finch said.
Finch said in training camp that he wanted to play a 10-man rotation, but it’s been eight, plus a few minutes for Joe Ingles, in the first three games. Finch said after the Raptors win that he would like to get Ingles some more minutes and consider a 10th man, but other goals take precedence at the moment. Finch mentioned getting Mike Conley into a rhythm, playing Edwards and Randle as much as possible to work on their two-man game and having the players who were here last season get used to spacing around Randle, which is so much different than spacing around Towns.
“It feels like we’re getting somewhere with that,” he said.
That means that minutes for rookies Rob Dillingham and Terrence Shannon Jr. and preseason standout Josh Minott likely will be hard to come by early while the top eight congeals. There have been some good signs. The Wolves hit Rudy Gobert with four lob dunks against the Raptors, a weapon that they underutilized in Gobert’s first two seasons in Minnesota.
“It looks like it’s starting to come together,” Finch said. “Things that I can see and lean into are starting to form a little bit. We’ve got to keep doing them, particularly when it matters most, but it was good for those guys.”
the Wolves are soooooooo back. pic.twitter.com/xTEdJnbofD
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) October 27, 2024
An 82-game season offers more than enough time for others outside the rotation to get a look. For a team that believes it can come out of the West, the first order of business is ironing out the wrinkles with the new guys, who will be heavily relied upon all season long.
“Just getting a rhythm together, learning each other’s spots, where people like the ball, actions to run, how to space for others and move and cut for others,” Randle said. “We’re still learning, but we’re getting better each game.”
Here are some more takeaways from the first week of action:
Warm welcome for Randle
Randle stepped up to the mic before the home opener to give a “welcome to the season” message to the Target Center crowd.
Before he could even say a word, the sellout crowd rose to its feet to welcome him. They cheered so loudly for their new power forward that Randle had to pause to let the volume subside before he could start his little speech.
Julius Randle with his “Welcome To Minnesota Moment” as the crowd gives him a standing ovation before he addressed the fans pic.twitter.com/UkSziKkiFx
— SneakerReporter (@SneakerReporter) October 27, 2024
“It was amazing. I wasn’t expecting that at all,” Randle said after putting up 24 points, nine rebounds and five assists. “I don’t know what it is, but since the moment I’ve got traded here, from the organization to the players, to the coaches to the people I meet out at restaurants, everybody here is just so nice.”
The importance of his comfort cannot be overstated. No one saw the trade coming, and Randle moving from a place he called home for the previous five seasons to a contender in the West, replacing a player embedded in this franchise, is a daunting task. It has been a whirlwind for Randle and his family, so the good early vibes should only help him settle in on the court as well.
Even with an uninspiring first game against the Lakers, Randle is averaging 24.3 points and hitting 54 percent of his 3s through three games.
The big welcome on Saturday also taught Randle about the enthusiasm this town has for this team. The Wolves have topped 11,000 season-ticket holders for the first time since their first season in the arena in 1990. Edwards is emerging as a face-of-the-league-level star. Naz Reid has inspired tattoos and signs outside of restaurants. The upper deck end zone seats are sold after being blocked off during the regular season last season.
“I’m definitely loving it and enjoying it and taking in the moment, for sure,” he said. “I’m happy here, for sure.”
Conley looks to get going
Conley went 2 of 9 from the field on Saturday night, hitting a couple of early 3-pointers but is still not looking quite like himself. It’s been a slow start to the season for him. He is averaging 7.0 points and hitting just 20 percent of his shots and 22 percent of his 3s.
Conley was 3 of 16 from the floor, including 2 of 12 from 3-point range in the first two games. The Wolves were outscored by 28 points in his minutes in those games. That is a tiny sample size, but it still jumps out because of how rare it is for Conley’s plus-minus to be in the red. He only had 22 such games last season, but more than the numbers, the eye test has not been kind as he’s just getting started. The heady plays, the clean reads, the opportunistic steals have been few and far between.
One could chalk it up to turning 37 a couple of weeks ago, but it is more likely symptomatic of the early season clunkiness with the offense in general. Incorporating Randle into the offense is taking some time. Even against the Kings, when Randle scored 33 and Edwards went for 32, it felt much more like turn-taking than real, in-the-flow offense. If the ball gets “sticky,” a term Finch uses to describe the stagnancy, and teammates stop moving, that is bad for Conley.
That is one of the reasons we haven’t seen Dillingham yet. Finch said on Saturday that he is not concerned at all about Conley’s shot. He hit a career-high 44.2 percent on 3-pointers last season and has missed some excellent looks early this season. Everyone expects the shot to start falling, but it would be nice to see it start to happen soon.
Letting it fly
Last season the Timberwolves were third in the league in 3-point accuracy with a team conversion rate of 38.7 percent. One would think that would be a recipe for a highly efficient offense. But the Wolves were 17th in offensive rating, partly because they were 23rd in the league in attempts with only 32.7 per game. That was only 38.7 percent of their overall shots, which also ranked 17th.
So far this season, the Wolves seem determined to shoot a higher volume of 3s. In the very early going this season, the Wolves are putting up 42.7 3s per game, good for fifth in the league. They are second in the league in percentage of shots from 3 with 50.4 percent of them coming from beyond the 3-point arc. That’s behind only the Boston Celtics at 56 percent.
The Wolves are only 12th in accuracy at 36.7 percent, but that doesn’t concern Finch. The coach likes to say that if you’re leading the league in 3-point percentage, you’re not shooting enough of them.
The Wolves took 91 3s in the first two games, including 50 in the win over Sacramento. DiVincenzo has been a big driver of the spike, hoisting 11.0 3s per 36 minutes.
McDaniels’ slow start
One of Finch’s goals entering the season was getting Jaden McDaniels more involved in the offense. McDaniels showed promise as more than just a 3-and-D player in the times that Towns was injured. KAT sitting out opened up more shots and a bigger role for McDaniels, and he looked comfortable asserting himself.
The Wolves were hoping for a Year 4 leap from him on that end last season, but his 3-point percentage dropped from 39.8 to 33.7 and his scoring fell to 10.5 points per game after averaging 12.1 in his third season. He was better in the playoffs, hitting 54 percent from deep, as one of the bright spots in the Western Conference finals loss to the Mavericks. But McDaniels has been quiet offensively so far this season. He is shooting 29 percent from the field in the first two games, didn’t hit a 3-pointer in seven attempts and failed to attempt a shot in the first half against the Raptors.
McDaniels finally got going in the third quarter on Saturday night, scoring nine points on 4-of-5 shooting in the first seven minutes of the period. He helped the offense get back on track after it appeared to hit the skids with a big lead.
McDaniels scored several different ways, hitting his first 3 of the season, getting a tough pull-up jumper in the lane and finishing in transition. That last one is a big key for the Timberwolves, who see McDaniels’ ability to run the floor as an easy way to jump-start their fast-break game, which has been lagging early.
3️⃣ FOR 3️⃣ pic.twitter.com/yLHg8CslwI
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) October 27, 2024
When McDaniels started to roll, the Wolves went from a nine-point lead to 15.
“We’ve seen it before. He can do a lot of things,” Finch said. “He just has to wait for the game to come his way and he did a good job staying patient for that.”
(Photo of Julius Randle: Jordan Johnson / NBAE via Getty Images)
