Is This the Year for the Timberwolves?

With the Timberwolves in the Western Conference Finals for the second year in a row, you would think we would know how to act. We were just here, right? And after beating both the Lakers and the Warriors in the first two rounds—in five games each!—you would think we would know how to feel about this team by now.  

But Timberwolves trauma is real: The Musselman ’90s. Missing out on Shaq for Laettner. The multiple slam dunk contest champions. The multiple three-point contest champions. Glen getting caught for signing Joe Smith under the table. Cassell’s groin. Sprewell’s “I have a family to feed.” McHale trading KG to the Celtics. David Kahn passing on Steph Curry. Ricky’s ACL. Flip’s death. The Jimmy Butler humiliation. Luka swearing at Rudy. You get it: I’m not used to clearing my schedule for the Timberwolves for the entire month of May. Including this year, gloriously the second consecutive, the Wolves have played into May five times total in their entire 35-year history.

So yeah, in February, I bought two Sturgill Simpson tickets for a date night with my wife. May 6 seemed years away. And everybody who saw Sturgill at Roy Wilkins says it was the concert of the year, so I bought two tickets. I wouldn’t consider myself a huge outlaw country guy or anything—probably never been less of an outlaw at any point in my entire life, actually. As the parent of a 3-year-old, I need weeks just to plan a date night. But the weekend before the show, the Golden State Warriors lost a playoff game to the Houston Rockets and ruined everything. Their loss ensured the Timberwolves would be opening the second round the same night of the Sturgill show. Initially, I tried to convince myself, telling Maggie, “No sweat about our conflict with the massive Timberwolves Game 1 vs. Steph Curry and the Warriors.” But she—also not a huge outlaw country music fan—instantly called me on my bullshit. She didn’t want to be at a Sturgill Simpson date night with me while I stood behind her refreshing the Timberwolves score on my phone for the duration.

She was absolutely right.

I ate those tickets (thank you, Ticketmaster, you crooked bastards, for making any attempt to resell at a reduced rate basically impossible). And I made it to the Wolves game, and I instant karmically paid for my date night cancellation when the Wolves came out playing like they’d rather be tripping out during one of Sturgill’s guitar solos too. The Wolves never had a chance, losing 88-99, playing and shooting like absolute garbage. By halftime everybody in the arena found out on twitter that Steph Curry shredded his hamstring 13 minutes in—a devastating bummer no matter what it meant to the Wolves chances. To add insult, Jimmy Butler took over the game. (By the way, is there some kind of revisionist history going on that Wolves fans are somehow unjustified for carrying a grudge against Jimmy Butler, because his financial interests didn’t align with him being a leader to a young team with potential? Wolves fans have every right to dislike Jimmy Butler. I think it’s great that Andrew Wiggins won a ring with the Warriors btw.) It was depressing watching him ignore all the invective being hurled at him in Target Center. Jimmy completely took over the fourth quarter, rarely letting the Wolves get closer than 10 points. I was up in the second deck, and by the end, the vibe up there was mostly young people bored and sour with only a few angry enough to still let it rip. Big clouds of boos would run out of gas and at the end you could start picking out the voices of individual haters. One lone fan, fueled by $15 beers and indefatigable grievance, kept screaming, “I HATE YOU, JIMMY BUTLER!” We all trudged out of there at like 11:30, most people going straight home.

I love that Sturgill reportedly opened his second night at the Armory by snarling, “Sorry about your Timberwolves last night—it seems about 1000 of you decided to go to the game instead. That’s what you get!”

Sturgill was right. This is, usually, what we get. Last year’s deep playoff run is still hanging over us as a reminder of what happens when our expectations get too high. Last year’s run to the Western Conference Finals was so much fun. The Wolves beating the defending champion Nuggets felt like what winning it all must feel like—the highest high. Coming back from being down by 20 against a terrifying Serbian monster in a legendary Game 7. Everybody in the city was so on fire for a seemingly guaranteed trip to the Finals, and then they got smoked in the first two games at home against Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving and the stupid Dallas Mavericks. Series over. No NBA Finals for you. And sure, this all happened again against the psychic backdrop of an endless seasonal cycle that’s failed to produce a local pro sports champion (on the men’s side) since 1991.

And if you watched the games on cable or watched the halftime shows or read the internet or watched any of the cable argument shows you know we haven’t been able to count on the national media for providing any sorely needed perspective. The Wolves disrupted their world by trading Karl-Anthony Towns just before training camp and they seemed to have taken it personally. It felt like the local media and the fans tried to talk themselves into it for a couple weeks, and then everybody in the biggest media market in the world fell in love with KAT, one of the best seven-footers in the world. And our new guys seemed bummed to have been exiled from New York. Still, the Wolves retained Anthony Edwards, the most exciting 23-year-old on the planet, a guy who told Obama that he was The Truth before winning a gold medal with Team USA. The Wolves were Ant-Man’s now. And okay, we would miss the great but flawed KAT, but even without Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo, the rest of our rotation was great. Jaden McDaniels. Naz Reid. And Coach Finch. Sure, we lost a lot of close games, and maybe out-executing a zone defense or getting good shots in the last two minutes wasn’t his strongest suit, but the team seemed to compete for him. And while the Wolves kept blowing so many close games, they finally started putting it together in March. And despite a couple last bad losses down the stretch, we came into the playoffs hot, and the national media completely blew us off, and then acted incredibly annoyed when we started winning. From that first series against the Lakers, the entire internet has swung wildly between being completely dismissive of our chances to being actively disgusted that they considered them. Before that first round, every NBA writer on ESPN.com picked the Lakers. And while the first round is treated as a minor footnote in the illuminated history of the game, the Minnesota Timberwolves gentlemen’s sweeping the most famous basketball franchise in the world, with LeBron James and Luka Dončić both wearing purple and gold—that was a sweet moment for Minnesota. We don’t have to get too deep into what it means, but the Lakers are the coolest team in the history of the league and of course they wouldn’t have become what they became if they stayed back home, but the “17-time world champions” still count the five they won in Minneapolis. Anyway, the Wolves destroy the Lakers in five, and embarrassing nearly every ESPN.com expert into picking the Wolves against the Warriors the next round. (Which felt like a huge jinx to Timberwolves fans.) And then the national media regretted their pick en masse by halftime. Five games later, the Warriors were out, and everybody was tweeting, “the Warriors would’ve easily won if Curry didn’t get hurt.”

All of it irritates our flyover inferiority complex. Now the whole world seems to be picking the Thunder. At least this time their self-assuredness might be warranted: the Thunder won 68 games this regular season to the Wolves’ 49.

And I get that the national media doesn’t know what to say about our weird ownership situation. Nobody here really knows how to feel about Glen Taylor, the Mankato printing billionaire. (Is Glen’s printing business why we have so many “white out” T-shirt giveaways on for these home playoff games, btw? Aren’t white tees the cheapest option?) He saved the team from being moved to New Orleans in 1994 and has the lowest winning percentage for an owner in NBA history in the three decades since. Maybe seeing former Yankee Alex Rodriguez as a savior feels challenging, but you have to admit A-Rod seems like the type of guy who will do whatever it takes to win.

And it’s obvious that A-Rod and Lore were the source of a new energy around the franchise—they were the ones who identified Connelly and went out and got Glen to pay for him, and they were the ones who went out and identified and hired Michael Grady, the team’s incredible new play-by-play announcer, and they were the ones who were building that cool new owner’s suite in Target Center until Glen locked them out, wealth shaming them in the press. (“They wanted that private room for themselves down there,” Taylor told The Athletic. “I didn’t think that was a very good idea.”) and pulled out of the $1.5 billion deal they had all agreed to four years ago. Who knows if A-Rod and Lore will spend the Timberwolves to glory, but when the arbitrators ruled for the guys from out of town, it felt like our luck had finally changed.

So yeah, the way everybody talks about this team has felt bipolar this entire season, and I’m sure big swaths of the national media didn’t know how good the Wolves are because they weren’t paying attention, and that’s probably a little embarrassing, or maybe they resent Tim Connelly for making them look kind of foolish, twice now. It didn’t take very long for the entire NBA media ecosystem to conclude the Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo move was made for financial considerations—some insinuating that a small market team basically lost its nerve, weirdly the exact opposite reasoning used by those who ripped Connelly for giving five first rounders to Utah for Rudy Gobert two years earlier. The media hated that one too, but instead of dinging Connelly for being too prudent, he was deemed reckless, trading away all those draft assets for a 30-year-old rim protector. But then Rudy won defensive player of the year, anchored the best defense in the league and helped the Timberwolves reach their first conference final in 20 years. Now, Julius Randle has been playing at an All NBA level all playoffs and has helped us get back to the exact same position, with the results crammed into a shorter time frame—one season of grinding together instead of two.

So here we are, in the Western Conference Finals for the second May in a row. Downtown will be packed this weekend, rain or shine, with throngs of fans in Wolves gear lining First Avenue in front of the Target Center. Downtown’s bars will be gloriously overrun. People watching at home will clean out Cub Foods for Memorial Day playoff grill outs. NBA Twitter will be tweeting, many of them from Minneapolis. But I am sensing a slight local tempering for these Western Conference Finals, and that’s probably healthy. Even during the climactic Game 5 against the (justifiably) hated Jimmy Butler, the crowd was partying from the jump, but holding back a little bit in the fourth quarter. Sure there were a lot of dumb turnovers, but the full release didn’t come, even after the final buzzer. The exhale might never come. And the hold-your-breath moments feel more intense the closer you get. Of course Glen Taylor is going to keep the team and we’re going to lose Tim Connelly. Of course LeBron James is going to roll up on Ant’s ankle and he’s going to be done for the year. And unlike last Western Conference Finals, everybody seems to realize how formidable our opponent is—the Oklahoma City Thunder were the best team in the league all year, and they just sent the best player in the league back to his horses. And the Thunder’s best player, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is probably going to be presented with the MVP trophy in a pregame ceremony sometime this series. So holding back a little euphoria in reserve until our team shows us some actual hardware is probably wise.

Maybe like the team, deep into this second consecutive playoff push, the fans have finally learned to pace themselves. You can feel it online and you can feel it in the arena. Because of our historically terrible record, the Wolves fan base has always had this sort of intense bifurcation—they’re either terminally online, irrationally exuberant mutants who listen to Finchy on PA, crush Dane Moore pods and read every Brit and Johnny column, or they’re “Wut, the wolves are good this year?” casuals. But this multi-season run of playoff success has sort of melded everybody together. After winning two rounds, the know-it-alls are toning down some of their grumbling over the team’s lack of readiness, whether regarding our 23-year-old star Anthony Edwards or our 55-year-old head coach Chris Finch. (Ant and Finchy even unlocked a zone defense against the Warriors!) And it’s been great to see both the casuals and the nerds show Julius Randle levels of hero worship like Naz Reid—it’s like both groups are seeing him fresh. And what if we do have the best player in the game, and he’s just 23 years old? What if the most charismatic guy in the game with one of the most stylish games in the game goes on an incredible run over the next three weeks and becomes a legend? What if he’s put up enough bad shots this season as our unquestioned offensive alpha that he’s leveled up to some kind of NBA Lisan al Gaib galaxy brain and he figures out the sacred math right now?

Maybe the team is peaking, and maybe the fan base is peaking too—our expectations, initially high, and then probably a little too low, and then high again, have probably already been realistically exceeded, and now we’ll see what happens against the best team in the league.

And parts of you should probably be telling yourselves that. But there are other parts. And for anybody who’s been following this multiple season playoff run, now we’re involved. Now we know these players and these coaches—we love these players and these coaches. And if you love them, you’re beginning to see aspects of former NBA champions, where the path to a title always seems to follow a similar script. Every champ fails along the way, and it almost always takes more than one attempt to ultimately succeed. Three years ago, lead by a young star barely in his twenties, the Wolves lost to the eventual champion in the first round. Last year, they beat the champs, only to lose to an all-time playoff villain in the Western Conference Finals. What about this year? Are we about to see the Minnesota Timberwolves take the final step and make it rain upon this dry, rocky place? And when they do, will you already have taken that leap of faith?

Will Wolves fans finally know how to act?