Welcome to a fascinating season of Minnesota Timberwolves basketball.
The former laughingstock franchise of the NBA has become appointment viewing and one of the league’s daredevil darlings in their fifth season under showrunner Tim Connelly and director Chris Finch, who predates Connelly’s tenure by 15 months. It’s been an audacious ride.
Less than 30 seconds after Connelly was introduced as the Wolves president of basketball operations in May of 2022, he proclaimed that “this place has an unbelievably special core. I’m here not to mess it up.” Forty-four days later he traded three of the top seven players in the Wolves rotation plus five first-round draft picks, all to acquire center Rudy Gobert, who played the same position as the team’s resident star, Karl-Anthony Towns, who had the longest service time of anyone on the roster.
It was the heyday of space-and-pace basketball, with the Golden State Warriors having won their fourth championship behind the sharpshooting duo of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, abetted by hotshot second-year pro Jordan Poole. By pairing two lumbering seven-footers in the same lineup, Connelly blatantly bucked the trend. Two years later the Wolves were in the Western Conference Finals.
This past summer, Connelly turned that situation inside-out, punting both of his power forwards, who also happened to be his backup centers behind Gobert, in order to obtain the passing wizard LaMelo Ball. At a time when the league is trending toward multiple big men and the iconic superstar has morphed from Curry to the seven-and-a-half-feet tall Victor Wembanyama, Connelly is turbo-charging space-and-pace by pairing Ball in the backcourt with resident superstar Anthony Edwards.
The Wolves are living dangerously but not stupidly. Their previous two seasons have been terminated by opponents who defrocked any pretensions they might have harbored about their competitive equality. Those foes — the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2025 and the San Antonio Spurs earlier this year — each still has a star who supersedes Ant to go along with formidable depth, length and cohesion. The overwhelming consensus is that they will once again finish as the top two teams in the West by a substantial margin.
During the offseason of 2025, the Wolves stood pat, claiming that their continuity was a virtue, enriched by hard lessons about the resilience of commitment required to generate the legitimate momentum, synergy and selfless compassion of a champion. It was cheap talk, a counterfeit commitment exposed at various points throughout the season and especially in the playoffs. To essentially run that roster back for a third straight time in the 2026-27 season would demonstrate a failure of nerve and imagination.
The chances of leapfrogging both the Spurs and the Thunder to reach the NBA Finals remain dreadfully thin, especially since it would likely require beating them both in the postseason should they finish as expected at one and two in the standings. But the resourcefulness of Connelly and track record of Finch being able to mold the right identity for a significantly revamped roster over the course of the season makes it a compelling endeavor. There is obvious risk — the floor of this team is lower than the more predictable configurations of the previous two seasons. But the ceiling is higher, which is the prevailing motivation.
Let’s get specific.
It is not a stretch to believe Ball and Ant could be the league’s most prolific backcourt. I’ve written about the accuracy gap between Ant’s three-point shots when he already has the ball and is pulling up (35.3%) and when he receives the feed for a catch-and-shoot (49.6%). All the other players with similarly large differentials wisely decide to take fewer pullups. But because Ant was on the ball so much last season, he didn’t have that luxury.
Now he is beside one of the game’s purest passers, someone who can dish off the dribble in one fluid motion, without a gather, and combines comprehensive court vision with deft finesse and generous instincts. Ball also isn’t afraid to call his own number — he led the NBA in three-point attempts, including “long” treys well behind the arc that go in less but space the floor more.
For the Wolves to maximize this potent pairing, two things have to happen: A fast pace and savvy, efficient ball movement. If that happens, Ant and Ball will feast on the lion’s share of usage they deserve without depriving Jaden McDaniels of too many touches for his escalating playmaking talents. And it will fill the need of keeping Gobert engaged and encouraged in a manner that has been proven to boost his production at both ends of the court and throw enough bones in the direction of newcomer Jonathan Kuminga to keep him relatively content so he can focus on rebounding and defense even as he confronts a player option on a bargain contract at the end of the season.
Put simply, there is enough speed, spacing and playmaking talent in the starting lineup to stipulate that Ant and Ball should almost never have to resort to taking a bad shot. The ceiling on this is the most efficient offense in the NBA that also happens to be an aesthetically beautiful display of hoops.
Off the bench, both Ayo Dosunmu and TJ Shannon thrive playing at a breakneck pace and the offense of backup center Joan Beringer is ahead of his defense merely via his knack for putbacks and nonstop activity. Should the Wolves require a classic backup point guard, Bones Hyland is the best option, but he is likely to get bullied on defense by the league’s preponderance of large wings. The “non-Rudy” minutes with the inexperienced, foul-prone Beringer in the paint are already problematic when it comes to getting stops. The ceiling is Ayo as a Sixth Man of the Year candidate and he and Shannon blending well enough to get Jaylen Clark playing time to shore up the D and Kuminga some romping with the bench crew to bolster his counting stats. The play of Cody Williams during the preseason also makes him another intriguing option for Finch’s tinkering.
The weakness of the 2026-27 Wolves naturally stems from the loss of the power forwards, Julius Randle and Naz Reid. The holes they leave mandate that Kuminga and Beringer are among the top eight players in the rotation, roles that are above their pay grade and their resumes. Both have shown flashes of developing into above average players, but Kuminga has lacked consistency and Beringer experience enough to validate their respective upsides.
For the Wolves to seriously contend in the West, they need to sustain a top 10 defense, which has typically happened for any team with Gobert on the roster. But Rudy is 34 now and the Wolves no longer have the luxury of throwing a beefy teammate like Julius Randle to body an opposing big so he can indulge his metier of freelance help and rim protection. At 6-feet, 9-inches and 234 pounds, veteran Trey Lyles comes closest, but preseason play revealed that Lyles doesn’t make a big impact even while consistently being in the right place to defend.
The other two reliable defenders on the roster are McDaniels and Clark, with a host of others — Ant, Dosunmu, Kuminga — requiring more consistency and Ball, Shannon and Beringer capable of improvement. Expect Finch to utilize a variety of schemes to cover for the paucity of interior brawn, including active, “fly around” rotations on the perimeter to disrupt the vision and ease of entry passes and a zone defense with McDaniels patrolling the middle and Gobert off the court.
It is an evolving roster with a ton of x factors. Can Gobert stay healthy? Will this be the season Ant devotes more mental as well as physical energy to being on the chain link of team defense? Can some combination of Dosunmu and Shannon capably run the second-unit offense? Can Kuminga and Beringer grow into their load-bearing roles? Can Donte DiVincenzo speedrun his recovery from Achilles surgery and join the rotation in the spring?
Here is where I’m bullish on the Wolves this season. I believe Ball and Ant will thrive and enable each other enough to fuel a top-three offense. I believe McDaniels is ready to become a legitimate two-way star, provided that he is purposefully included in a ball-movement offense and isn’t overloaded as the positional finger-in-the-dike on defense. I believe Dosunmu will get 6MOY votes and that both Hyland and Clark will have stints over the course of the season where they shine off the bench. I have faith that Finch will utilize Beringer and Kuminga in creative ways that better fit their roles and hasten their development — or come up with more credible alternatives before the trading deadline. And Gobert will play at least 65-70 games.
My opinion on where the Wolves will fare in the regular season standings generally follows the consensus. They will be in a second tier of teams behind the Thunder and Spurs, better than the L.A. Lakers but not the Houston Rockets and on par with the Denver Nuggets. With the new rules discouraging tanking, racking up wins — especially late in the season — will become significantly more difficult, so my dartboard guess at the win total lands between 46 and 47.
But the end result after 82 regular season games is less important than the progress made to get there. Figuring out how to patch defensive weaknesses and fully exploit an abundance of offensive strengths likely should and will take time. Finch is a master at this, and Connelly has proven to be willing and adept at acquiring the right roster tweaks at the trading deadline if a problem isn’t fixed.
The beauty of the Connelly-Finch regime is that the Wolves are always retooling, never rebuilding. I predict for the fourth straight season, Minnesota will win a playoff series as the lower-seeded team — something that never happened in franchise history before they showed up.
What lies beyond that first round is almost certainly OKC and San Antonio. I’ll be excited to watch Minnesota try and cross that chasm if and when they come to it. But before then, sign me up for the fascinations, frustrations and through-lines of joyful adrenaline as another season of appointment-viewing NBA basketball gets underway.
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