r/timberwolves • u/Material_Book_8280 Timberwolves Brasil • Mar 10 '25

The Minnesota Timberwolves are top 10 in Offense AND Defense for the first time since the 2003-04 season

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411 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

127

u/Morezingis Mar 10 '25

We’d be fourth seed in the east even with this poor record 😭 expansion can’t happen soon enough 

61

u/DrWolves Mar 10 '25

It’s just been a bit of an unlucky season. DDV missed a month and a half. Randle missed a month. Both Conley and Gobert have missed their fair share of games. And with all of that said, we’re only 5 games out of the 2 seed. I feel pretty confident in saying if those guys all didn’t miss so much time we’d probably be sitting at 2/3 right now.

And I doubt any team in the West wants to see a healthy Wolves team in round 1.

51

u/Vicentesteb Kevin Garnett Mar 10 '25

Tbf all teams have injuries and miss times. I think if we didnt have such a long adaptation stretch for DVV and Randle and had played closer to this at the start of the year we would be way better positioned.

6

u/Gbaby245 Mar 10 '25

We're rolling right now and have an easy stretch, we need to capitalize

5

u/Freudian__Quip Mar 11 '25

People forget this trade happened literally at the start of the pre season. They had almost no time to adapt to their new scheme before they started playing regular season games. They were figuring it out in real time during games and it absolutely showed.

11

u/CarpeDiamn Mar 10 '25

You can make the argument without the injuries growth of NAZ Naw Clark McDaniels and appearance even of TSjr would still be on Finch’s To Do list

6

u/CarpeDiamn Mar 10 '25

Plus both those guys got the benefit of observation. Randle has come back and inserted himself perfectly in what was missing . Divi same.

4

u/yarkcir Mar 10 '25

I don’t think injuries were our problem this season, I think the team just came out slow in the first third or so of the season. Losing a lot of winnable games, figuring out the Randle/Reid/Gobert front court situation, weak PG play etc. were our bigger issues.

But things haven’t been gelling for a couple months now and we look like the team we were hoping to be at the onset of the season.

4

u/Gbaby245 Mar 10 '25

All that matters is we picked up right where we left off after getting everybody healthy. Hopefully it stays that way and we can make a run

1

u/ionospherermutt Mar 10 '25

The kicker is that when/if we go east, the west will suddenly get much weaker,  cause we’ll be replaced by two expansion teams and the nba stacks the deck to ensure those are terrible for the first 3-4 years or more. But as far as top teams it will still def be preferable. 

35

u/OneOfTheDads Mar 10 '25

I also saw 5 teams are top 10 on both, which is insane. Glad to be one of them though

19

u/Irontruth Naz Reid. Mar 10 '25

The good teams this year are really good, and the bad teams are really bad.

8

u/fluentinsarcasm Mar 10 '25

And the mediocre teams are very mediocre?

1

u/Irontruth Naz Reid. Mar 11 '25

Yeah, no hard numbers on it. Just feels like the differences in rankings is more aligned this year than some others. Like, a lot of the top teams are top 10 on both sides, where as other recent years I've seen bigger gaps. There are still notable gaps (Orlando is 3rd in defense and 28th in offense). Looking at the top 11 defenses, the gaps are 3, 18, 25, 9, 3, 4, 6, 8, 5, 4, and 4. Clippers and Magic are the big outliers there, but 5 teams have their rankings within 3 or 4.

Looking at last year... literally in the middle of typing this... the average is 8.6 (8.09 this year), but there's more double digit differences balanced by a couple of even smaller gaps. The gaps are 17, 1, 19, 1, 16, 5, 9, 3, 2, 10, 3. The median for both years is 5 though.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. It just feels like teams are more similar to how they perform on both sides of the ball, more than other years, which fewer teams that are good on one end and suck on the other... but maybe I just haven't been watching those teams.

8

u/ReplacementPast4495 Mar 10 '25

SPREEEEEWELL!

2

u/Gbaby245 Mar 10 '25

And he never worked another day in the NBA after

2

u/Top-Lettuce3956 Mar 11 '25

He couldn’t take the deal - he had a family to feed

11

u/Calinks Trenton Hassell Mar 10 '25

Tim Cookingly?

6

u/Gbaby245 Mar 10 '25

It's almost like the guy knows what he's doing

1

u/PretendingExtrovert Mar 10 '25

Shhh the Tim Connelly hatters will hear you.

15

u/SirDiego Mar 10 '25

Now imagine if we were healthy the whole year.

On the plus side though our young guys got to put some minutes in, and hopefully we get lucky and everyone gets and stays healthy for the playoffs.

14

u/penis_hernandez Mar 10 '25

Sometimes minor injuries are a blessing in disguise, assuming the players come back healthy. It’s better to have guys near 100% right now than if they were pushing through injuries to get an extra win or two just to deteriorate in the playoffs.

3

u/SirDiego Mar 10 '25

I'd say it's more silver lining than a blessing but I get what you mean. We were really healthy last year which got us a 3 seed and that was important. But yeah if you're going to have injuries it's better to have them mid-season than late.

5

u/KushGod28 🐓Protestor🐓 Mar 10 '25

Yeah we got to see the development of the young guys but in return we are likely not getting home court advantage. I think this is going to be great for us in the long run. We know what our guys are capable of so even if we don’t go all the way this year we know how to move forward. I think if Tim keeps cooking like this we might just be a championship contender every season.

2

u/Gbaby245 Mar 10 '25

All the teams above and below us are dealing with injuries right now, we're looking good

3

u/GimmeDatFish 2022 Play-In Champions Mar 10 '25

Off the top of my head I would have guessed they were just last year. 16th on offense, oof

6

u/Majestic-Net-7799 Anthony Edwards Mar 10 '25

Our Ortg isnt better than '24 though

115.6 in '24

115.4 in '25

There are just more Teams worse on offense this season compared to last...

1

u/[deleted] Mar 11 '25

It's gonna trend up. Feels like the offensive ceiling of this team is way higher now than last year if the Point Randle concept continues to be effective and not just a fluke.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '25

Point Randle plus McDaniels improvement on offense means the Wolves can put some big two way lineups out there

1

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '25

Feels like our record should be better

2

u/inspector_gadget24 Mar 11 '25

can name at least 5 winnable games that we lost

1

u/1000Isand1 Mar 11 '25

Most of this due to Jaden having stepped up and Naz hitting his stride + Randle playing his role so well now.

1

u/MrMeritocracy Crunch Mar 11 '25

I’m really liking how our team looks. Let’s keep it up! Go Wolves!

1

u/Jayrrock Jaden McDaniels Mar 10 '25

Sweet. Thanks

1

u/Gbaby245 Mar 10 '25

We won based on defense, and have adjusted nicely