Power of the pack: Timberwolves putting it all together, especially on the defensive end

Power of the pack: The Timberwolves are putting it all together, especially on defense.

The numbers on the back of the envelope made sense: The Timberwolves tried to step up their game by adding the NBA’s best paint protector as well as defensive rebounder.

This was because they played like the league’s best offense for the first four months of the 2021–22 period but lost in the playoffs because they couldn’t protect the paint and get defensive rebounds.

But sometimes, what sounds fine when you’re drawing it out doesn’t look good when you do it. Also, the Rudy Gobert scenario in Minn seemed doomed for the first year because of some messy factors.

Because he helped France win silver at EuroBasket 2022, Gobert got to training camp late. He came in with a lot of bumps and bruises from playoff play, and he looked stiffer and less powerful than he did when he was on top of Utah’s defensive hierarchy.

Karl-Anthony Towns, the Wolves’ current All-NBA center, went to the hospital with an illness before the season that made him lose almost 20 pounds.

In the end, a calf strain would keep him out for 51 games, ruining Minnesota’s best-laid plans to let its huge tandem build the kind of chemistry it required to make all that bulk matter—and figure out how to keep Anthony Edwards’ style open.

Things didn’t go well for the Wolves last season. When Towns as well as Gobert played together, they barely beat their opponents in scoring.

But when Towns played without Gobert, they had a bottom-10 defense and a bottom-5 offense.

In some way, the vibes often felt even worse. In the last game of the regular season, Gobert and veteran center Kyle Anderson got into a fight on the sidelines.

Anderson was suspended over the first game of a play-in tournament, as well as Jaden McDaniels broke his hand by striking a wall out of anger, so the defensive star missed the whole first-round loss to Nikola Jokić’s Nuggets.

The Wolves’ owners made Tim Connelly a very good offer to leave the title-caliber team he had built in Denver.

They did this in part to make big, risky moves such as the Gobert gambit in order to win the team’s first title.

After the first year of the new era failed, Connelly chose an alternative, and some might say even braver, encore: not worrying.

“I’m a pretty patient person,” Connelly told the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Michael Rand not long ago.

The Wolves are finally seeing the idea that Connelly and his team had drawn on the back of that envelope come to life, and they’re already a quarter of their way through the 2023–24 NBA season.

“We needed to find our own identity,” Wolves coach Chris Finch told reporters not long ago. “Last year, we didn’t have a name.” Every night was a little different.

They now have the one that Connelly pushed almost all of his trade chips through the middle of the playing field to find two summers ago.

A doubter might point out that the Wolves have had one of the NBA’s easier first schedules, as shown by a number of strength-of-schedule measures.

After beating Luka Dončić’s Mavericks in Dallas on Thursday, the Wolves are now 18-5 and tied to the Celtics for the top record in the NBA. They are also best in the West.

Cleaning the Glass says they’re beating their opponents by 8.2 points per 100 plays, which is third-best in the league and tied with Philadelphia and Boston.

According to CtG’s records, that would be the best net rating of any Minnesota team going back to 2003–04.

That was the year that Kevin Garnett, who won MVP, led the Wolves to 58 wins as well as the Western Conference finals with Latrell Sprewell and Sam Cassell.