2025 was a frustrating year for Minnesota Timberwolves basketball. It was also one of the franchise’s best calendar years.
Chris Finch’s squad won 53 and lost 31 games in the regular season in 2025. They beat the Los Angeles Lakers in five games in the first round of the 2025 playoffs. Followed that up with another five-game series win against the Steph Curry-less Warriors to reach the Western Conference Finals for the second consecutive season. They fell apart and got blown out in a second consecutive Western Conference Finals. Naz Reid and Julius Randle got paid. Anthony Edwards is a superstar. And the Wolves established themselves as a team with enough talent to compete for a championship.
And yet, the Timberwolves are still not true contenders. After a promising stretch in which the Wolves won 10 of 12 games, including against the Oklahoma City Thunder, New York Knicks, San Antonio Spurs, and Boston Celtics, the Wolves are 1-3 in their last four games. The three losses include what should have been a miraculous comeback that turned into a nine-point blown lead in overtime on Christmas Day against the Denver Nuggets, and two feckless, gutless, braindead losses to the Brooklyn Nets and Atlanta Hawks before the new year. The current run of foul play left a familiar bad taste in the mouths of Wolves fans to ring in 2026.
The new year is a time for reflection, resolutions, and self-improvement. So here are some bad habits the Timberwolves should mercifully leave behind in 2025.
Does anyone on this team practice their free throws? It’s the one piece of advice basketball parents can give to their kids and be right all the time. The Wolves shot 79 percent from the charity stripe from January 1 to the end of the 2024-25 regular season. That was 12th in the NBA, a respectable mark for a team without a true deadeye from the free throw line now that Mike Conley’s minutes have been slashed.
It seems as though there was no emphasis on free-throw shooting over the summer. The Wolves are down to 75.9 percent this season, 25th in the NBA. Ant is down a few percentage points from last season and leads the league in unserious free throws taken. Minnesota misses Nickeil Alexander-Walker’s 78 percent from the line last year. But almost every rotational player is hovering near or above their free-throw percentage from last season, except Rudy Gobert.
Gobert is having the worst free-throw shooting season of his career since his rookie year. Gobert is shooting a measly 51.1 percent from the line, 16.3 percent lower than last season and 12.6 percent below his career average of 63.7. He’s costing the Wolves nearly two points per game of missed free throws.
Minnesota missed 10 free throws and shot 69.7 percent from the line in the blown lead loss to the Phoenix Suns in November. They missed 15 free throws in an eight-point loss to the Thunder. And they made just 71.9 percent of their free throws over the last 11 games of 2025. The Wolves went 6-5 over that stretch. Free-throw shooting needs to be prioritized in 2026.
The other bad habit the Timberwolves need to leave in 2025 is slow starts. The Wolves were far better in the second half than they were in the first half in 2025. From January 1 to the end of last season, Minnesota’s net rating in the first half was plus-1.2. In the second half? They were a plus-13. The offense stagnated in the first half (113.8 offensive rating) and exploded in the second half (124.4 offensive rating). The same trend leaked into the first 34 games of the 2025-26 season.
In the first half of this season, the Wolves have a net rating of just plus-0.1, and in the second half that balloons to plus-7.6. Far too often, they mess around with inferior opponents only to find out that they can’t always come back from a first-half deficit. This season alone, they’re minus-2.5 points per 100 possessions in the first quarter. Plus-2.7 in the second quarter. Plus-4.5 in the third. And dominating the fourth quarter at plus-10.7.
They’re also having trouble finishing games off. They’ve blown insurmountable leads, resulting in losses to the Suns and Sacramento Kings in back-to-back games and a nine-point overtime loss to the Nuggets. Minnesota’s net rating in overtime is minus-8.3. They’ll need to figure out how to start and finish games to keep pace in the West playoff race.
A usual bad habit for the Wolves that they actually kicked in 2025 is those g–d— turnovers. Chris Finch’s Timberwolves teams commit the most mind-numbing turnovers across his five-year tenure. But in 2025, Minnesota actually curbed the turnover plague. They are 11th in the NBA in turnover percentage so far this season and finished the previous season in 10th between January and April. The Wolves still know how to throw the ball away with the best of them at the worst times during the game. But they’ve at least cleaned up their act a little bit across the full 48 minutes.
The Timberwolves are still a good, not great, basketball team as we careen into 2026. If they ever want to take the next step into true contention, they have a few things to clean up as part of their 2026 New Year’s resolutions.