We live in an imperfect society. Everything, no matter how meticulously designed for perfection, has its flaws. Seven seasons of storytelling went up in flames when nobody noticed a coffee cup in a Season 8 shot of Game of Thrones. Michael Jordan couldn’t walk past a blackjack table without splitting tens. And the 2024 presidential elections will still be decided by the Electoral College.
The Minnesota Timberwolves are no different. (Except for Naz Reid, who is perfect.) Since we’re not sitting here looking at 36 Larry O’Brien trophies lining the corridors of the Mayo Clinic Square, it’s safe to say every Wolves team has been flawed in some way. Usually, the flaw is pretty obvious and we can attribute it to a general lack of talent and franchise malfeasance.
As Anthony Edwards, Chris Finch, Tim Connelly, Alex Rodriguez, and Marc Lore rebuild the Timberwolves from top to bottom into a perennial contender, the flaws are harder to spot, but they are still there. Two years ago, the awkward fit between Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns capped Minnesota’s ceiling. Their penchant for blowing big leads kept the Timberwolves in the play-in tournament, leading to a first-round exit. Last year, the NBA’s best defensive team came undone by a below-average offense that ground to a halt at times. Sloppy turnovers kept the Wolves from advancing to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history.
This year will be different. Towns is in New York after spending his first nine seasons in Minnesota. Kyle Anderson and his wonky shot will line up next to Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and the rest of the Golden State Warriors looking to cling to the end of a dying empire. In their stead are Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo, Joe Ingles, and rookie Rob Dillingham. They bring their own style of play and idiosyncrasies to meld with Edwards, Gobert, Mike Conley, Jaden McDaniels, and Reid in Minnesota’s most anticipated season ever.
So what will be Minnesota’s fatal flaw that brings everything crashing down this season?
The easy answer is to say that by sending KAT packing, the already mediocre offense will implode, and Edwards will get stuck driving into five bodies with no spacing around him. KAT was a great offensive player and a prolific shooter, hitting 41.6 percent of his threes last season and 39.8 percent over his career. That scenario would be a no-brainer if this were a one-to-one trade. Randle is a career 33.3 percent three-point shooter and 33.8 percent on similar volume to KAT since 2019, when Randle expanded his game beyond the arc.
Fortunately for the Timberwolves, this wasn’t a one-to-one trade; three-point shooting isn’t the only offensive metric, and the Wolves did a great job to recreate KAT’s shooting and offense in the aggregate.
Enter DiVincenzo, a career 37.6 percent three-point shooter who hit more than 40 percent of his deep balls last year in a breakout season for the New York Knicks. Ingles is 37 years old and may have pseudo-retired three years ago, but he’s a career 41 percent three-point bomber. Dillingham will make his NBA debut next week and shot 44.4 percent from three during his lone collegiate season at Kentucky. None of these guys are also seven feet tall. Still, if you also consider defenses not having to worry about Anderson at all last season, shooting should remain a general strength for the Timberwolves this season.
The defense might take a slight hit now that the Wolves no longer have two seven-footers patrolling the paint and lost their Swiss army knife in SloMo. Randle isn’t a horrible defender. Still, he’s 6’8” and won’t give the Wolves the super-sized superpowers they had with Gobert and Towns last year. DiVincenzo is a good enough defender on the perimeter to help keep the unit in the top five this season.
It may be a smaller part of the game, but I think the sneaky fatal flaw for the Timberwolves this season will come down to free throw shooting. Last year, the Timberwolves were eighth in free throw attempts but only 18th in free throw percentage. Towns was a great free-throw shooter and could be counted on in clutch situations to drain two free throws. KAT is a career 83.9 percent free throw shooter and hit 87.4 percent of his foul shots in the last two seasons.
Randle and DiVincenzo are not bad free-throw shooters in their own right. Randle is a career 74.8 percent free throw shooter, and DDV hits freebies at a 77.1 percent clip. Those are good numbers. However, put them with Edwards at 79.3 percent, Gobert’s 63.9 percent clip, McDaniels at 72.9 percent, Naz Reid at 71.7 percent, and now Conley as Mr. Reliable at 82.3 percent (91.1 last season) and you have a recipe for leaving some easy points on the board, especially late in games when the score is close. Conley may not be closing as a defensive liability.
Things could be worse than a poor free throw shooting team, but a few missed free throws a game could be the difference between a few wins across the season and the difference between the third or eighth seed in a congested Western Conference.
Every team has flaws, and this Timberwolves team may have the fewest obvious flaws in a generation. But what should be the easiest part of the game, something called “free,” could be the 2024-25 Minnesota Timberwolves’ undoing.