The Minnesota Timberwolves Have a Miserable Record and Reason for Hope

The Golden State Warriors' pursuit of historical greatness has typically exuded joy, what with its frenzy of parabolic three-balls and behind-the-back passes and wins on wins on wins. Which made it that much more striking that the team looked hollow-eyed and weary while absorbing their ninth loss of the season on Tuesday night—especially in comparison to their opponent, the bubbly young Minnesota Timberwolves.

Throughout the evening, Minnesota's Generation-Z talent supplied tantalizing glimpses of the future: Andrew Wiggins spun and shouldered his way to 32 points; Karl-Anthony Towns posted a double-double while stymieing Stephen Curry on switches; Zach LaVine snagged four steals and drilled four three-pointers, including a crucial make in the closing minutes. The victory was even more impressive because the Wolves were youthfully imperfect—there were bungled layups, careless turnovers, and a dubious charge call that erased a potential three-point play. All that they still managed to dispatch one of the finest NBA teams ever constructed, in overtime and on the road, by the score of 124-117.

Now Golden State and Minnesota go extremely separate ways. The Warriors are chasing the specter of the 1996 Chicago Bulls and a second consecutive championship. The Wolves are returning to the NBA lottery for the 12th straight season, the league's longest postseason drought. They are 26-52, and appear locked in as the fifth-worst team in basketball. But instead of despair, there is optimism in Minnesota.

For most of the past two seasons, the best way to digest the Wolves has been in snack-size, highlight portions. Wiggins and LaVine soar with flagrant disrespect for gravity. Towns is a freakish big man who can leave Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook hugging oxygen on a spin move. Point guard Ricky Rubio, who qualifies as a long-toothed veteran at 25 years old on this team, combines Trans Continental Records hair with deft, no-look assists. Forget wins, this team has Vines.

Lately, Minnesota has not only been fun; they've been almost relevant and, intermittently, tantalizingly good. Since February 1, they've gone 12-17, with the 11th best offense in the NBA. Along with beating the Warriors, the Wolves have bagged the Los Angeles Clippers, the Toronto Raptors, and the Oklahoma City Thunder during that stretch. Per game, Wiggins is 18th in the league in scoring; Towns is eighth in rebounding, ninth in blocks, and eighth in field goal percentage; Rubio is fifth in assists and third in steals.

"We've been playing really good as a team," LaVine told VICE Sports. "We're just moving the ball. We're taking good shots, and not just contested, one-on-one moves. When somebody gets hot, of course, they get the ball and do their thing."

Milt Newton, the Timberwolves' general manager, attributed the recent success to a more free-flowing, intuitive style of play. "We have a team of outstanding athletes," he said. "With young players, I believe you have to free up their minds for them to play instinctively. Sometimes, if you have a lot of sets, they're thinking during the game and not being natural. At the All-Star break, we sat down with Glen [Taylor], our owner, and said, in order for our players to thrive, we have to get up and down."

Despite the team's 42-118 record since the beginning of last season, Minnesota appears to be orchestrating an ideal rebuild. Two offseasons ago, the team traded All-Star Kevin Love to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Wiggins, who was the 2014 draft's first overall pick, and then snagged LaVine with the 13th selection. After the injury-plagued Wolves ended the 2015 season with the worst record in the league, they won the lottery and drafted Towns with the top pick. Towns, the inevitable Rookie of the Year, has a combination of size, perimeter shooting, coordination, and rim-protection that raises an unthinkable question: Will he be the best big man in the league by next season? Supplemented by Rubio, big man Gorgui Dieng, Shabazz Muhammad, and rookies Tyus Jones and Nemanja Bjelica, Minnesota has a deep, diverse young core.

Still, amidst the excitement over the Wolves' precocious kids, the approaching offseason brings organizational intrigue. Flip Saunders, who was both the team's general manager and head coach, died from Hodgkin's lymphoma last October, and his replacements in those roles—Newton and Sam Mitchell, respectively—still haven't been stripped of the interim badge. Taylor recently said that Newton would continue to oversee the team during the offseason, but it's unclear if two men without real job security can afford to make roster moves and coach with the future in mind.

Team-building is a tricky, delicate endeavor, and rushing the process risks derailing it. The New Orleans Pelicans hurried to surround Anthony Davis, an ascendant superstar, with a quality supporting cast; they are currently 29-38 and staring down another overhaul. The Phoenix Suns, a young team that signed 33-year-old center Tyson Chandler to a four-year, $52 million contract last offseason, are 20-38. Dating back to the disastrous David Kahn regime, Minnesota does not have a history of making wise personnel moves.

To some degree, the Wolves' enviable position has been sculpted by luck. There was no calculated teardown like the ones in Boston, Orlando, or Philadelphia. After dealing Love, Minnesota hoped to remain competitive—they kept veterans like Kevin Martin and Mo Williams around, and acquired Thaddeus Young for a future first-rounder—but sank to the bottom of the standings. Ethicists can debate whether the NBA lottery rewards ineptitude or shrewd tanking, but it's obvious the Wolves have benefitted from fortuitous bounces of ping-pong balls, which gave Cleveland the top pick that led to the Wiggins trade and, later, dropped Towns in Minnesota's lap.

The Wolves currently have a 29 percent chance of landing a top-three pick in the upcoming lottery and adding yet another potential star like LSU's Ben Simmons or Duke's Brandon Ingram. But according to Newton, the team had higher ambitions for this season. "We planned on winning this year," he said. "Who in this league plays to lose? The record—I won't say it's a disappointment, because if I say it's a disappointment, then I'm placing the blame. And I'm not gonna do that—we're all in this together. Of course we wanted to win more games."

Last offseason, the Wolves signed old-timers like Kevin Garnett, Tayshaun Prince, and Andre Miller as player-mentors for the team's youngsters. When Minnesota started the season 8-8, the strategy was widely applauded as a model for rebuilding teams. But after a winter swoon in which the team lost 20 of 23 games and plunged in both offensive and defensive ratings, the Wolves wisely shifted direction toward a full-fledged youth movement. Miller and Martin were bought out, and both eventually joined the more age-appropriate San Antonio Spurs.

"Andre came here, and while he is on the downside of his career, he still wanted to play," said Newton. "And, as the season went on, we saw Zach grow and Tyus grow, now it became time for us to give all the minutes we can to the young players, as opposed to an aging veteran. We felt it was in our best interest and his best interest—because he was such a great mentor and a teammate while he was here—to let him out of the contract to get on a San Antonio Spurs-type team."

Miller, appearing in late March as a guest on Chris Mannix' podcast The Vertical, had less charitable things to say about his former employer. "If this was going to be my last year, there was no way I was going to stay in Minnesota on a team that doesn't have any goals," he said. "There was no expectations in Minnesota on which way they wanted to go, it wasn't communicated. I can't go out like this."

It also remains to be seen if Mitchell, who has earned a reputation for possessing the crankiness of a shotgun-brandishing retiree, is the right coach for an inexperienced team that will inevitably make mistakes. He often makes his job seem like a hassle instead of an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something special. After a loss to the Los Angeles Clippers at the end of March, he scornfully tore into his charges in the postgame presser. "I wish they would stop reading the newspapers, stop talking to their friends, because we're not good enough to just show up and play," Mitchell said. "That was the worst game we've played all year."

Mitchell's critics have often pointed to a Minnesota offensive system that seems prehistoric when compared to contemporary basketball philosophy. The Wolves have the second lowest three-point rate in the NBA, and have made the second fewest attempts from deep. Instead, they take the most two-pointers over 16 feet. "A long two, for analytics people, it's not a good shot," LaVine said. "When you got your foot on the line, those are the worst ones. But two points is two points, man. I know some of the analytics dudes on the team don't want to hear that. If you take a long two and make it, they can't really say anything to you."

The Wolves' shot selection doesn't really trouble Newton. "I'd like for us to shoot more threes, and sometimes our players have to understand spacing," he said. "But every team can't be a three-point-shooting team. For now, we'll play with the players we have. Who knows, maybe in the next couple years, the trend in the NBA will go back to fast-breaking-type basketball and getting the ball in the flow and taking shots where you get 'em."

In truth, the Wolves' main issues are on the other side of the ball. After Garnett, who is still a brainy and intimidating defender, went down with a knee injury, opponents gleefully knifed into the team's soft underbelly. They are ranked 28th on in the league on defense, surrendering 110 points per 100 possessions; only the Brooklyn Nets and the Los Angeles Lakers give up more. Per Basketball-Reference, Minnesota surrenders the sixth highest percentage of shots at the rim, and foes are making them at the third highest rate. Towns is a fine rim protector, though not yet elite, and the guards seem to be contributing to the problem: by Defensive Box Plus-Minus, the trio of Wiggins, LaVine, and Jones are all far below average defenders.

"We're going through a lot of different defenses and learning to switch up on the fly," LaVine said. "We're trying to develop that chemistry and it's going to take more than a month to get that down. But teams are really good! Take the Spurs, for example—that ball is just popping. It gets to seven seconds and they're still moving the ball. They're not going to take a one-on-one shot and just throw it up at the end of the shot clock."

Let's be be clear: young teams always struggle. The Wolves' record is of distant secondary importance to the development of players like Towns, Wiggins, and LaVine. While the organization has smartly begun emphasizing player development over wins and losses, that ideology may have been born of desperation—and this offseason, they'll surely be recalibrating the balance between long-term potential and more immediate goals. "We don't have a losing culture," LaVine said. "We don't act like a losing team. We still think we're going to go out there and win every game."