On being wrong, or my thoughts on the Minnesota Timberwolves
After their stunning road win in Game 7 of the Western Conference Semifinals, I probably need to adjust my view of the team from the Twin Cities.
The NBA playoffs have been marching along with the semifinals in both the Eastern and Western Conferences wrapping up this past weekend. In the East, there’s a matchup between the Boston Celtics and the Indiana Pacers while the Minnesota Timberwolves and Dallas Mavericks square off in the West.
I’ve been watching games here-and-there, though not as closely as I would if the Warriors were still involved. But even at that slight remove, I’ve come to a realization. Specifically, that I was quite wrong about the Timberwolves. While I’ve been putting off writing about this, after their come-from-behind Game 7 victory on the road against the defending champion Denver Nuggets… I had to own up to it.
I was skeptical of Minnesota going into the season and all the way through it. I didn’t think they would be atop the conference going into the season. When they started playing well, I was waiting for the over shoe to drop and they would regress back to the pack.
One reason for this is my constant belief that Rudy Gobert is not as great as certain segments of the basketball internet/social media make him out to be. The Gobert-Donovan Mitchell combination in Utah was the smart pick to make noise in the Western Conference and yet they never did. He’s certainly an elite rim protector, but he’s also someone who could get picked apart (see what Houston did to him in the 2018 playoffs) and really doesn’t have the offensive game relative to how he can be praised. Also, as a Warriors fan and given Draymond Green’s… interactions with Gobert… I’ve just never been a fan.
Karl-Anthony Towns was a player I thought was overrated too. I saw KAT as the archetypal “big stats on a middling team” player who was too soft or lacked “it” to be a truly elite player.
Even coming out of college, I had questions about Anthony Edwards. I hate to admit but I thought Wiseman was the for-sure pick for the Warriors in that 2020 draft and wasn’t upset they didn’t get the chance to pick Edwards. While I don’t think a player has to win an NCAA championship for me to think they’ll succeed in the NBA… Georgia finished with a 5-13 record in the SEC in Edwards’ one year at Georgia. That Edwards couldn’t get that team into the top half of the SEC made me wonder if this was a player worthy of being picked at the top of the draft with the hopes of a franchise placed upon his shoulders.
No matter what happens the rest of the postseason, I need to reevaluate some of these opinions.
The biggest one is with Edwards. Though I think the Michael Jordan comparisons are….a bit ridiculous (thought of course I would think so, given that I was raised on Jordan and 1990s basketball/think he’s the greatest of all time), Edwards has clearly shown he belongs the conversations with, say, Luka or Jokic or Tatum when we’re talking about the next class of great players.
He’s only burnished that legacy with his play in the postseason, like when he scored 43 points in Game 1 of the Western Conference Semifinals to steal homecourt away from the Nuggets.
Edwards, rightfully so, has been the story of the playoffs (had Jalen Brunson been able to stay healthy and get the Knicks into the Eastern Conference Finals, he might’ve been up there but alas that was not meant to be). He’s brash, he’s explosive, but Edwards has shown that he can back it all up with great (and game-winning) play (on both ends of the court too as his defensive work on Jamal Murray was key to that Game 7 victory).
The shift in my KAT and Gobert opinions are tempered. While I’m still of the mind that Gobert is overrated, perhaps if he’s your third or fourth best player (behind Edwards, KAT, and Jayden Daniels… maybe even Naz Reid…Mike Conley) you could be a team with championship aspirations. KAT, meanwhile, showed quite a bit in this Denver series as he was able to be the second option after Edwards while dealing with a tough Nuggets front court of Jokic and Aaron Gordon.
Now the Timberwolves, a team I certainly did not think was tough enough or had the championship meddle, won three games in Denver (one of the toughest places to win) including a Game 7 and now will be favored in the Western Conference Finals. For a team I doubted from the beginning, that’s quite impressive and means I probably need to adjust my opinions. Sometimes, we have to accept that we were wrong about some things, learn from that, and readjust.
The Twin Cities are really good at being underestimated. I guess it makes sense that the T-Wolves would follow suit. I will say that I love how much fun their fans seem to be having silencing all the haters on Twitter.