Loving the Timberwolves When They’re Good (or Bad)

The Timberwolves’ bad genre run from 2005 to 2022 wasn’t exciting, and it didn’t lead to an emotional epiphany or bonding experience for me. It was mostly misery – a team that wasn’t good and wasn’t close to being good, a team that wasted draft pick opportunities to change franchises. (I’m not particularly hung up on this, and I think it was the right decision at the time, but I am haunted by a photo from the 2009 selection committee, showing the Timberwolves selecting point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn, just before the Golden State Warriors selected Stephen Curry. Rubio proved to be a solid but not great point guard. Flynn left the NBA after three years.)

I have a running joke that, like many of my running jokes, is more coherent than funny. It started in 2011, in the early days of posting on what was then Twitter. Heading into the NBA season, no matter how good the Timberwolves had been the year before and no matter how stagnant they were in the offseason, I would send a message like this: I believe the Timberwolves will be 82-0 this season. It was a joke in the sense that it was an absurdity, but it was also a joke in the sense that it was an absurdity that I believed in, because when there are zeros on both sides of the victory-loss column, you can believe a little in the impossibility. In the weeks and days before the foreground rises, the sun shines on the spot of the large rock you intentionally placed yourself on, and the rock seems momentarily lighter. Until it doesn’t.

I don’t understand people who come to exercise to feel rage, agony or panic. At least I don’t understand these people more (I used to be one). I’ve experienced the new golden age of Timberwolves basketball over the past few seasons with a sense of calm that I think alarms the rest of my fellow Wolves fans. I think supporting a desperate and unhappy team for so long gave me a new perspective on the simplicity of sport: it’s the clearest example of a zero-sum game. There is only one championship and only one team can win it. For a period of time, all teams share the same odds, and afterward, the stats probably won’t work in your team’s favor – or if they do, it won’t last long. And so I no longer understand this fandom mentality that insists that you can only feel good about a team if it wins a championship. Seems to me like this sets up years of disappointment, with maybe a silver lining, or two if you’re lucky.

By the time you read this, the Timberwolves might be on the verge of elimination against the San Antonio Spurs, or — against all odds — they might be able to prevail once again, in another series victory that will be called improbable but won’t particularly seem that way to me. I think the Spurs are a better team than the Timberwolves, not only on paper but also on the field. This is a team that is stifling defensively and almost impossible to defend against at all three levels. One of the highlights of their first-round win over the Denver Nuggets, for example, was seeing Jaden McDaniels, a constant defensive threat, declare that the Nuggets were “all bad defenders” after Game 2 of the series, before going out and scoring thirty-two points in the closing Game 6. And yet one thing about the Timberwolves — what appeals to me most about them, I think — is that they seem almost violently propelled by their underdog status, or by the awareness that people have little faith in them, whether because of injuries, bettors, or whatever our eyes clearly tell us about a game.

I’ve decided that I enjoy watching the Timberwolves fight as much as I enjoy watching them win at the end of the fight. When I open a Timberwolves game, even now, I feel distinctly aware that I need to find pleasure in something other than winning, and so I choose to find pleasure in rooting for a team that doesn’t back down, that shows up ready more often than it does (although I intentionally don’t mention Game 2 of that Spurs series), and a team that has managed to correct everything I believed about it during the dark decades. I like these Timberwolves precisely because I know how bad it can get, I know how easy it is for a team to fall back into eternal villainy, and I train my heart not to fall. Also I’m very much in love with this different thing, because there’s a chance that, at some point in the future, I’ll crave these Timberwolves while watching a version of the team that doesn’t reach the same heights. And I will have to love this team too, as easily as I love this one. ♦