Timberwolves Tiebreaker Outlook: Playoff Race & Frauds Speculation
Explore Timberwolves' surprising season, tiebreaker scenarios, and debunking fraud claims. Plus, All-Star game thoughts and dunk contest critique.
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It’s difficult to imagine the Timberwolves having 39 wins coming out of the all-star break. Think about it. This franchise won 40 or more games in a season just 12 times in the previous 34 seasons. Entering this season, the Timberwolves had an all-time winning percentage of 40.2 percent or roughly 32 wins in a season.
Winning 40 games is hardly a terrific season; it’s not even .500. The first playoff team in franchise history won 40 games in 1997 and was swiftly dismissed by Houston in the first round. Forty-two is how many games last season’s team won and they are just three wins away from matching that number.
This sudden winning after years of futility has been an adjustment for a lot of people hearing the reactions to losses such as the one to the Spurs. These games serve as a good reminder that the season is long and lulls are inevitable for every team. Then again, this is a fanbase that has consistently seen the bottom fall out of seasons and even entire eras. It’s going to take a lot of sustained success to mend that scar tissue. This team is not perfect but they have proven to be pretty good more times than not, and that’s what is important.
Tiebreaker Outlook for the Stretch Run
According to Tankathon, the Wolves have the 10th-easiest remaining schedule remaining, which means they should easily eclipse 50 wins for the first time in 20 years and for just the fifth time in team history. The Wolves have this rather easy schedule despite two games remaining against the Clippers and three against the Nuggets.
Aside from playoff seeding, these games will have huge tiebreaker implications. Here’s where the Wolves sit against the three other top seeds in the West:
Clippers: Timberwolves hold a 2-0 lead in the season series with one game remaining in both Minneapolis and in Los Angeles.
Thunder: The Timberwolves own the tiebreaker over the Thunder, but just 1.5 games separate the two teams in the standings. If Oklahoma City passes Minnesota in the standings, the tiebreaker is irrelevant.
Nuggets: Minnesota holds a 1-0 lead but two of the three remaining games are in Denver. The question will be how much Denver is concerned with seeding or their potential first-round matchup. The final meeting between these teams on April 10 will be interesting for seeing who plays and whether anyone rests.
The tiebreaker implications with the Clippers are especially juicy right now. One more win and Minnesota clinches the tiebreaker. If they split the season series, the tiebreaker would go to the team leading the division. In this case, both the Wolves and Clippers are division leaders, which would then come down to each team’s record versus their division.
This scenario is in play as both the Wolves and Clippers lead their divisions, but LA holds a four-game lead and appears to be walking away with the Pacific while three games separate Minnesota, Denver and OKC atop the Northwest. If it came down to each team’s inter-division record, it would be close— Minnesota is 8-2 in their division while Los Angeles is 8-3. If the teams still remained tied, it would go to inter-conference record, which would comfortably favor the Wolves.
Minnesota will play Phoenix twice and though they are six games back in the standings, will be key games. The Wolves suffered a schedule loss earlier in the season and won’t play again until April. Health will be a big question for the Suns, especially, but depending on where the standings are, these games could have heavy playoff implications. If the Wolves slip to second or third in the West, this may be a potential first-round matchup.
Really, the simple route is to just win. That makes everything so much easier. A big part of holding on to that division lead will also be buoying their record in their remaining games against Detroit, Memphis, San Antonio, Washington and Toronto like they did in Portland last week. Like I said above, the season is long and there are lulls. Being a great team requires a lot of focus to get up for the playoff and lottery teams alike. The Wolves will probably win most of their games against both, as we saw in the first two-thirds of the season, but they will also lose some against both. However, so will the teams around them in the standings.
Are the Timberwolves Frauds?
You know you have made it when Zombie Deadspin writes the piece discrediting your start to the season. I won’t link it here, though you can find it, but essentially the writer argues this team is just the 2021 Utah Jazz team that won the West that year with 52 wins and flamed out in the second round using a lot of the same arguments about Rudy Gobert being played off the floor in the playoffs.
While I do not think this Timberwolves team is going to the Finals, I do think that blindly applying the same Gobert take to this Timberwolves team ignores key roster construction differences between the two teams and also where that Jazz team was in their trajectory versus where this Wolves team is.
The 2021 Jazz had won between 44-50 games from 2017-2020. There was a lot of talk about whether Gobert and Donovan Mitchell could eventually get out of the second round. This was with questions surrounding whether Mitchell was long for Utah and whether Gobert and Mitchell even liked each other. So, we had already seen this team ascend and fail to get over the hump for four years. There was some grace for the first two runs by chalking it up to experience but they never took that next step. By the time 2021 came around, we needed to finally see it from the Jazz and didn’t.
Contrasted with these Timberwolves who won 23 games just three years ago and 46 and 42 in the subsequent seasons, and they are not the same. This team legitimately celebrated a play-in tournament win. The last time they even hosted a first-round series was 20 years ago.
It’s funny because being the 2021 Jazz would probably mean the second-most successful era of this franchise, but they are not there yet. This is a semi-experienced team that we don’t know if we can trust because we have not seen it yet. If this team wins a series or bows out in the first round, it will likely have more to do with being inexperienced than frauds.
All-Star Game Thoughts
After last season’s debacle of a game, I decided not to watch this year’s and don’t think I missed anything. Karl-Anthony Towns had 50 points off the bench in a 211-186 loss, which is an absurd sentence to have typed. Nonetheless, I still have thoughts on Saturday’s events, which I did watch, and the game.
Steph vs Sabrina: By now you have heard about this. Sabrina Ionescu dominated the WNBA 3-point contest this past year and Steph Curry is Steph Curry. Curry beat Ionescu 29-26, with 26 being the same score Damian Lillard needed to win the main contest. I thought this worked well and if it encourages people to watch New York Liberty or other W games, that’s awesome. I think a rematch or expanded contest next year involving Caitlin Clark could be a lot of fun. However, this may be a rosy outlook, as Frankie de la Cretaz wrote in their piece about it, “When women athletes challenge men, they can’t win.”
The Dunk Contest: *sigh* I don’t even know what to say about this. Stars rarely participate anymore, which made it notable that Jaylen Brown did. Brown’s first dunk was great but his dunks became less impressive over time. Jacob Toppin and Jaimie Jacquez were fine. Mac McClung was great but he is not a name that is going to draw eyeballs. It feels like the biggest stars no longer care and everyone recycles the same gimmicks or tributes that retreads dunks we’ve already seen. I’m to the point where I wonder if we need it anymore. Imagine if MLB had some AAA masher in the home run derby because they couldn’t get the stars to do it. That would be silly but that’s the dunk contest every year now.
I know this game is for the fans, but is a game where the teams combine for 397 points really serving them? How does this showcase the league’s best players to casual fans who have misconceptions that players don’t care about things like effort or defense? Folks, I went and saw Madame Web instead of watching the All-Star Game.