Why Do the Timberwolves Keep Losing Close Games?

Coming into the 2016–17 NBA season the Minnesota Timberwolves were a trendy team. They had a mega-star poised to make The Leap (Karl-Anthony Towns), a star sidekick who now had a coach to mold him (Andrew Wiggins with Tom Thibodeau), a lottery ticket that was looking primed to be cashed in (Zach LaVine), a top-five pick in the most recent draft (Kris Dunn), and a couple nice complementary pieces (Ricky Rubio, Gorgui Dieng, and Brandon Rush). Their new coach was a man who had made the playoffs in all five seasons during his previous stint with the Chicago Bulls.

Many pundits were naming the Wolves as one of the most likely teams to make a jump into the playoffs as early as 2016–17, and become legitimate contenders soon after. Even the pundits who didn’t see this team as playoff-caliber team in the tough Western Conference just yet had to admit that this team was among the elite tier of “Most Fun” and “Most Promising” teams in the NBA. You couldn’t go more than a week without a major sports website releasing a “Top Ten League Pass Teams in 2016–17” article, all of which starred the Timberwolves.

All of that has fed into what has been a gut-punch of a 2016–17 season so far for the Minnesota Professional Basketball Team. (At least on the men’s side; the Lynx continue to roll, coming up just short in the WNBA Finals this past July.) The Wolves are 12–26, a record that leaves them just a game above the bottom of the Western Conference, a place in the standings that many Wolves fans believed they would be leaving behind after a decade of life near the cellar. (The last time the Wolves place in the Western Conference standings didn’t have two digits was in 2004–05, when they finished all the way up in 9th…)

What is most intriguing/depressing, depending on how diehard of a Wolves fan you are, isn’t just that the Wolves are losing, it’s how they are losing. The Wolves have played 12 games this season in which the final margin of victory was within five points. They are 2–10 in those games. Per, TeamRanking.com, that’s the worst such record in the NBA this season. If the Wolves were merely completely average in those games, going 6–6, their record would be 16–21, and they would be the 8th seed in the Western Conference. One has to imagine that there would be a much different discussion surrounding the team if that were the case.

So what is it that is holding this team back in close games?

I posed this question on Twitter with three possible explanations: Inexperience, Coaching, and Bad Luck. Let’s look at each of those possibilities, along with one theory put forward by an intrepid Twitter user.

Inexperience

This was by far the winner in the poll I put out into the Twitterverse. In fact, all eight of the people who voted in the poll (I have lots of Twitter followers, I know guys…) chose “inexperience” as the issue behind the Wolves close game tribulations. It makes sense, too. There’s a reason I listed “inexperience” as the first option, it’s the choice that makes the most sense. If William of Ockham were to cut into this problem with his famous razor, it’s the solution he would find.

There’s plenty of support behind young teams struggling in close games, as well. Just look at this very season. Who is second to the Wolves in losing close games? The Baby Lakers, as so aptly named by Andrew Sharp of Sports Illustrated. Another pair of young teams joining the Timberpups and Baby Lakers in the bottom five: the Brooklyn Nets and Philadelphia 76ers. On the other end of the spectrum, veteran teams such as the Cleveland Cavaliers and Memphis Grizzlies have the best records in games decided by five or fewer points this season.

This is good news for the Wolves, as their team is only going to gain more experience and cohesion as they coalesce under Tom Thibodeau over the next few seasons. Thibs isn’t going to be run out of town after one poor season, and KAT, Wiggins, and LaVine are all under contract through at least 2019.

While not ideal, if inexperience is truly what is hurting the Wolves this season, it should comfort Wolves fans for multiple reasons. For one, it means that the failure is not a more insidious, deeply-rooted issue. It also means that there should be positive regression in the future. If not during this season, then hopefully down the road, and sooner than later.

Coaching

Whenever a team struggles in close games there are going to be questions of the coaching staff. For most of the game, it is the players who decide 90 percent of what happens on the court, but when it gets late in a closely-contested game, coaches are under the spotlight as much as the players.

Drawing up offensive and defensive sets, and getting your players to buy into those sets, is of the utmost importance in a tightly-contested game. It can easily be the determining factor between a 2–10 record in close games and a 6–6 record in those games.

One way of seeing if this is a coaching issue is to look at how Thibs’ Bulls teams did in close games. In a word: well. Here are the ranks, in close games, for Thibs’ Bulls teams in his five seasons: 2010–11 (2nd), 2011–12 (12th), 2012–13 (10th), 2013–14 (11th), 2014–15 (11th). One elite season followed by four solidly above-average seasons. Thibs’ Bulls were never in the lower half of the league in close games, let alone dead last like this current Timberwolves team.

That still doesn’t mean coaching is off the hook. While Thibs was able to win close games in Chicago, if he is having trouble communicating with his players in Minnesota (while previously being able to connect in Chicago) that could still be an issue. Of course, it’s quite hard to know if the players aren’t running the sets he is telling them to down the stretch, but given that there hasn’t been a leaked story stating as much, and given the success of Thibs’ Bulls in close games, I’m fine writing this explanation off.

Bad Luck

This wasn’t a popular choice in the poll, but I think it could definitely be having a pretty big impact. Season-to-season correlations among winning percentage in close games is a subject that has been studied with more depth in baseball than in basketball. That being said, there isn’t a lot of evidence that says that if an NBA team does poorly in close game one year, they will continue to struggle in close games the next year. What baseball evidence we have seen often goes the other way, showing that teams that do poorly in close games often see a reverse — or at least a return to average — the next season, and that luck plays as big a role in close games as anything else.

In further support of the Timberwolves playing the “bad luck” card (which, of course, you will never, ever see any coach or player pull, since it is truly the biggest cop out of all time), is the team’s point differential in 2016–17. Point differential has been proven to be a better predictor of future success than a team’s actual winning percentage, meaning NBA fans can mine a lot from this statistic. At the current moment, the Timberwolves have the eighth-best point differential in the Western Conference (-1.5), meaning they are well within their rights to believe themselves to be a playoff team by the overall performance they have put into games. Of course, try telling that to one of the players on this near-last place team and they’re about as likely to listen to you as anyone of us are to listen past the first five seconds of one of those “This is Paul from Southwest Texas Phone Company calling to tell you that you’ve won…” [click]. However, as a fan, bad luck can be a crutch to get us through rough times, even if it may be written off by many.

The “bad luck” explanation is very likely one that will not win you over if you didn’t believe it coming into this article, and will be ignored by many if the Wolves do start to win some close games (the whole “gained experienced” narrative will likely be played up a lot more). That’s fair, no one likes to admit the sometimes rather large role that random chance plays in determining our beloved sporting events, even if it truly does play a big role.

Twitter Theory: The Darkest Timeline

As noted earlier in this article, when I posted this poll on Twitter, I had a Timberwolves respond with an interesting theory. Fair warning Timberwolves fans, this one comes with a trigger warning:

Oh boy. What if the Timberwolves are simply building around the wrong guys? While all their fans are busy preaching that patience is a virtue and this core group of players are simply inexperienced, they’re actually wasting away precious years of fandom with a team that is never going to make The Leap into the tier of contending teams.

We’ve seen it happen before in NBA history, as teams build around players that, for whatever reason (injuries, chemistry, poor timing), just never arrive on the big stage. Those fanbases probably sounded a lot like most Timberwolves fans right now, stating that their squad just needed a little time to season. What if, in hindsight, Timberwolves fans will see that Karl-Anthony Towns was too nice to ever be a killer late in games for the Wolves; Andrew Wiggins was too sleepy to ever become a finisher when Minnesota needed him; and Zach LaVine simply had too low of a basketball IQ to be worth his while late in games. What if Thibs’ manic drive ends up burdening this team more than helping them grow, and suddenly it’s 2018–19 and the Timberwolves have never made it out of the first round of the playoffs?

That’s a mighty scary paragraph for Timberwolves fans, and thankfully it seems like the darkest possible timeline. We’ve all seen firsthand LeBron James single-handedly demolish the theory that “being too nice of a player” means you can’t win a championship. We’ve also seen many a Tracy McGrady game in which he proved that just because a player might look like he’s asleep doesn’t mean he can’t rip your throat out. And finally, we just saw J.R. Smith play a key role in the city of Cleveland breaking its 50+ year title drought, so I think Zach LaVine will be fine.

Wolves fans might be a little worried these days (worries that were certainly not quelled by the latter stages of this article), but overall the future is still very bright. Just a few breaks the Timberwolves way this season and we’re talking about their chances in a first-round matchup with the Warriors instead of imagining scenarios that seem like scenes from David Lynch’s upcoming Timberwolves horror-documentary. Patience is the toughest virtue for sports fans, but it is also the most rewarding.