NEW YORK — The first half of this Minnesota Timberwolves season has been frustrating for many reasons. The sequel to last season’s thrilling run to the Western Conference finals has been plodding, a hard-to-watch mix of turnovers, isolation dribbling and slow pace.

The hardest part of this underwhelming start has been the understanding that there is so much more in this roster than what has been put on display. The Timberwolves look dangerous when everything is clicking, as it did for the final three quarters of a 116-99 win over the New York Knicks on Friday night.

The best version of the Wolves looks like this: Anthony Edwards putting the game in his hands, overpowering a very good Knicks perimeter defense and racking up 36 points, 13 rebounds and seven assists, one of his best games of the season.

ANOTHER ONE. 🔨

ANT» https://t.co/iBU749iEGO pic.twitter.com/YBqqyyHUvW

— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 18, 2025

It’s Naz Reid hitting open 3-pointers generated off Julius Randle’s post-ups. Reid went 6 of 6 from deep and scored 23 points one night after attending his jersey retirement ceremony at Roselle Catholic High School in New Jersey.

BIG JELLY FROM DEEP. 🍇 pic.twitter.com/8jmjiIzLZ8

— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 18, 2025

It’s Rudy Gobert holding down the fort on defense, blocking Josh Hart’s 3-point attempt on the perimeter and deterring the Knicks from driving to the basket. It’s Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker hounding Knicks star Jalen Brunson into an inefficient 26 points on 23 shots. It’s Mike Conley, filling in for an injured Donte DiVincenzo, scoring 10 of his 13 points in the first quarter to help the Wolves weather a 1 of 8 start from Edwards. And it is Rob Dillingham sprinkling some of his point guard fairy dust on the offense, pulling up for 3s and hitting Gobert for lobs to give a spark off the bench.

ROB LOB. 🤌 pic.twitter.com/YCq6od6lCl

— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 18, 2025

It’s in there for these Timberwolves, buried under the sludge of the preseason trade of Karl-Anthony Towns to New York for DiVincenzo and Randle. It has been waiting to be unearthed for good in a 22-19 start that has featured four losing streaks of at least three games after Minnesota went through the entire 82-game regular season and the first six games of the playoffs without one last year.

“I think it’s still a work in progress,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said before the game. “That’s probably the best way to put it. We’ve been here before with the Rudy trade. It took us a while. There’s a lot of moving parts to the chemistry that we need to have with Rudy. It’s a chemistry we have to have with Ant; it’s a chemistry we have to have with each other. There’s a lot there.”

In the first 41 games of the season, the Wolves are 26th in turnover percentage, 22nd in defensive rebound percentage and dead last in transition opportunities. Their offensive rating is 15th this season as opposed to 17th last year but still more than two full points per 100 possessions worse.

And yet the Wolves (22-19)  are 1.5 games behind the LA Clippers for the fifth seed in the Western Conference playoff picture. The fits and starts have been maddening at times, but the Wolves are still right in the middle of things while they work through their issues.

“It’s frustrating at times we start to get a rhythm and we kind of stub our toe,” Finch said. “But we also feel like we’ve got a good run in us, too.”

There are many reasons to blame for the uninspiring start to the season and many reasons to believe that it can turn around.

Randle’s fit

The biggest target for fan ire has been Randle, and Friday night served as an interesting microcosm of his first season in Minnesota. He scored just eight points on 2-of-6 shooting and turned the ball over four times, ugly numbers for a player who was supposed to help supplant Towns’ scoring in the wake of the trade.

He also was an essential part of the victory with seven rebounds and six assists, most of them which created open looks from 3-point range off of doubles in the post. The Wolves outscored the Knicks by 20 points in Randle’s 34 minutes.

two words. pic.twitter.com/h5socPT0sW

— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 18, 2025

Finch has backed Randle steadfastly through these choppy early days in Minnesota. He is transitioning from the primary scorer he was in New York to a supporting cast member to Edwards with the Timberwolves. He is taking more than four fewer shots per game than he did in New York and still working on building chemistry with Edwards, Reid and Gobert.

“I got nothing but a lot of admiration for Julius for what we’ve asked him to do. We’ve asked him to score. We’ve asked him to playmake, we’ve asked him to guard in a lot of different situations. His biggest contribution for us has been doing all that,” Finch said. “Our inconsistency so far this season, everybody’s kind of trying to adjust and figure out their new reality and he’s been at the front of that. He’s done it all.”

He is averaging 19.2 points and 7.1 rebounds this season, both far below his averages last season in New York of 24.0 points and 9.2 boards. But the role is different, especially on defense. Randle has often been slow to close out on 3-point shooters and inattentive off the ball. But when he is put on the ball against a bigger player, he has shown the ability to lock in and get stops.

Randle’s fit with Edwards, another player who likes to play in isolation, and non-shooters in Gobert and McDaniels has been a constant topic of discussion. The offense has been slow and stagnant at times this season, with its 112.2 points per 100 possessions rating far behind last year’s mark of 114.6.

Randle’s numbers pale in comparison to Towns, who did not play on Friday night because of a sprained thumb. Towns is averaging 25.4 points, 13.9 rebounds and hitting 45 percent of his 3s, a monster season that has put him on the fringe of MVP conversation with the Knicks. The production has cast a long shadow that has enveloped Randle.

“He’s been passing the ball tremendously well, finding me in transition, talking to me the whole time,” Edwards said of Randle. “Late kickouts have been great for us, playing through him in the post.”

There will continue to be trade chatter around Randle’s name heading into the Feb. 6 deadline. He has a player option for $31 million next season, but so far there is little indication that the Wolves will move him. Finch is a staunch proponent of Randle’s game and the Timberwolves are in the dreaded second apron of spending, meaning it is far more difficult to construct trades that meet the parameters of the collective bargaining agreement. There also may not be much of a market for Randle, and the Wolves would want value back in a deal for him given their push to be competitive this season.

Role player regression

Randle is far from the lone culprit for the Wolves’ inconsistency.

Reid hit 8 of 11 shots against the Knicks and grabbed eight rebounds in 25 minutes. Gobert scored 11 points on 5-of-6 shooting with six boards and two blocks and Conley had 13 points and hit three 3s in his return to the starting lineup in place of DiVincenzo, who was out with a sprained toe. It was a well-rounded performance from Edwards’ supporting cast, something that has not always been reliable this season.

Through the first two months of this season, all three players were playing far below the levels they hit last season. Reid shot 29 percent from 3 in December but is hitting 57 percent from deep in January and looking more like the NBA Sixth Man of the Year.

“Sometimes you gotta go through obstacles and things like that to get yourself in rhythm more, or have your teammates help you get in rhythm,” Reid said. “Just going through the flow, ups and downs. It’s kind of part of basketball.”

Conley and Gobert were enormous parts of the Wolves’ success last season, but both have looked older and slower this season. Conley is shooting 41 percent at the rim and a ghastly 33 percent on 2-point shots overall this season. He hit a pair of floaters in the first quarter against the Knicks, a welcome change.

“The mission before we took him out of the starting lineup was to be aggressive in that first shift, he was doing that, and continued it tonight,” Finch said. “Ten points in the first quarter was huge.”

Gobert’s rebounding numbers are his lowest since his second season in the league. He has been routinely beaten on the glass by younger, bouncier players who are creating second-chance opportunities with offensive rebounds. The Knicks had 15 offensive rebounds and took 11 more shots than the Wolves, but Gobert hunkered down and held them to one offensive rebound in the fourth quarter.

When asked why the team has been so inconsistent on defense, Finch was straight to the point.

“It’s rebounding,” he said. “We’re really good at making people miss one time, but we’ve struggled to consistently rebound. I would say a lot of it is there.”

McDaniels is another role player who has yet to take a leap this season. But after shooting 31 percent from 3 in November, he is hitting 45 percent of his 3s in January. He also is averaging 5.7 rebounds per game in December and January after just grabbing 3.7 in October and November.

Finch’s adjustments

Wolves fans have expressed frustration with coach Finch’s unwillingness to make changes amid the team’s early struggles. The eight-man rotation has remained nearly untouched with Josh Minott getting some sparing run as a pseudo-ninth man in recent weeks. Rookies Dillingham and Terrence Shannon Jr. have been fixtures on the bench before ankle injuries could be used as justification for the lack of minutes.

But Finch has been making more and more changes to how he allots roles and minutes over the last several weeks. Most notably, he put DiVincenzo into the starting lineup for Conley at point guard on Jan. 6. Finch immediately acknowledged how much easier that move made it on him to give Conley some extended runs in games while also keeping his minutes in the low 20s.

Perhaps more subtly, Finch has been changing the way the Wolves finish games as well. Randle played nearly all of the crunchtime minutes for Minnesota in the first two months of the season, 97.5 percent of them in the first 20 games to be exact, per statistician Ramiro Bentes. Since the calendar turned to 2025, Randle has played 41 percent of the clutch minutes.

He might not be starting Reid and moving Randle to the bench as some want. But the minutes allotment between the two players has been much more balanced of late.

On Friday night against the Knicks, who were much smaller with Towns out, Finch went into a stagger with Gobert and Randle. The two played the first six minutes together but did not share the floor the rest of the first half. Then he changed it up in the fourth quarter, sitting the red-hot Reid down and riding Randle’s passing and Gobert’s defense for a dominant finish. The Wolves outscored New York 35-21 in the fourth, holding the Knicks to 35 percent shooting.

Rudy Gobert block, awesome team defense pic.twitter.com/znLVVxfsCX

— Timberwolves Clips (@WolvesClips) January 18, 2025

“Our ball pressure and ball containment was elite tonight,” Randle said after playing his first game at Madison Square Garden since the trade. “All those guys on the perimeter had elite ball containment, and we’re catching drives and not letting Jalen and Mikal (Bridges) get downhill easily.”

Injury luck on Wolves’ side

The Timberwolves have been remarkably healthy this season with 45 games lost to injury heading into the night the second-fewest in the league. And the bulk of those games lost have been to players like Dillingham and Shannon, both of whom were not a part of the regular rotation. Seven of their top eight players in minutes had played in every game this season, including DiVincenzo before he sat out on Friday night. It remains unclear how long he will be out with the turf toe, but that is a painful injury that can take time to heal.

That good fortune makes it even more concerning that the Wolves have been languishing around .500 all season. Every team above them in the West standings has had to deal with at least one injury to a key player that has caused them to miss multiple games. And yet the Wolves have not been able to parlay that injury advantage to make up any ground.

It would be hard to imagine the Wolves are as lucky in the second half of the season, and the timing of their first big one is problematic. DiVincenzo has been playing outstanding basketball of late, averaging 17.5 points and shooting 42 percent from 3-point range since entering the starting lineup six games ago. And it isn’t just his floor spacing that was helping. DiVincenzo had taken on the burden of crashing the glass to help out the Wolves bigs.

“It’s a tough one for us. He had finally settled in,” Finch said. “He looked great. He was playing amazing, doing everything, too, for us. Not just making shots, but rebounding, tough defense. Winning plays.”

Their first big test came against the Knicks on Friday night, but the gauntlet continues with a back-to-back at home against mighty Cleveland on Saturday followed by a road trip to Memphis and Dallas and home games against Denver and Atlanta next week.

Dillingham had a promising return to the rotation, putting up nine points and three assists in 13 minutes. He does not have DiVincenzo’s size or rebounding toughness, but he is a shifty player with good court vision and a slick handle, all of which are needed right now.

“I thought, he was patient, created some open shots for his teammates, there was a bunch of pop,” Finch said. “So, it was really good.”

Team chemistry

One would think the struggles for consistency on the court would create tense vibes in the locker room. Watching Randle sulk on the bench in the fourth quarter of a loss to the Warriors on Wednesday night and listening to Edwards vent about his frustrations at various points in the season weren’t great body language indicators.

But the mood within the players has been decidedly more upbeat all season long than the negativity swirling in the fan base. Case in point: the Wolves landed in New York on Thursday evening and it would have been understandable for them to splinter out into the big city for a night on the town. Instead, the entire team boarded buses for a 50-minute drive to Roselle, N.J., for Reid’s big night at his alma mater.

“It’s definitely an honor and it just shows how much work that I put in,” Reid said. “The journey still continues, but that was a big part of my journey, and being able to play here tonight and play the way I did, and get the win, another blessing for me.”

the squad showed up to support 🫶 pic.twitter.com/pb22FkL56q

— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 17, 2025

“That was the best feeling I had in a minute, since having my little girl,” Edwards said. “It felt like my jersey was getting retired. Naz is like a brother to me. I’ve been here for five years and every year that I’ve been here Naz has been here. He’s like a brother to me.”

This team has a long way to go and has in some ways been disappointing in the first 41 games. But the personalities have meshed quite well and there is the possibility that better days lie ahead.

(Top photo of Julius Randle: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)