Don’t look now, but is the Timberwolves defense…good?

The Timberwolves are finally starting to look like a dangerous all-around team, and the idea that they have a poor defense suddenly looks somewhat stale.

Ladies and gentlemen: the Minnesota Timberwolves just might have figured ‘it’ out on defense.

The Wolves, despite what the Players Only (plus Ernie) crew on TNT may have told you on Christmas night, have had a potent offense all season long. They’ve ranked in the top-five in offensive rating virtually all year, and stand at No. 5 in the league following Saturday’s win over New Orleans.

On the other end of the floor, however, the Wolves rank just 21st in defensive rating. But if you’ve been tracking their ranking since October, you know that they’ve always been near the bottom, and until recently, the bottom-five.

And the Timberwolves’ point differential has largely proven to be right in line with their overall offensive and defensive ratings; they’ve hovered just slightly above an even differential for much of the season, and a top-five offense combined with a bottom-five defense should equal a fairly average team.

But the Timberwolves have gone 12-5 since December 6, and their defensive rating since then is ninth in the NBA. That’s right: the Timberwolves have had a top-10 defense in the entire NBA over the last 30 days.

So, what’s changed?

While a big part of the Wolves’ defensive turnaround can be credited to Karl-Anthony Towns‘ continued improvements, as detailed recently by our own Logan Metzger, the entire defensive unit seems to be working together — which is not something we could have said six weeks ago.

Take, for example, the below transition defense in Friday’s loss to the Celtics. First, note the hustle at the seven-second mark from Nemanja Bjelica and Tyus Jones in particular. Bjelica is sprinting back in order to keep the open floor situation as a three-on-three instead of an odd-man rush, and Jones is back and in a defensive stance to slow down the ball.

Now, in part two of the sequence, both teams have recovered to a five-on-five situation, thanks to the solid transition defense from Jones, Bjelica, and Jamal Crawford. But that same trio continues to do work, with Bjelica forcing the ball into the corner, and Crawford closing out hard on Kyrie Irving. When Irving drives baseline, it’s Jones who cuts him off and forces a floater instead of an easy layup.

That’s three bench players (Jones is currently starting in place of the injured Jeff Teague but is the backup point guard) playing hard for a long sequence, from transition defense into a half-court scramble. It’s exactly the kind of hustle play that was missing for the better part of October and November for the Timberwolves.

You wouldn’t be hard-pressed to find a handful of those plays from the first half of Saturday night’s win over the Pelicans, either. The Wolves have simply been playing harder, and, more often than not, have trotted out a defense that has played on a string for the better part of the past month instead of the disjointed, unaware group that donned their jerseys earlier in the fall.

It hasn’t been perfect, of course. For all of the much-improved box score lines that Andrew Wiggins has given us over the past few weeks (including Saturday night, when Wiggins grabbed eight rebounds along with three blocks and two steals), there are still mind-numbing lapses that too often center around something as simple as getting into an athletic, defensive stance.

Here, Wiggins simply doesn’t get into a stance, allowing Jaylen Brown to change directions and cruise right past him down the middle of the lane. Wiggins is content to ride his hip, eventually fouling Brown in the act of shooting.

And that was far from Wiggins’ worst play on Friday night. Below is the exact same issue: a failure to get into a defensive stance, which leads to a blow-by from Marcus Smart. Immediately following the brutal defensive effort, Wiggins compounds matters by making an inexplicable mistake on the inbounds pass.

The turnover is dumb, of course, but to have the athletic ability and talent level of Wiggins and to simply refuse to get into a guarding stance, allowing the defender a free run at the basket with 19 seconds left on the shot clock is…mind-boggling.

Wiggins isn’t the only one who has run into issues here, either. Brian Sampson and I covered Jeff Teague’s occasional…lackadaisical defense in last week’s edition of the DWW podcast. Towns has been guilty of this, too, albeit not nearly as much of late.

At any rate, there’s no denying that the Timberwolves defense has improved measurably. Not surprisingly, so has their record and their standing in the Western Conference.

Next: 5 trade ideas for Nikola Mirotic

And if this growth is genuine, it would be prudent to begin penciling in the Wolves into a top-five seed in the Western Conference come playoff time. Put simply, a top-five offense plus a middle-of-the-pack defense is good enough to be a solidly top-10 team in the entire NBA.