With their win over the Spurs in Austin on Saturday, the Minnesota Timberwolves will officially finish the 2022-23 regular season at or above .500 for the second straight year. It will be just their third time finishing at .500 or better in the last 18 seasons.
Having secured a spot in the play-in, the Wolves are simply awaiting their opponent. Minnesota will be squaring off against the Lakers, Warriors, or Thunder when the play-in tips off this coming week.
When they do take the floor, the Timberwolves will have to play their best basketball of the season to have a shot at advancing to the playoffs. Thankfully, they have a few secret weapons up their sleeve that may be able to help them accomplish their goal.
3 secret weapons the Minnesota Timberwolves have for the NBA Playoffs:
Kyle Anderson
When opposing teams prepare to face the Timberwolves, they are primarily thinking about the scoring power and offensive gravity of Anthony Edwards, the rim protection of Rudy Gobert, and the versatility of Karl-Anthony Towns. But one more overlooked player who has been a major piece in Minnesota this season is Kyle Anderson.
The player affectionately known as Slo-Mo has been a huge factor in keeping the Timberwolves aloft in 2022-23, especially while Towns was sidelined with a calf injury. Anderson’s high IQ and methodical play style lead to smart and focused basketball, and he has more than flourished in his first season in Minnesota.
Anderson has fit in seamlessly with his talented teammates, and he has helped raise the ceiling of this group in a big way. He is enjoying a career year with the Wolves, averaging career-bests in assists per game and three-point percentage, while acting as Minnesota’s best statistical three-point shooter this season.
It is perfectly reasonable to say Kyle Anderson currently looks like the best free agent acquisition in Minnesota Timberwolves history. Most NBA teams are aware of his talent at this point, but his presence may still prove to be huge over the course of a potential seven-game series.
Defensive prowess
The issues with the Minnesota Timberwolves over the course of the 2022-23 season have largely been about offense, not defense. The Wolves head into the final day of the regular season with a top 10 defensive rating of 113.2.
Minnesota achieved this level of team defense by upgrading their defensive personnel not just last summer, but during the current season at the trade deadline as well. Of course adding Rudy Gobert provided a new level of rim protection and a strong defensive anchor to the Wolves’ scheme, but the likes of Mike Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker have been positives on that end as well.
Looking at the Timberwolves’ roster as a whole, they are absolutely loaded with capable defenders all over the floor. Jaden McDaniels is an all-defense candidate and hangs his hat on ruining the nights of opposing star players. Anthony Edwards has made some noteworthy strides in that department as well.
All this will bode extremely well for the Timberwolves’ chances in a playoff environment. As anyone who watches the NBA Playoffs is aware, the game tends to slow down and points grow harder to come by when the calendar hits April. Minnesota may be able to surprise some teams with how hard they have made it to score on them.
Playoff experience
No matter how you look at it, prior experience in the playoffs will always be a factor when the postseason comes around. It is the primary reason so many fans and analysts are questioning whether the Sacramento Kings should be taken seriously as a contender in this year’s playoffs.
When you enter the playoffs having been there before, you bring with you all the knowledge and understanding that you gained from playing in that environment. Entering that atmosphere with no prior experience can be a bit of a shock for some teams, and it is part of the reason the Timberwolves were not able to pull off the upset against the Memphis Grizzlies last April.
Now, with over half the Wolves’ roster coming in with playoff experience, they can firmly identify as a battle-tested group in the postseason. Of course, the eight players still around from 2021-22 will bring with them their know-how from the six-game series with Memphis, but the newly joined veterans add a much greater depth to Minnesota’s maturity in that area.
Between Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley, Kyle Anderson, and Austin Rivers is a total of 229 playoff games worth of experience in the NBA postseason. They bring to the Minnesota locker room all of their successes and failures from those games. While having a plethora of playoff-tested veterans is something of a new concept for Timberwolves fans, it could prove to be a very effective secret weapon against championship-level teams.