Reason IV: Timberwolves and tough love
If you don’t like to see teammates at odds with one another in the heat of battle, perhaps you should rethink what goes into the mindset of a professional basketball player. Players on the Timberwolves roster have to be passionate enough about the game to be willing to voice dissent when events do meet their expectations. After that, the players have to have enough love and respect for one another to voice their concerns.
But perhaps most of all, the players on the Timberwolves roster have to feel ownership, to hold one another accountable. The derision that proved to be the catalyst to the Rudy Gobert-Kyle Anderson feud was not a long-simmering dislike but was a moment in time that exploded in a spat of tough love.
Tough love team
Expressing tough love happens in all professional sports. It’s simply not often that cameras are trained on the event to broadcast it to the nation.
Emotions got the best of me today. I should not have reacted the way i did regardless of what was said. I wanna apologize to the fans, the organisation and particularly to Kyle, who is someone that i truly love and respect as a teammate.
— Rudy Gobert (@rudygobert27) April 10, 2023
Adversity is an odd duck. A team is a group of highly talented athletes who are all so confident in their own abilities that they are willing to praise the efforts of others. Military forces use the team-building qualities of adversity to forge military units rapidly, simply by turning up the heat and making everyone in that unit suffer from the same outside forces.
By adding external stress, individuals instinctively align to meet that common threat. Right now, we are witnessing that happening to the Minnesota Timberwolves players.