This is the first of a four-part Q&A between Britt Robson and Minnesota Timberwolves Head Coach Chris Finch.
Training camp for the Minnesota Timberwolves is less than two weeks away, which means it is time for what has become one of my favorite annual rituals: An in-depth conversation with the Wolves head coach, Chris Finch, about what he views as the charms and challenges facing his team as they absorb the inevitable roster tweaks and chart the course for another season.
For the first time in decades, the Wolves enter the 2024-25 campaign as legitimate championship contenders after reaching the Western Conference Finals the season prior. Despite that success, as our 70-minute interview makes clear, the Wolves will not simply “run it back” in terms of either personnel or strategy.
This first of four segments examines how resident superstar Anthony Edwards can mesh on offense with Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert, respectively. Finch also reveals that the team will experiment with getting Jaden McDaniels more involved in the offense and utilizing a “3 bigs” frontcourt rotation of Gobert, KAT and Naz on occasion.
Up front I want to thank Finch for doing this. We are privileged to have a coach willing to engage in a candid conversation for more than an hour about all aspects of the team, without evasion or dumbing down the basketball talk. The next three segments will run next week.
Training camp starts Oct. 1.
MinnPost: So, training camp starts Oct. 1. What do you see as the priorities?
Chris Finch: Re-establishing our identity. That was a huge part of our success and we can’t forget about that. Assessing where our guys stand physically. We had four guys in the Olympics; so figuring out how we manage those guys. There has been enough of a break since the Olympics, compared to some World Cups, where there is just a week turnaround. But just kind of assessing where they are physically and figuring out our preseason approach with that in mind.
And then we go back to the Dallas series and look at things that I thought were season-long weaknesses that came to the top, whether it be end-of-game offense, some pick-and-rolls with both bigs on the floor. Maybe some more creative things defensively that we have to add to our portfolio. Then finally we have got to get our young players as integrated as possible because as we look at the landscape it looks like there is going to be opportunity and a need for them to play.
MP: When you say that the first person I think of is (Rob) Dillingham.
Finch: Yeah. TJ (Shannon), of course. Josh (Minott) has had a really good summer. There is probably not going to be room for all of them to play, but certainly one, maybe two of them. We’re not going to be married to any single one coming in.
With our need for a backup point guard and our need for a long-term point guard succession plan, Rob has got a lot of expectation on him. Managing that is going to be important. There is going to be failure, there is going to be bumps and bruises, but you’ve got to make sure you don’t kill his confidence along the way.
MP: Sure. When you say re-establishing your identity, I look at this team and say the obvious identity is defense. The identity you have in mind for this team offensively is a flow offense with a lot of good ball movement and movement without the ball.
Finch: Yeah.
MP: Which is one of the things that has been stubbornly absent at times. Is that one of the priorities you have when you talk about establishing the identity? What tweaks to the identity do you need to make?
Finch: Well, first and foremost, I think you’re right – it’s defense for sure. Being a big team, you’ve got to do all the things big teams do: Own the rim, own the paint, rebound at a high level, use your length to be contesting (shots). So that certainly are things I don’t think we can take for granted.
Offensively, when I look at tweaks to our identity, I think we can re-establish some better chemistry between KAT (Karl-Anthony Towns) and Ant (Anthony Edwards). I think we can maybe give the ball to Jaden (McDaniels) a little bit more. At times I’ve been reluctant to do that – not because of his ability, more that, we’ve got a lot going on.
MP: A lot of mouths to feed on offense.
Finch: Yeah, exactly. But I do think we can find ways to incorporate that. We still have to grow the Ant-Rudy (Gobert) partnership. We’ve seen moments that we can build on, but we have to be more consistent. A little bit more productive.
And then – I don’t know if this is offense or defense – but can we go bigger? Can we give Naz (Reid) some extended minutes at the three (small forward position)?
MP: Let’s take those one at a time. KAT and Ant. In the season-ending media session after being eliminated by Dallas, you talked about a comfort in style that both KAT and Ant individually have that may not be synergistic. Can you clarify that? You said it wasn’t a lack of will or desire, it was just that they tended to settle back into their individually comfortable styles.
Finch: Yeah. I think both of them have an idea of how they best play the game. And I think at times it certainly works. Earlier in their career I would say they had a more natural chemistry as they played off of each other. I don’t think that chemistry has gone away because they have chosen not to play well together. I think it has been (due to) some evolution of Anthony as the primary ball-handler; KAT missing a lot of games with injury; KAT not playing exclusively at the five (center position) like he was when they had this chemistry – and so he is trying to figure out a new rhythm for himself.
Now you have enough experience across all of those things to draw from them and we need to give ourselves up into doing these things a little bit more. A perfect example: If Anthony feeds KAT in the post and cuts baseline as KAT gives it back to him, we score almost every single time. We don’t do that very much. Why don’t we do it more?
Likewise, when Anthony comes down and KAT’s man (guarding him) is loaded up in the gap, there should be an easy swing for trail three (three-point shot). Why don’t we do that more? We’ve done it, it is there for us. It is not hard, or complicated; it is not like we have to put in a whole new offense to do it.
So accentuating those little pieces that we have done in the past and have gotten away from is just low-hanging fruit in terms of our internal growth.
MP: Do you think it is a confidence thing; that they think “I’m in the post, I don’t need that baseline pass; I’ll just turn around and hit my little jump hook.” Or Ant thinking, “Maybe a three, but that midrange (jumper) is there.”?
Finch: I honestly don’t think it is a confidence thing. I think it is a forgetful thing.
MP: Too much of a habit?
Finch: Or the other way to look at it is, they haven’t built the habit, that this should be automatic. Or, if Anthony is coming down and KAT is in the trail, he is probably surveying everything else except for the easy thing (passing to KAT for a three) that is right there.
Just getting back to those simple things. And then developing more of a two-man game, which is a little bit more structured and strategic than that. But I think there is other stuff that should just happen naturally.
MP: In what ways should Jaden get the ball more frequently? He has become really adept at what I call that rocking-chair midrange, where he leans back from the defender …
Finch: Yeah, yeah.
MP: And he was making that fairly regularly but missing catch-and-shoot threes unless they were (feeds) from Ant.
Finch: [laughs] Well I think we can call his number in pick-and-roll with Rudy.
MP: He has had good numbers on that in previous years.
Finch: Yes he has. And it is another way to continue to maximize Rudy. It gives another look to the (opposing) defense. I think if you run him in some action with Rudy and have the other three spotted up next to them, I am intrigued to see what the spacing on the floor looks like then.
What I like about doing it is that I think Jaden is an underrated playmaker. I do think he has a good feel for making the late play, whether it be the lob …
MP: Especially with Rudy.
Finch: Yeah. And I think with the size of the two of them it could be problematic (for opponents) because defenses put a lot of small players on him.
MP: Right.
Finch: We traditionally at times have tried to flash-post him.
MP: I think you did a good job, especially in the later part of the season, of punishing the weak-guy on Jaden matchup regardless.
Finch: Yeah. But that was a conscious effort. There have been ways we have tried to do it, but I think we can do it in the flow and in called pick-and-rolls and even in pin-downs, with the intention of Jaden turning the corner and getting into the heart of the defense, and to your point, he still has the size to make that shot if nothing else is there.
MP: Ant and Rudy is never going to be a natural pairing.
Finch: Right.
MP: But I did see growth in … the intention to make it work is there.
Finch: One hundred percent.
MP: What struck me last season is that when Naz and Ant were on the floor together, Naz as a threat to make above-the-break threes makes Ant a different player in the half-court.
Finch: Yeah.
MP: And that is the intractable thing about the Rudy-Ant dynamic. Both the positive and negative reality is that Rudy is in the way, which works great on screens, but he screens (away effective) offense too.
Finch: Yeah. A hundred-percent accurate assessment, with the caveat that we got better, Rudy’s spacing got a lot better last year. His screening is elite, and in many ways that’s great for Ant because he is looking to score first and foremost when he does get screens in pick-and-roll. What we need him to do is mix in more play-making off of that regardless of whether it is to Rudy or the rest of the team. He’s better at playmaking against some coverages compared to others. I think his continued development of understanding how to manipulate the defense, if you will, in pick-and-roll, is something he is getting better and better at. There are a lot late plays and lobs to Rudy I think that are missed – not just by him (Ant) but by everybody. But him in particular. But that is a big point of emphasis in training camp to try and get those guys a little bit more connectivity there.
The spacing part; I think Rudy has done a better job of not intentionally collapsing the spacing in the paint by looking for the ball all the time. It is chicken-and-egg thing: The more Ant can find him in the flow and on the drive, the more patient with spacing Rudy will be and the more that will open up the floor for Ant. But you’ve got to make them (the defenses) pay when they help (off of Rudy to go to Ant).
And you know, if I look back to Year One with Rudy, and talking to Ant at times, how frustrated he was with the spacing, and learning it all, it was very very different than with KAT at the five and very very different than with Naz at the five.
MP: Because both of those guys could step out (away from the basket).
Finch: Yeah, and the floor was wide open. You might have Vando (Jarred Vanderbilt) down by the baseline, but he wasn’t a lob threat. So finding him wasn’t an issue.
MP: And Vando didn’t feel entitled to touch the ball anyway.
Finch: [Laughs] Yeah. Good point.
MP: The three-bigs frontcourt.
Finch: Yeah.
MP: I understand why you are intrigued by it. Naz had a pretty phenomenal step forward last season. Would it be Jaden at the two (shooting guard)?
Finch: I’d love it. I’d love to go as big as we possibly can. Maybe Joe Ingles at the 1 (point guard).
MP: [Laughs]
Finch: Naz at the three is going to come down to how we guard way more than it will be about offense. Skill-set wise, I think offensively there is enough skill among those guys to make it work.
MP: I know you disagreed with this – which means you are probably right – but I felt like Naz guarded threes as well as he guarded fives last year.
Finch: He did. He very much did, yeah. But there are also a lot of moving parts in pick-and-roll-type things, pin-downs, just the different actions that opponents will us in that we really haven’t run through. But I have every confidence that he (Naz) can do it – we’ll see. The ironic thing is with this year’s roster we may not need him to play there as much, but it might be interesting to play him there.
MP: Right. Especially against certain matchups, obviously. Some opponents would fear it, others would love to see it.
Finch: Right, of course.
MP: Do you feel …
Finch: And by the way, just to finish up on this, guarding close-outs would be the biggest challenge. The actions – he did a good job of defeating actions and I think you could switch out of a lot of actions with the right partners (teammates on the court). But it would be that now you are closing out against even more skilled guys.
MP: And with all three bigs on the court, you can’t protect all of them (on closeouts). Where is the help coming from?
Finch: Right.
MP: Offensively with the three bigs on the floor, would you run a four-out?
Finch: It would be interesting. But obviously you want to make the defenses pay for being small. So traditionally you would think you would power it inside as much as you possibly can.
I think you are going to have to find some ways to be big in and around the paint. It may be on the offensive glass, where you should dominate. But you know it might be posting up mismatches on Naz. Who knows? But developing his package of punishing mismatches is important to that concept.
MP: It seems like both KAT and Naz could drive the lanes and lob to Rudy the way you want Ant to do. I mean, you frequently talk about the importance of skilled bigs. One of the ways to use skilled bigs is to punish in the paint. But with those two, both are three-level scorers who can burn you outside and inside.
Finch: With Naz what we started doing more last year is running him off pin-downs like you do with smalls, because he is really good at turning the corner, more so than many of our wings.
MP: Absolutely.
Finch: So he gets downhill with momentum and becomes really hard to stop. KAT in pick-and-roll with Rudy has a great chemistry now. (But) eighty, ninety percent of the time he wants to throw it to Rudy. We need him to read the floor a little bit more. It is something we haven’t done a lot with Naz. It is an area of growth, maybe something similar with Jaden.
But in my mind’s eye, when I look back at the lobs that Naz has thrown, they have been smacked back by the defense – he is kind of shortchanges them. So just developing that touch. But to be fair to him, it is not a situation we have done a lot with him. He has generally be been playing hard off the catch; it is not like he’s holding (the ball) and waiting for pick-and-roll, you know?
MP: One of his strengths is quick decision-making and a lob is not a quick decision.
Finch: Right. And the other part, we do need Naz, I think, to get back to more passing. I think he sees the floor very well – I think it’s elite. I think he’s been on this track to prove he can be this scorer; it is like he’s wired to score. But I think he can do more playmaking, whether it be quick decisions where it is just simple (passes to the) side stuff or with his passive passing unlocking simple shots. He needs to get back to doing more of that. He should now have comfort level that is a proven part of this team and every year he has found a way to get better, make an impact and excel in his role.
Britt Robson
Britt Robson has covered the Timberwolves since 1990 for City Pages, The Rake, SportsIllustrated.com and The Athletic. He also has written about all forms and styles of music for over 30 years.
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