Jim Souhan: Timberwolves players were right; the NBA regular season really doesn't mean that much

MINNEAPOLIS - As everyone said for the past six months, the Minnesota Timberwolves blew it during the regular season.

Just not in the way that the team's coaches and fans expected.

What the Wolves proved during their six-game victory over the Denver Nuggets in the first round of the NBA playoffs was that they didn't coast enough. They didn't take off enough nights.

They didn't lose enough.

They have proved in each of the past two seasons that playoff seeding means little. They were the sixth seed in the Western Conference last year and went to the conference finals, where they lost to a great Oklahoma City team. That was going to be their optimal finish even if they had earned the No. 2 seed. Or maybe even the No. 1 seed.

This season they are again the No. 6 seed, and they took down the Nuggets with remarkable ease. What we learned over the past two weeks is that the Wolves are better than any of the teams they were most likely to face in the first round - Denver, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets.

The Wolves have had a split personality during the past two regular seasons. Their roster features hard-working players who don't believe in taking games off - "load management" in modern sports parlance - yet they can't summon the required urgency to win on the average Tuesday night in January against a bad Utah team.

This year, they finished four games ahead of seventh-place Phoenix in the final conference standings. Earning one of the top six seeds is vital, to avoid the play-in round and earn a week of rest. Finishing third, fourth or fifth offers little advantage over finishing sixth.

I think Wolves players know this, even though they won't admit it publicly, and that's why they can't summon the required urgency to beat Utah on the average Tuesday night in January.

In fact, this Wolves team might be in better shape right now had they followed modern basketball protocol and rested their starters more often during the season.

Anthony Edwards is the Wolves' franchise player. He dealt with ankle and hip injuries and soreness frequently during the season. During the last month of the season, he dealt with "runner's knee," a painful if not damaging condition that short-circuited Steph Curry's season.

Edwards is the rare NBA star who wants to play as many games as possible in the regular season, so he pushed himself through those injuries. And what happened? He hyperextended his left knee during Game 3 of the playoffs.

He has been protecting his right knee for months. It's not surprising that his left knee became vulnerable.

The Wolves would have been better off resting Edwards for an additional week or two or three during the season to help him become fully healthy for the playoffs.

The Wolves' emphasis on competing instead of resting is admirable, but perhaps not wise in this instance.

After the Wolves lost 116-105 in Denver in Game 1 of the first round, Wolves coach Chris Finch said he went into the locker room and yelled at his players, saying, "You lied to us."

The players had been telling him all season that they would be ready to compete in the playoffs, and they had just played poorly in the first game of the season that truly mattered.

Then they won four of the next five against a team that had played brilliantly down the stretch to earn the No. 3 seed.

This is a reminder that the 82-game NBA season doesn't exist because it's a good idea. It exists because that schedule makes the league a lot of money.

The back-to-backs shouldn't exist. Playing five games in a week isn't optimal, for player health or quality of play. The NBA doesn't care.

We should learn from this. In sports with large playoff fields, the playoffs are all that matter. And this Wolves team, like its two predecessors, was quite prepared to win when the playoffs started.

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This story was originally published May 2, 2026 at 5:49 PM.