Let the soul searching commence.
The Minnesota Timberwolves were supposed to all be on the same page to open the 2025-26 season. Almost everyone from the coaching staff was back to work with a roster that had nine of its top 10 players returning, including the entire starting five. The familiarity was supposed to give this team a leg up in what was expected to be a hellacious Western Conference playoff chase.
Instead, in the past two games against the Phoenix Suns and Sacramento Kings, the Wolves have looked like a team that has never been together before. Two nights after surrendering a nine-point lead with 50 seconds to play in Phoenix, the Wolves gave away a 10-point cushion in the final three minutes of regulation on their way to a 117-112 overtime loss to the Sacramento Kings on Monday night.
Every once in a while in a long season, a collapse like the Phoenix loss will happen, when everything that could possibly go wrong seemingly does and the opponent takes advantage of the mistakes to rally to a victory. But to do it twice in a row calls into question everything the Wolves have talked about when it comes to going one step further than they have in each of the last two seasons.
“Talking’s great, but let’s see if we care,” Rudy Gobert, who had 11 points, 13 rebounds and two blocks, said to reporters in Sacramento. “Let’s see if we actually care about doing the things we need to do to win and putting our teammates before ourselves. That’s what it’s about at the end of the day.”
This does not look like a team that is comfortable with itself right now. Last year, the slow start was explained away by the blockbuster trade that sent Karl-Anthony Towns to New York and brought Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo to Minnesota two days before training camp opened. It made sense at the time: Both players had to move their families out of the blue, get settled into a new city and find camaraderie with a new cast of teammates. It took most of five months, and extended injury absences for both DiVincenzo and Randle, before the new team started to click and went on a spirited run in the playoffs.
This team was supposed to be beyond all the exploration required last season. Those Wolves played a full, rollercoaster of a regular season, then beat the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors in the first two rounds of the playoffs before getting wiped out by the Oklahoma City Thunder. These Wolves are wobbly and unsure of themselves, and that uncertainty is breeding collapses of epic proportions.
Anthony Edwards scored 43 points, hit five 3-pointers and had seven rebounds and five assists against the Kings, the second straight game he has topped 40 after a shooting slump in the previous four games. Randle seems to be in his first little funk of the season. He has turned the ball over 10 times in the last two games and has not been as efficient as he was in the first month of the season. Both players were a minus-12 against the Kings.
too strong 💪😤 pic.twitter.com/GFJmMiBLqa
— Sacramento Kings (@SacramentoKings) November 25, 2025
On Friday night in Phoenix, the Suns did most of their damage with star guard Devin Booker watching from the bench after fouling out. Edwards and Randle kept turning the ball over, and Edwards missed two key free throws down the stretch before Collin Gillespie sent them packing with a last-second floater.
This time around, the Wolves led the downtrodden Kings by 12 in the fourth quarter, and 10 with 2:51 to play, before DeMar DeRozan feasted on the mistake-prone group. Minnesota missed 12 of its last 13 shots in the fourth quarter and 17 of its last 19.
Edwards missed four of his five shots in the fourth quarter, including a couple of rushed 3-pointers. The entire team shot 26 percent in the period, so Edwards tried to make things happen on his own. But the offense really started to bog down, and the lack of flow forced the Wolves to take tough shot after tough shot, and it cost them.
“We’re struggling right now to find a good rhythm offensively all around,” coach Chris Finch said. “We gotta get back to the way we were playing about a week ago when it comes to offense. A lot of things we were doing then, we’re missing now.”
A week ago, the Wolves were fifth in offensive rating, a number likely propped up by a very soft schedule to start the season. But the way they were sharing the ball, finding each other for open 3s and empowering Edwards and Randle to score efficiently spoke to a harmony on that end of the floor that should be sustainable.
They have sunk four spots to ninth in offensive rating over the last week, with a lot of the ball movement, cutting and precision disappearing, especially late in games.
“We didn’t play super connected,” Gobert said. “Then I feel like we let the frustration get to us, and we can’t do that. If we want to be a championship team, can’t do that.”
The Timberwolves (10-7) are not playing smart enough to be a championship team. They have yet to beat a team with a winning record, the bench scoring is next to nothing outside of Naz Reid — who had 15 points against the Kings but went 1 of 6 on 3s — and Finch is having a hard time finding the right lineup combinations to get the team moving.
The coach drew scrutiny after the Suns loss for not putting defensive specialist Jaylen Clark in the game for Phoenix’s last offensive possession, which resulted in a way-too-easy look for Gillespie. But one of the reasons he decided against it was the concern that Clark could foul one of the Suns’ shooters and put them on the free-throw line to win the game.
That fear was realized on Monday in Sacramento, when Finch put Clark in the game late in overtime in search of a stop with the Wolves trailing 110-109. Clark inexplicably fouled DeRozan before the ball was inbounded, giving him a free throw and allowing the Kings to retain possession. He made it, then made two more on the possession after the Wolves fouled him on purpose. That gave the Kings a four-point lead with 19 seconds to play.
There are other nits to pick against Finch. The coach seemingly had settled into a rotation that included Clark and Jaden McDaniels, two high-level perimeter defenders, on the floor for much of the time that Gobert rests, helping to address the defense falling off a cliff when Gobert sits. But Clark has played very sparingly the last two games, including just 6:25 on Monday. Finch went to lineups at the end of the first half and the end of the third quarter that did not include Clark when Gobert rested, and the Kings chopped double-digit leads down to manageable deficits both times.
Fans online were furious at Finch for a perceived lack of timeouts in the fourth quarter as the Kings were making their run. He called one when the Kings cut a 12-point deficit to eight with 5:28 remaining in the fourth. He called another two minutes later when Sacramento pulled to within 96-89. But there were none called in the final 3:28 of regulation, just before the Kings started their run.
Earlier in the overtime, Randle started the period with a sloppy turnover. Edwards scored nine of the team’s 12 points in OT, but the Wolves’ defense couldn’t do anything to slow down DeRozan, who had 33 points. McDaniels got a key steal, only to throw the ball right back to Russell Westbrook. Gobert made the same mistake after his own stop, and Randle ended any hope of a miracle comeback when he inbounded the ball right to the Kings with 18 seconds to play.
“We’re not in the same rhythm,” Finch said.
The Wolves better find it in a hurry. The juggernaut in Oklahoma City is waiting for them on Wednesday night, and the once-Dairy Queen soft schedule starts to stiffen. The Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, OKC (again) and New York Knicks are all on the schedule in December.
It is still early. This team is off to a better start than last year’s squad, which hovered around .500 into January. But alarm bells are starting to go off with some of these performances, and Gobert knows it.
“Hopefully we learn,” Gobert said. “We still have an amazing opportunity ahead of us, but we have to decide who we want to be.”