Will the Timberwolves finally be able to win close games?

Heading into last season, expectations were fairly high for the young Minnesota Timberwolves. Coming off a season where the Wolves won only 29 games, they were widely presumed to be in the running for the Western Conference playoffs and headed for a huge leap in their win total.

In fairness, it was easy to see why the Wolves were earmarked for improvement. They had an exciting young core featuring a potential top-10 overall player (Karl-Anthony Towns), and they hired Tom Thibodeau to teach Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine and the rest of the Pups how to play defense. Factor in improvement for the young guns, give the defense a Thibs-y boost from the bottom of the barrel to the middle of the pack, and presto! You’ve got yourself a .500-ish team. It made sense.

Of course, the Timberwolves did not make the leap that many expected. Instead, they did what they always seem to do: they underperformed. Not only did the Wolves win just 31 games, their win total was also significantly lower than their point differential suggested it should be.

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Minnesota was outscored by just 91 points last season, an average of just about 1.1 per game. Using Bill James’ Pythagorean Expectation, you’d normally expect a team with that point differential to finish with 38 wins. (Point differential has been shown to be a better predictor of future success than actual win-loss record, and as such a team’s Pythagorean record can generally be considered a more accurate baseline of its actual talent level.) But again, the Wolves managed to win only 31. The seven-win difference between their expected (Pythagorean) wins and actual wins was the largest in the NBA.

While that might seem unusual, underperformance compared to Pythagorean Expectation is actually old hat for the Timberwolves. The 2016-17 season was the 10th straight year during which the Minnesota won fewer games than its point differential suggested it should have.

From 2007 through 2017, the Timberwolves’ point differential suggested they “should” have won 289 games, but they actually won only 251. They were one of just five teams to win at least 10 fewer games than expected during that time period, and their 38-game differential between expected and actual wins was — you guessed it — the largest in the NBA. But it wasn’t just the largest in the NBA; it was actually more than double that of the next-closest team, the Philadelphia 76ers.

The driving force behind Minnesota’s underperformance, along with a truly dreadful defense (second-worst in the NBA behind only the Kings since 2007), has been an allergy to winning close games. Though a team’s record in games that enter “clutch time” (defined by NBA.com as a game that is within five points at any time during the last five minutes of regulation or overtime) tends to regress toward .500 over time, the Timberwolves were unsurprisingly significantly worse than that over the last 10 seasons.

The average team played 417 games that entered clutch time from 2007 through 2017, per data culled from NBA.com, and the Wolves played 422. That’s pretty normal. What’s not at all normal is their abominable record in those games. One of only six teams that failed to win at least 45 percent of their games that entered clutch time, Minnesota went just 142-280 in those contests, good for an atrocious 0.336 winning percentage. The next closest team — again, the 76ers — had a 0.403 winning percentage across their 395 games that entered clutch time.

The Wolves shot 39.2 percent from the field and were outscored by 586 points during clutch time of those games, and again those figures were the worst in the NBA, with no team coming particularly close to the latter number. (The Kings were outscored by 424 points in their 427 clutch games. Minnesota’s number was 38 percent worse. These dudes were so freaking bad in clutch time, man.)

The Timberwolves obviously know this is an issue, and this offseason added players from two of the league’s best clutch-time teams over the last several years.

Jimmy Butler, Taj Gibson, and Jeff Teague were not in Chicago and Atlanta for all 10 of those seasons, but Butler was a driving force in Chicago for five of them while Gibson was a rotation staple for eight, and Teague was Atlanta’s starting point guard for five years as well. During the time each of those players were regularly contributing to those teams, they were among the best clutch-time teams in the NBA.

They were not necessarily the singular driving forces of that clutch-time performance for all or even most of that time, but, for example, Butler has been one of the best clutch-time scorers in the NBA over the last few seasons, and Teague was very efficient in similar situations during his final two seasons in Atlanta. Butler and Gibson also have extensive experience locking down opposing offenses down the stretch of close games, which has been a major bug-a-boo for the Wolves over this last stretch of time.

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It should come as no surprise that, given their excellent close-and-late performance, the Bulls and Hawks were among the teams that performed best in relation to their expected win-loss record, with each of them winning at least 10 more games over the last 10 seasons than their point differential suggested they “should” have.

If that trio of players – who are presumably going to be on the court late in games along with Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins, given Tom Thibodeau’s level of trust in Butler and Gibson, and the fact that they paid Teague a bunch of money to be their point guard – can impart some of the experience and wisdom it takes to win close games on the young guns, and contribute in ways beyond just scoring (which Towns and Wiggins do plenty of), it’s possible that for the first time in a while, the Wolves can have a record that reflects their actual ability. And if they can do that, they might just live up to everyone’s lofty expectations as well.