The 2025 NBA Playoffs have looked more like the NCAA Tournament than any postseason I can remember. It's awesome.
Cleveland is headed home with more questions than answers after a 64-win season fizzled out in the second round. Oklahoma City is trying to avoid a similar fate as it heads to Game 7 against Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets. The defending champion Boston Celtics will likely fall short of the conference finals (albeit due to an injury to star Jayson Tatum.) It's a bloodbath out there.
Barring a historic collapse from the Knicks, it appears that two of last year's conference finals contestants will be back in the final four in 2025; Minnesota and Indiana.
Not who you expected? Me neither!
Well, I guess it technically was who I expected — I picked the Wolves to come out of the West in our preseason predictions — but at no point did I feel supremely confident in that pick.
Two straight conference finals appearances aren't a fluke, especially for these two teams. Indiana hadn't advanced this far in the playoffs in the decade preceding last season, and Minnesota was in a 20-year conference finals drought before breaking through in 2023-24. Now they've done it twice in a row. You don't luck your way into two consecutive conference finals after not making one in at least ten years. This is sustained success.
And in a league where rosters are constantly turning over and talent is more spread out than any time in at least 10 years, sustained success for two small-market teams will undoubtedly lead other small-market teams to try and replicate the path that Indiana and Minnesota took.
Whether those teams should try to replicate what these teams have done is a tough question to answer. Actually, it might be an impossible question to answer for a pretty glaring reason.
Minnesota and Indiana took opposite routes this offseason
Indiana went to last year's Eastern Conference Finals and essentially left its lineup alone, hoping for in-house improvements from its young guys and a team led by two All-Stars would be enough to replicate last year's success. It was enough. Not only was it enough to replicate the success, it might be enough to surpass it; Indiana will either face a beatable Knicks team or a Celtics team missing its best player.
Minnesota, meanwhile, made last year's Western Conference Finals and then traded its second-best player because it didn't want to pay him the money it had agreed to pay him. A bolder strategy that, somehow, also worked.
Which way, small market team?
If you're the GM or owner of a small-market team trying to find its footing in the NBA, first off, thanks for reading. Secondly, take Indiana's path.
There are zero top-five picks on this roster. Indiana didn't bottom out and hope for the best in the lottery. Instead, it was willing to trade the talent already on the team, like Domantas Sabonis. It was not stingy with draft picks, evidenced by giving up three to acquire Pascal Siakam. It found success on the margins, like drafting Andrew Nembhard in the second round.
All of those things are achievable for even semi-competent front offices; be willing to part with assets, take swings on available stars and find value in the second round of the NBA Draft. Stack good decisions on top of each other. Sometimes those decisions will be big, like trading Sabonis for Haliburton, and sometimes they'll be in the margins, like adding Aaron Nesmith in a Malcolm Brogdon trade. When May rolls around, the importance of those decisions is felt almost equally.
Yes, taking the "Pacers path" is still hard, because building a winner in the NBA is hard. But this team has not lucked into anything and it didn't try to skip steps in the team-building process. Their path is like what we're told the American Dream is; pull up your bootstraps, go to work every day, get 1 percent better, all of those things. Except Indiana's version is actually, like, real.
The Wolves path is considerably less attainable for small markets because it, frankly, feels accidental.
Minnesota might be here by blind luck
Minnesota had as good a chance at landing James Wiseman as it did landing Anthony Edwards. In 2020, the Wolves won the NBA Draft Lottery and the right to select Anthony Edwards, while the Golden State Warriors won pick No. 2 and picked someone who was never an NBA-caliber player.
The Wolves deserve credit for adjusting to a pretty new roster and grinding their way back to the WCF (and maybe beyond) this season. Julius Randle, who the Wolves acquired from New York in the Karl-Anthony Towns trade, has been wonderful in the postseason and should be applauded. Chris Finch has rolled with the punches, fitting new pieces into a roster. Jaden McDaniels has, for the most part, become the consistent two-way option that we were gaslit into thinking he was for the past five years. Anthony Edwards obviously deserves credit for taking the leap from star scorer to star player.
That doesn't mean trading KAT wasn't crazy. It was. Overhauling the roster after a team's best season in 20 years is nuts. Reports have come out that then-owner Glen Taylor was fine paying the luxury tax instead of trading KAT, but who knows what really went down.
Minnesota is here, and should not apologize for being here. This team is talented enough to hang in 2025, and its franchise player will be good enough for the next decade to lead them back to plenty of Western Conference Finals... And likely some NBA Finals, too.
Finding Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Naz Reid on the scrap heap are both smart, heady moves by the front office; those are adjacent to the Nesmith and Nembhard additions for the Pacers.
I would still strongly advise against building a team in the style of the Minnesota Timberwolves. You can't just bank on getting the No. 1 pick in a draft — hello, Utah and Washington — and you still probably should not trade your second-best player for the hell of it. Even the Rudy Gobert trade (which has undoubtedly worked) is not a template that teams searching for stability should try to replicate.
The 2024-25 Minnesota Timberwolves should come with a warning label: rebuilding teams, do not try this at home.