Chris Finch knew the question was coming.
His Minnesota Timberwolves had just snapped a three-game losing streak, a win that came after the head coach did something he did not seem keen on doing less than 48 hours ago.
So when he was asked about changing the starting lineup for Monday night’s game against the LA Clippers, Finch slathered on an extra layer of sarcasm to his response.
“I just read all the papers, and what everybody was telling me and said, ‘You know what, s**t, I should change the starting lineup,’ ” he cracked after a 108-106 victory.
Two days ago, after a dispiriting loss in Detroit, Finch was as resolute as ever about the starting lineup remaining intact. He said he did not believe changing it was “a magic bullet.” Finch looks at the game, and his team’s underwhelming start to the season, through a wide-angle lens. He is not enamored with whose name is introduced when the lights go down in the arena, and his responses to questions about it imply that anyone fixated on such an issue is distracted by aesthetics, like the flames that ignite at Target Center when the opening video montage plays to hype up the crowd.
In Finch’s eyes, there are far more important things to consider than who starts and who comes off of the bench. That making a change there can, as he said on Saturday, have “a chain reaction to everything you do.”
He is a thinking man’s coach and believes strongly “that there are other combinations and things that go on on the floor that are just as important if not more so than the starting lineup.”
With all of that said and the Timberwolves languishing at 17-17 and the starting lineup of Mike Conley, Anthony Edwards, Jaden McDaniels, Julius Randle and Rudy Gobert consistently falling behind early in games, Finch tried something new on Monday night against the Clippers.
He inserted Donte DiVincenzo as the starting point guard for Conley. The move adds more shooting around Edwards and hopefully, helps Conley get into a rhythm that has been elusive in his 18th season.
Finch approached Conley at the team’s shootaround on Monday morning. Conley has essentially been a starter his entire basketball life, dating back to when he stepped into the first five with the Memphis Grizzlies in January of his rookie season in 2007-08. He has started 152 straight games — regular season, playoffs and Play-In games — with the Wolves since coming over from Utah in a trade that sent D’Angelo Russell to the Lakers. His last game coming off the bench was Dec. 9, 2022, for the Jazz.
“I kind of asked his permission to do it, just given his pedigree and his amazing career,” Finch said. “He was all for it. He’ll do whatever we need him to do.”
Finch kept the decision close to the vest all day. So when the Timberwolves sent out their standard pregame announcement of the starters 30 minutes before tip, it came as a surprise to everyone outside the organization.
“It was respectful, man. It was super cool that he even did that,” Conley said of the sit-down with Finch. “I know he knows I was going to be OK with it, I feel like. But for him to sit me down and ask, it shows the respect he has for me and all our players.”
Conley has long had a reputation as one of the most intelligent, selfless players in the league. Even though Finch might scoff at the attention paid to who gets their name called before a game, it is a real thing for a lot of players. A move like the one Finch made on Monday is not just a basketball decision. It is a political one.
One of the reasons Finch chose Conley as the starter to move to the bench was that he knew his veteran would handle it like a pro. Conley has preached the importance of selflessness, so Finch had zero reason for concern about Conley sulking or not taking the news the right way.
“He’ll do whatever we need him to do,” Finch said. “He understood and, I think, he was welcoming of it.”
The five-man lineup of DiVincenzo, Edwards, Gobert, Randle and McDaniels had a net rating of minus-17.5 points per 100 possessions of non-garbage time minutes, per Cleaning The Glass, entering Monday night. That is over only 175 possessions so the sample size was small, but DiVincenzo has been playing much better of late, and his shooting figures to help provide some spacing to open up driving lanes for Edwards.
Conley provided plenty of spacing last season when he hit a career-high 44 percent of his 3s. But it has been a nightmare start to this season for the highly respected 37-year-old. His 3-point shooting has dropped to 36 percent, but even more glaring is he was shooting 32 percent on 2s and 39 percent on layups, per Basketball Reference.
His age no doubt plays a role in his regression, but the addition of Randle in the trade before the season has messed with his rhythm as well. Randle is much more of an offensive hub than Karl-Anthony Towns was, preferring to bring up the ball as a point-forward and orchestrate the offense.
Finch had several options to consider when tweaking the starting lineup, including starting Naz Reid for Randle or putting Nickeil Alexander-Walker, arguably the team’s most consistent player this season, in for Conley at point guard or McDaniels at small forward.
“It was all about trying to get Mike into a group of guys that could accentuate his talents better,” Finch said. “He plays the bulk of his minutes with that unit. The usage has shifted in that unit. It was a way to try to help him get going.”
Conley had 11 points, hit two 3s and added four rebounds and three assists in 26 minutes, one of his best games of the season.
“I guess it worked,” Conley said with a smile. “We’ll see as it goes forward, but definitely felt like I had to be more aggressive and more free with the lineups I was in, so we’ll see how it goes.”
Putting DiVincenzo in the starting lineup also gives him a role closer to what he had in New York last season when he thrived as a spark-plug shooter and defender for the Knicks. He started 68 games in the regular season and every playoff game for New York.
Another reason it could work? DiVincenzo is a more natural off-ball player than Conley, which could accommodate Randle’s usage a little bit easier than when Conley shares the floor with Randle.
The early returns on the new look starters were not encouraging. The Wolves were flat again at the start against the Clippers, unable to hit a shot or put up much of a fight on the defensive end. They were 3 of 13 from the field, missed all three of their 3s and turned it over three times in their first six-minute shift, falling behind 13-7 at the midpoint.
Minnesota trailed by as many as 15 points in the first quarter and 19 in the first half, looking completely out of sync. DiVincenzo was 0 of 3 with no assists and was a minus-11 in 12 first-half minutes. He was not helped by his teammates shooting 9 of 29 from the field.
Starting the way he did allowed Finch to get to a lineup of Conley, Edwards, Gobert, Reid and McDaniels in the second quarter, and that’s when the Wolves made their move. They sliced the Clippers’ lead from 19 to seven by halftime, breathing a little bit of life into a Target Center crowd that was sitting on its hands and nervous that all the fun they had last season was swirling down the drain with this season’s hard-to-watch version.
Beginning in the third quarter, the second shift for the new starting lineup was much better. DiVincenzo got going by hitting his first three shots, including a 3 and a nifty rainbow floater, and Edwards came out super aggressive with 15 points on 12 shots in the quarter.
“It’s going to take a little time. But I think you take out the second-guessing, you take out all the slow decisions and you just play faster to start the second half,” DiVincenzo said. “That’s what opened up things for us in the third quarter.”
this sequence was niiiceee. 🙂↕️ pic.twitter.com/dUWVTuGVKW
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 7, 2025
Edwards has now scored 90 points in the last two games, including the 53 he put up against the Detroit Pistons on Saturday. It has been an emphatic response by him and the team after he fumed following a narrow loss to the Boston Celtics last week that he was not getting to harness his scoring talent enough in these losing efforts.
Edwards took 28 shots combined in close losses to the Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics last week. He has taken 60 shots in the past two games, including going 14 of 29 against the Clippers.
The Wolves trailed by five points with four minutes to play in the game, but Edwards responded with a three-point play, an assist on a 3 by Jaden McDaniels, and three bombs of his own, the last one a step-back to give Minnesota a 106-101 lead with 35 seconds to play.
UNR5AL
🐜 » https://t.co/iBU749iEGO pic.twitter.com/JukrqTGX9N
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) January 7, 2025
“I thought he did a good job of finding people, balancing being aggressive and also playmaking, getting to the heart of the defense, going quick, staying in one direction when he did go, not trying to overcomplicate it in a crowd,” Finch said of Edwards, who also had eight assists and seven rebounds.
Rudy Gobert added eight points and 18 rebounds, and DiVincenzo finished with 15 points and eight rebounds. Reid had 18 points, seven rebounds and three assists, earning the closing minutes over Randle, who was just 2 of 10 with three turnovers in 23 minutes, his lowest minute total of the season.
At this point in his career, Conley has too many priorities to let his ego get in the way. He is in the first season of a two-year extension he signed last year and is desperate to get his first crack at the NBA Finals. The Timberwolves could smell it last season, but they lost to Dallas in five games in the West finals. This season’s team has looked nowhere close to that one, which is why Finch swallowed hard and made a move the public had been begging to see.
“I don’t even think twice about feeling some type of way about this,” Conley said. “You know I’m the type of guy that’s like, ‘Whatever you’ve got to do.’ I get it. I’m getting older, too.”
Before the starting lineups were introduced, Conley stood at the end of the receiving line with Joe Ingles, who played with Conley for years in Utah. The two shared a laugh as the lights dimmed and Conley turned his attention toward the bench as public address announcer Jedidiah Jones called DiVincenzo’s name first.
As the crowd cheered, Conley met DiVincenzo in the paint, dapped him up and got ready for his new role.
(Photo of Donte DiVincenzo: David Berding / Getty Images)
