Training camp is the one week a year the league office hands every coach a microphone and a list of things it swears it will finally fix. Flopping is on this year’s list, same as it has been for about a decade, and most coaches gave the memo a polite nod and changed the subject. Chris Finch is not most coaches.
“Hopefully the league cleans up this crap, because nobody wants to watch it,” Finch told reporters at camp on September 30. He wasn’t finished. “For me it’s a simple fix. Just don’t reward these non-basketball actions.” Then came the line that should matter to anyone who actually watches this team: “We don’t teach flopping here. We don’t teach embellishment. We never have.”
Maybe we should, he added, dry as a cracker.
A coach grumbling about officiating is the oldest move in the sport, filed right next to blaming the schedule and the thin air in Denver. Finch has climbed onto this particular soapbox before. So the easy read is that this is just another coach working the refs in late September, planting a seed he hopes sprouts into a few friendly calls come April.
Except there is a real basketball identity underneath the griping, and Wolves fans have watched it for years. Minnesota plays downhill and physical. Rudy sets the screens, Ant attacks the paint like it owes him money, and the offense feeds on genuine contact instead of the manufactured kind. No one on this roster has built a living out of hunting a defender’s hip and snapping their head back. Call it integrity, call it stubbornness; for a team built to win ugly games in May, it might even be a flaw.
Which brings us to the question Finch all but teed up himself. If the Wolves refuse to bait fouls, what is that costing the best player in the building?
Last season Anthony Edwards averaged a career-high 28.8 points and got to the line 7.2 times a night. That sounds like plenty until you stack it against the men who have turned foul-drawing into dinner theater. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the reigning MVP, took 9.0 free throws a game. Jalen Brunson, the guard whose contact opposing fans swear defies the laws of physics, took 5.7.
Now the part that stings. Shai scored 31.1 a night to Ant’s 28.8, roughly an eight percent edge in scoring that somehow ballooned into a 25 percent edge at the line. Run it per point and it gets uglier. Gilgeous-Alexander earned a free throw for about every 3.5 points he scored; Edwards needed a full four. Same downhill game, same nightly 28-plus — and Ant left close to two freebies a night sitting on the floor. Across a full season, a little theater would have handed him north of a hundred points he never bothered to ask for.
Brunson is the flip side of the same coin. He scored 26 a game on only 5.7 attempts, which looks almost modest right up until you remember he does it at a generously listed 6-foot-2 by walking defenders into his chest and selling the crash. The man draws whistles that Edwards, who is stronger and leaves the floor like a launched missile, simply does not get.
Sure, you can argue Ant leaves some of this on himself. He settles for the pull-up three more than Finch would ever admit wanting, and a jump shot does not draw contact. Fair. But the gap isn’t really about shot selection. It’s about what happens on the drives he does take, the ones where he initiates the contact and keeps playing rather than shopping for a referee. That is the Finch ethos made flesh, and it is admirable right up until a playoff series, when the whistle goes quiet for everyone except the guys who spent 82 games training the officials to expect the fall.
So here is where I land, and it is a cramped little spot for a fan who agrees with his coach on principle. Finch is right that nobody is buying a ticket to watch Shai collapse into the second row. Flopping is a blight, and a league with any self-respect would legislate it into a parking lot.
But principle does not show up on the scoreboard in a Game 7.
Until the NBA genuinely cleans this up, and I mean whistles actually swallowed rather than another camp-week promise, the Wolves are playing an honest game inside a league that still pays out for the con. Edwards will keep absorbing contact and getting up. Finch will keep teaching it that way.
Clean it up, and Finch looks like a prophet.
Leave it dirty, and Minnesota keeps leaving points at the line on principle.
