The Lynx beat the Aces 92-87 on Saturday night in Las Vegas, and the question I asked in Friday's preview got answered inside six minutes of third-quarter basketball.

The question was whether the Portland collapse was tired legs or a habit. Minnesota let a 29-point lead shrink to one in the final two minutes on Wednesday, and it took Kayla McBride's late steals and a driving layup to get out of it. I wrote that a top seed cannot do that to A'ja Wilson and live.

For a half, Las Vegas got the reply it wanted. The teams reached the break tied 48-48 after seven ties in the second quarter alone, Wilson was on her way to 32 points and 11-of-12 from the line, and Michelob ULTRA Arena had the game it paid for.

Then the Aces missed nine of their first 10 shots after halftime and shot .231 for the quarter. McBride's free throws started an 8-0 run, Minnesota won the period 26-16, and the lead was 62-52. Becky Hammon's postgame accounting was blunt: "We weren't scoring the basketball. We were stuck on 52 points."

The other preview thread was the Collier-Miles stagger, and Saturday stress-tested it rather than confirming it. Collier picked up fouls and sat in stretches Cheryl Reeve would have preferred to schedule herself. Nia Coffey covered the gap with 12 points on 4-of-5 shooting, three of them from the arc, and the margin never turned back into a coin flip. Six Lynx scored in double figures. Natasha Howard finished with 13 and 11, McBride had 13, Courtney Williams 12.

Olivia Miles had 23 points and eight assists a week after hanging 26 and seven on the same team at Target Center on Aug. 8, and Reeve's read was the correct one: "Liv's decision-making in the second half was exceptional. I thought she really found the easy pass."

https://x.com/MAVoepel/status/2088819941436764205

Vegas still got it back to three. Wilson is the reason any of these games stay close, and NaLyssa Smith's 17 points and 12 rebounds, nine of them offensive, kept manufacturing extra possessions. This is where the Portland slide gets settled: Collier answered with a deep three under seven minutes to go, and she and Williams closed it from the line in the final minute. "They went on a couple of runs, but I think we did a good job of clogging the paint, doing what we do, getting stops, and making our own runs," Collier said.

My mom reads every piece and replies with exactly one emoji. The Portland recap earned the grimace. Saturday got the flexed bicep.

I said Lynx by 9 and collected five, which is the correct price when Wilson shoots 11-for-12 at the stripe. The lapse in Oregon was tired legs, not a habit.

Minnesota is 29-7, three and a half games clear of Golden State, and has won 14 of 15 since July 8. Saturday was the franchise's 15th road win in a single season, a record, with six weeks still on the schedule.

The defending champions are a measuring stick now. Nothing more.

The Links

• Star Tribune: Collier is the Lynx's not-so-secret weapon against A'ja Wilson — the matchup that decides tonight, one week after Minnesota won the first meeting.
• SI: Lynx vs. Aces prediction, odds, and props for Aug. 15 — the betting market's read on the rematch.
• Yahoo: Olivia Miles breaks a WNBA record amid Collier's return — the rookie of the year front-runner adds another line to the résumé.
• Yahoo: the first meeting, a 98-87 Lynx win as Miles and Collier combine for 48 — the tape the Aces spent a week stewing over.
• ESPN: Garnett's No. 21 to be retired Feb. 28 vs. Boston — yesterday's news, still the biggest story of the offseason.
• Sportico: Mark Walter sold the Lakers amid federal probes — the $12.5 billion sale that reset every NBA valuation, and the investigation underneath it.
• Canis Hoopus: the reaction to KG's number finally going up — our old stomping grounds on what a decade-late honor means to this fanbase.

Listen & Watch

• KXnO: the top Lynx vs. Aces players to watch tonight — a quick primer before the 7 PM Central tip on CBS.

Tweet of the Day

https://twitter.com/WNBAComms/status/2085056135116075473

The Slate

• Lynx at Las Vegas Aces: Saturday, Aug. 15, 7:00 PM CT, CBS.
• Lynx at Golden State Valkyries: Wednesday, Aug. 19, 9:00 PM CT, USA Network.
• Lynx at Washington Mystics: Friday, Aug. 21, 6:30 PM CT, ION.

The Timberwolves will retire Kevin Garnett's No. 21 on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2027, and they will do it against the Boston Celtics, on NBC, in the building where he became the best player this franchise has ever produced. The date is finally set, and if you have followed this team for any length of time, your first reaction is not excitement. It is relief.

This should have happened a decade ago. That it didn't is its own story, and it is worth telling honestly before we get to the banner.

Why it took this long

For more than ten years, Garnett would not do it, and he was not quiet about why. His relationship with former owner Glen Taylor curdled after Garnett came home at the 2015 trade deadline to play for Flip Saunders, expecting an eventual path to a minority ownership stake. Saunders died that October, the team later bought out Garnett's contract, and the ownership conversation went with it. Garnett's own public verdict on the fallout, that he "doesn't do business with snakes," is not the kind of line a man walks back for a halftime ceremony.

So nothing moved until the ownership itself moved. Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez finally pried the team loose from Taylor in a sale that took four years to close, and one of the first things they did was bring Garnett back into the fold in an off-court role spanning business, community, and content.

https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/2001661404529766416

He made his first public appearance back at Target Center in April 2026. Everything since has been a building anticipation for this moment.

Boston is the right opponent, and that is not an accident

Garnett won his only championship in Boston in 2008, and his No. 5 already hangs in the TD Garden rafters. Retiring his Minnesota number against the Celtics closes the circle on the whole career in one night.

The other number in the rafters

Garnett will become just the second player the Timberwolves have honored this way, joining Malik Sealy, whose No. 2 has hung since 2000. That pairing matters more than the trivia suggests. Sealy was Garnett's close friend and mentor, killed by a drunk driver in the spring of 2000, and Garnett later wore No. 2 in his own tribute during his time with the Nets. When his 21 rises next to Sealy's 2, it will be two numbers that were always connected.

What he was

It is easy for younger fans to know Garnett as a highlight reel. Here is the ledger: Drafted fifth overall in 1995 straight out of Farragut Academy, he gave Minnesota fourteen seasons across two stints, won the 2004 MVP, dragged a flawed roster to the 2004 Western Conference finals, and made the playoffs eight years running when this franchise had never sniffed the postseason before he arrived. He remains the all-time franchise leader in points, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals. Ten All-Star nods and eight All-NBA teams in Minnesota, the Basketball Hall of Fame induction in 2020.

More than the impressive stats, he set the standard the building still measures effort against. Anthony Edwards plays in front of a fanbase that exist because Garnett decided, nightly, that losing was a personal insult.

Circle Feb. 28. The people who sat through the Kahn years and the tank years and a decade of this honor being held hostage earned a Sunday night where the whole country watches Target Center raise the number that mattered most. It is late. It is also, finally, happening.

The Links

• ESPN: Wolves set Garnett's retirement for Feb. 28 vs. Boston — the date is real. No. 21 goes up on a Sunday, on NBC, against the Celtics.
• Timberwolves (official): retiring Kevin Garnett's No. 21 — the franchise's own announcement.
• CBS Sports: why this took more than a decade — the Glen Taylor fallout, the "snake" line, and the new-ownership thaw that unlocked it.
• Canis Hoopus: the reaction from the people who waited — our old stomping grounds on what this means.
• CBS Sports: Lakers sold for a record $12.5 billion — Kushner and Iger buy L.A. fourteen months after Mark Walter did, and every NBA valuation just moved.
• Field Level Media: Olivia Miles drops 26 on the Aces — the first meeting, one week before the rematch in Vegas.

Listen & Watch

• CBS News Minnesota: Garnett returns to the franchise, No. 21 headed to the rafters — the local TV version, with KG in his own words.

Tweet of the Day

https://x.com/Ballislife/status/2001686888629846402

The Slate

• Lynx at Las Vegas Aces: Saturday, Aug. 15, 7:00 PM CT, CBS.
• Lynx at Golden State Valkyries: Wednesday, Aug. 19, 9:00 PM CT, USA Network.
• Lynx at Washington Mystics: Friday, Aug. 21, 6:30 PM CT, ION.

The Los Angeles Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion, and the part that should make every Wolves fan put the coffee down is how fast it happened.

Mark Walter bought a controlling stake in the Lakers for $10 billion in 2025. Fourteen months later he sold the franchise to Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger for two and a half billion more, a record price for any pro sports team, past the $6.1 billion the Celtics fetched in 2025 and the $9.6 billion paid for the Seahawks. Iger, asked how it all came together, said the quiet part into a microphone.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/2087556463031996419

"The deal came together in three days," Iger said, in a quote the AP carried everywhere. Three days. Hold that number against a different one.

It took Minnesota fifty-one months to change owners. Glen Taylor agreed to sell the Timberwolves and Lynx to Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez in April 2021, and the deal did not clear the NBA's Board of Governors until June 24, 2025, only after Taylor tried to blow it up in 2024, dragged the buyers into arbitration, lost in front of a three-judge panel, and declined to appeal. Four years of our franchise held hostage to one man's second thoughts, for a sale price of $1.5 billion. Walter flipped the most valuable team in the sport in seventy-two hours for a profit bigger than our whole franchise was worth.

Here is where it stops being fun rich-guy trivia. Walter sold the Lakers while under federal investigation. The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan and the SEC are examining how nearly $21 billion in loans tied to Walter or his conglomerate TWG Global ended up on the books of insurance companies he owns, after routing through a third entity. Per the Wall Street Journal, federal agents seized devices in September 2025 and subpoenas went out in February. No one has been charged and nothing has been proven, and I am going to be careful about that, because grandpa taught me the fine print is where they get you, not where you get to guess.

But the sentence matters, because it is the whole game: the fine print is insurance money. Somewhere there is a retiree holding an annuity from Delaware Life who has no idea their retirement is a line item in the same empire that used to own LeBron James. That is the person on the hook here, and it is not "the fans" in the abstract; it is somebody who bought a boring, safe insurance product and became collateral in a story they will never be told, while the guy running it cashes a $2.5 billion check on his way out the door with the whole thing still under a microscope.

Now zoom out, because this is the future the league is selling all of us. The NBA signed a $76 billion, eleven-year media deal that kicked in last season, and that number is the engine under every one of these valuations. Franchises aren't teams anymore in the eyes of the men who own them; they are the most reliable appreciating asset a billionaire can park money in, a place where $10 billion becomes $12.5 billion in the time it takes a rookie to play a single season. That is why Walter could treat the Lakers like a house he flipped, and why the next guy will too.

The family up in Hibbing that just wants to watch Ant is paying for cable and a streaming subscription and getting told it's the cost of being a fan. The owners' box appreciated better than 20 percent in fourteen months. Your bill climbs too. Only one of those gets called an investment, and the other one gets called the cost of doing business, which is the same tired bullshit they have always sold us.

I am not even mad at Iger for saying it took three days. I am mad that he is right, that it took us four years to do the honest version of the same thing, and that the league will rubber-stamp this sale in a boardroom while a federal building across the country keeps a light on. Welcome to the asset class. Try to enjoy the games.

The Lynx are back in Las Vegas on Saturday night (7:00 PM Central, CBS and Paramount+), and the schedule did the Aces a small favor: it gave them a week to sit with what happened the last time these two teams shared a floor.

What happened was a 98-87 Minnesota win at Target Center on Aug. 8, a four-point game at the half that the Lynx cracked open in the third quarter behind 26 from Olivia Miles. Napheesa Collier and Miles combined for 48. It was the kind of night that makes a defending champion stew for a week, and now the champion gets the rematch on its own floor.

Here's the honest complication, and I'm not going to dress it up, because my mom already sent me the grimace emoji about it: the Lynx are 28-7 and the best team in basketball, and they just survived Portland 85-81 on Wednesday after leading an expansion team by 29. One rotten quarter, at the tail of three games in five nights. I wrote in the recap that the film session before this Aces game would not be gentle. It won't be. Cheryl Reeve does not let a 29-4 run go into the archive unexamined.

The rookie is still the story

Olivia Miles is averaging 19.7 points and 5.8 assists as a rookie running the league's best team, and in July she was named the WNBA's Rookie of the Month.

https://twitter.com/WNBAComms/status/2085056135116075473

The Collier return hasn't shrunk Miles; it has freed her. Phee draws the second defender, Miles makes the read, and Kayla McBride, who hit a career-high 10 threes this month, is waiting on the arc. Natasha Howard is playing two-way All-Star ball. It is the roster every contender claims to want.

What Vegas has waiting

The Aces are still the Aces: A'ja Wilson, Jackie Young, Chelsea Gray, and the muscle memory of a defending champion. They will be without Justine Pissott (leg) and Cheyenne Parker-Tyus (concussion), but the stars who decide games are healthy, and Michelob ULTRA Arena will be loud and personal. A week ago they got outclassed in Minnesota. Saturday is the reply, and Wilson has never needed extra motivation to be terrifying.

Minnesota's own report is thin: Emma Cechova is out for the season with a torn ACL and Chloe Bibby has missed time for personal reasons, but the rotation that matters is intact and rested enough.

What I'm watching is two things. First, whether the Portland lapse was tired legs or a habit, because a top seed that lets go of the rope for eight minutes against a 13-20 team cannot do it against Wilson and live. Second, whether Reeve keeps staggering Collier and Miles so one of them is always on the floor, which is the setting that turned the first meeting into a runaway.

The Lynx already own the season series lead and the top seed. This is the game that tells us whether Wednesday meant anything.

Prediction: Lynx by 9, and the film session does its job.

The Wolves will play 27 games on national television this season, including a Christmas night game in our building and a Thanksgiving Eve slot on ESPN. The NBA does not hand out that kind of calendar as a participation trophy.

The full 82 landed this week, and the league office answered a question this fanbase has been asking, in one form or another, since 1989: do they think we belong up there with the brand names? Read the calendar. They do.

That is not the same as saying this roster is finished. LaMelo Ball is here, Naz Reid and Julius Randle are not. But after two straight Western Conference finals in 2024 and 2025 and a summer that rewired the rotation, the league scheduled us like a team worth watching. Let's go through it.

The opener, and the first real week

It starts Oct. 21 in Miami, 6:30 p.m. CT on ESPN. Opening on the road on a national window is a compliment with a degree of difficulty attached.

The home opener is Sunday, Oct. 25 against Toronto at 6 p.m. CT. Then it gets unfriendly in a hurry: a trip to Cleveland on the 26th, Golden State back at Target Center on the 28th, and the Clippers on the 30th.

Four games in six days to open the year with three time zones involved. If you want an early read on whether the Ball fit is going to look coherent or chaotic, you'll have one by Halloween.

Christmas

Dec. 25. Oklahoma City. 7 p.m. CT at Target Center.

This is the first Christmas Day home game in franchise history. After years of watching that showcase from somebody else's arena, and this is the year the league finally put the cameras in ours.

OKC is the team that ended our 2025 spring in the conference finals, and now we get them in the marquee window, in our building. The league thinks we belong on its biggest day.

Circle it. Buy the tickets early. The people who sat through Kahn and the Wiggins years earned a December night where the whole country has to look at Target Center.

The revenge circuit

Naz Reid comes home Jan. 29, 8:30 p.m. CT, wearing Charlotte teal. That is going to be strange and it is going to be loud, and the ovation should last long enough to make the broadcast uncomfortable. He gave this franchise seven years, a Sixth Man award, and two words that people tattooed on themselves.

LaMelo's return trip to Charlotte is Feb. 15, an 11 a.m. CT Presidents' Day matinee. Noon tip on the East Coast, national window, for the first time he plays in the building where he became a star.

The Denver back-to-back is its own kind of grudge: Dec. 28 in Denver, Dec. 31 at home. New Year's Eve against the Nuggets is a good problem for your evening plans.

The shape of the schedule

The structural stuff, straight from the released slate: 13 back-to-backs among the 80 dated games. The longest homestand is a monster: eight straight at Target Center from Nov. 8 through Nov. 23, the stretch that should fatten the record. The bill comes due right after: a five-game West Coast swing (Sacramento, Portland, the Clippers, Phoenix, Utah) spanning Nov. 29 to Dec. 14 around the Cup-knockout window, the longest trip of the season. Full slate, all times Central, on our Schedules page.

The nastiest 48 hours: a Saturday matinee in Philadelphia on Jan. 16, then Madison Square Garden on MLK Day, Jan. 18, at 4 p.m. CT on NBC and Peacock. Holiday-window games in two of the loudest buildings in the sport, two days apart.

Two more circles on the calendar

San Antonio comes to town Feb. 18 as the last game before the All-Star break, a rematch with the team that ended our spring, and the frontcourt matchup will tell you plenty. And the season closes at home on April 11 against Houston, which is exactly the kind of finale that decides seeding if this thing goes the way it should.

The Cup

Minnesota drew West Group B: Oklahoma City, the Clippers, New Orleans and Memphis. Strip away the branding and the group is one game that matters and three the Wolves should handle. Win the winnable ones, and Thanksgiving Eve in Oklahoma City decides the group outright.

The group games: Clippers at home Oct. 30, at New Orleans Nov. 6, at Oklahoma City on Thanksgiving Eve, Nov. 25 at 6:30 p.m. CT on ESPN as part of the league's holiday tripleheader, and Memphis at home Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving. Group play runs Oct. 30 through Nov. 27, mostly on Fridays plus the Thanksgiving-week windows; knockouts are Dec. 4-11 with the final in Indianapolis.

Win the group and December gets interesting.

How to watch

This is the year the TV situation changes for good. DAZN is the new local home, carrying 55 of the 82 games across Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas and slices of Kansas and Wisconsin. The team is offering 15 games free before you have to pay anything, with pricing still to be announced.

The other 27 are national: ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock and Prime Video. That's a real number for a market that spent decades getting scheduled at 9:30 on a Tuesday and told to be grateful.

The team's PR account posted the full slate the moment it dropped:

https://x.com/Twolves_PR/status/2087979214939025538

The banner date

Kevin Garnett's No. 21 goes to the rafters this season. The team announced it back in April and said the ceremony details would come later. The full schedule release did not attach one. (Update, Aug. 14: the date is set — Sunday, Feb. 28, against Boston. The biggest home date on this calendar, Christmas included.)

Eighty-two games, the deepest national slate this team has ever carried, and a number going up for the man who made this franchise matter in the first place. Whatever else this season turns into, the calendar is worth showing up for.

The Links

• Our recap: Lynx 85, Fire 81 — Katie on how a 29-point laugher nearly became a nightmare at Moda Center.
• AP/Yahoo: Lynx nearly squander a 29-point lead — the wire version, with the full late-game sequence.
• Star Tribune: Portland nearly pulls off the largest comeback in WNBA history — the box-score forensics on how close it got.
• Lynx postgame notes: Olivia Miles, fastest in WNBA history to 650 points and 200 assists — the rookie hit another one.
• KPTV: the Portland side of the near-comeback — how the Fire's building saw it.
• Dunking With Wolves: 38 years for this Christmas moment — why a home Christmas game means something here.
• FOX 9: DAZN's 15 free Wolves games in 2026-27 — the new streaming home, pricing still TBA.

Listen & Watch

• Locked On Wolves: "A Surprising Fit? How A Ben Simmons Signing Could Work" (Aug. 12, 29 min) — the buyout-market case, next to Gobert.
• WNBA highlights: Lynx 85, Fire 81 — the run, the collapse, the escape, in three minutes.

Tweet of the Day

https://x.com/rudygobert27/status/2087630772131733844

The Slate

• Lynx at Las Vegas Aces: Saturday, Aug. 15, 7:00 PM CT, CBS.

The Lynx beat the Fire 85-81 on Wednesday night in Portland, and no four-point win has ever worked harder to disguise what it almost was.

For twenty-eight minutes this was the game everyone expected. Minnesota led 64-35 with 8:16 left in the third quarter: a 29-point lead, on the road, against an expansion team, with Napheesa Collier cruising toward a 20-point, 9-rebound night and Kayla McBride burying three of her seven looks from deep. In Tuesday's preview I said Lynx by 18. For twenty-eight minutes I was being conservative.

Then the Lynx stopped playing, in the most literal sense available to a team still wearing uniforms. Portland closed the third on a surge and opened the fourth with thirteen straight points, a 29-4 run across the quarter break that turned 64-35 into 68-64 and Moda Center into the loudest building in the league. The team that clinched a playoff berth last weekend spent eight minutes getting outworked by one that is 13-20.

Credit where the receipts demand it: Bridget Carleton put 16 on her old team, exactly the revenge night that seven professional seasons in Minnesota earn you, and Teja Oblak nearly triple-doubled the comeback with 11 points, 6 rebounds, and 9 assists. The Fire didn't luck into that run. They took it.

The escape came down to the two players it was always going to come down to. McBride's driving layup with 1:25 left made it 80-77, and Olivia Miles, who had a quiet 13 by her rookie-of-the-year standards, iced it from the line with 26.5 seconds to go. Natasha Howard's 14-and-12 double-double was the night's quiet load-bearing wall. Final: 85-81, 28-7, thirteen wins in the last fourteen games.

My mom reads every piece I write and responds with exactly one emoji. After the preview promised Lynx by 18, tonight earned the grimace.

How much should this worry anyone? Barely. It was one bad quarter in August, at the tail end of three games in five nights, and the top seed is already banked. The habit is the concern, not the outcome — Cheryl Reeve's teams don't usually need a McBride bailout against 13-20 opponents, and the film session before Saturday's Aces rematch will not be gentle. Good. That's the version of this team that wins in October.

The Lynx are 28-7. They owe me fourteen points and an apology.

The Lynx play the Portland Fire Wednesday night (9:00 PM Central, WNBA League Pass / Victory+ MIN), and the honest framing is that Minnesota clinched a playoff spot over the weekend, in the second week of August, before any other team in the league had gotten around to it.

Sit with that. The Lynx are 27-7. They spent the first two months building the WNBA's best record at 21-6 without Napheesa Collier, who was rehabbing offseason surgery on both ankles while a rookie point guard held the whole operation together. Then the 2025 MVP runner-up came back in late July, and the weekend just ended with a 98-87 win over the defending champion Aces, a four-point halftime game that Minnesota broke open in the third quarter behind 26 from Olivia Miles, and a 103-90 dismissal of Dallas to slam the door on the clinching weekend.

The one blemish in the last month, a loss to the Sparks that snapped a 10-game winning streak, was answered with two straight wins over playoff-caliber teams. That's the whole scouting report on this team's psyche.

The rookie is the story that keeps compounding

Olivia Miles is averaging 19.7 points and 5.8 assists as a rookie running the league's best team — three straight Rookie of the Month awards, the first Lynx rookie ever to do it. The Collier return has not shrunk her; it's clarified her. Phee draws two defenders on the catch; Miles makes the read; someone in a white jersey is shooting a shot they like. With Kayla McBride spacing, Courtney Williams doing chaos-agent work, and Natasha Howard playing All-Star-level ball on both ends, the Lynx have the luxury every contender claims to want: a superstar who doesn't have to be one every night until September.

About Portland

The Fire are an expansion team playing out an expansion season, and the two previous meetings went how you'd guess: 107-74 and 101-93, both at Target Center. Wednesday is the first Lynx trip to the Moda Center, where there are two reasons to actually watch. One is Bridget Carleton, who went No. 1 overall in April's expansion draft after parts of seven seasons of professional glue-work in Minnesota, and gets her first home crack at her old team. The other is on the Fire bench, where Sylvia Fowles is a first-year assistant coach — meaning the greatest center in franchise history will spend Wednesday night trying to beat us. The scoreboard will forgive her. I won't have to, because it won't be close enough to matter.

The trap-game case writes itself if you squint: third game in five nights, a 9 PM Central road tip, a clinched berth, an opponent with nothing to lose and a building that's been loud all summer. The counter-case is that second Portland game: the Fire cut it to 53-50 in the third quarter last month before Minnesota slammed the door, and Cheryl Reeve's teams treat even three competitive minutes as a personal insult in the rematch.

I'll be watching the way I always watch these West Coast trips from Chicago — TV muted, radio call synced, neighbors' opinions unsolicited. What I'm watching for: whether Reeve keeps staggering Collier and Miles so one of them is always on the floor, and whether the bench units that leaked points in the Sparks loss stay patched against a team that can't punish them.

The Lynx are the best team in basketball, the Fire didn't have a roster until April, and Wednesday should say so by the third quarter.

Prediction: Lynx by 18, and Fowles gets the only ovation Portland enjoys.

The NBA started rolling out its 2026-27 calendar this week — key dates, opening week, and the Christmas slate, with the full 82-game schedule still to come. For the Wolves, that means we know exactly two games right now. Both are worth sitting with.

December 25: Thunder at Wolves, 7:00 PM Central (ABC/ESPN)

Christmas Day basketball is coming to Target Center for the first time in franchise history. Thirty-eight seasons, zero home Christmas games... until this one. Sit with that for a second: the marquee evening window, our building, against Oklahoma City.

The NBA does not hand out Christmas home games as participation trophies. The five-game slate is the league's showcase shelf, and this year it's stacked: a Knicks–Spurs Finals rematch at noon, Giannis making his Christmas debut in a Heat uniform in Boston, LeBron's first trip back to LA as a 76er. And in the 7:00 Central slot, the league chose Ant and LaMelo against Shai and the Thunder.

https://x.com/NBA/status/2087147870352785570

The national broadcast will frame it as Shai's show. Fine. A Target Center crowd getting its first-ever taste of Christmas basketball at home will make its own argument. Hang with the in-laws on the 26th instead. Layer up. This one's ours.

October 21: Wolves at Heat, 6:30 PM Central (ESPN)

The season opener, one night after the league tips off with its NBC triple-header. It's a national TV window, it's on the road, and it answers the question every Wolves fan has been chewing on since the June 25 trade: what does the Edwards–Ball backcourt actually look like against real defense?

There will be no easing in. Miami now employs Giannis Antetokounmpo, the roster around Ant got remade in one violent afternoon of trade calls, and the first regular-season possessions of the LaMelo era will happen in front of a national audience in a building where the Wolves have historically gone to suffer. Perfect. If this experiment is what the front office believes it is, an opening statement on the road is exactly the right stage for it.

What we're not doing yet

The full schedule. Every date, every back-to-back, every return game isn't out yet. When it drops, we'll break down the whole thing here: the stretches that will decide the seeding, the TV count, and yes, the nights Target Center gets emotional about the guys who left. Until then, we're not going to pretend to analyze games that don't have dates.

Two games are on the calendar. One says the league thinks we belong on its biggest day. The other tells us whether they're right, starting night two.

Countdowns for both live on our Schedules page, all times Central, updated as the league fills in the rest.

The most important Timberwolves basketball of the offseason happened four thousand miles from Target Center, and nobody kept score.

This week, most of the roster got on planes to France to visit Rudy Gobert, who grew up in Saint-Quentin, a couple hours from Paris. Per The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski, Anthony Edwards and LaMelo Ball were the ones getting the team together. Ball was roughly six weeks into his Timberwolves tenure and already pulling teammates across an ocean. And Krawczynski was explicit that this wasn't a two-star photo op:

https://twitter.com/JonKrawczynski/status/2080329759163035948

The social feeds did the reporting for us. Ayo Dosunmu's story had the shot that mattered, the traveling party assembled in front of the Eiffel Tower (reposted by The Hoop Central):

https://twitter.com/TheHoopCentral/status/2086566159495905389

Gobert shared the scene from his own story too, including Ant's instant-classic review of the Eiffel Tower:

https://twitter.com/TheHoopCentral/status/2086606572483174418

Either a compliment to the Magic Kingdom or an insult to France — and knowing Ant, both.

Why this actually matters

Chemistry was the story of last season, and it wasn't a flattering one. This was a team that won 49 games in 2025-26 and made noise in the West almost in spite of itself: the vibes ran hot and cold, and Naz Reid himself named it after the season ended: asked what separated the Wolves from the two conference finalists, he landed on "probably just the moodiness," and the need to be "less moody and more selfless." When the most beloved player on the roster says that in public, the private version was uglier.

Then the front office detonated the core. In a four-team June trade, Naz Reid went to Charlotte, Julius Randle to Brooklyn, and LaMelo Ball arrived to run the point next to Ant. A full rebuild wearing familiar jerseys. The new backcourt has never played a possession together, and Gobert now cleans up for two of the most reckless shot-takers alive.

So no, a week of croissants doesn't fix spacing. But teams that just got blown up don't usually plan international trips on their own in August. The two guys with the most to prove about coexisting, Ant and LaMelo, were the ones booking it. And the destination mattered: at 34, Gobert is the piece this experiment leans on hardest, and he'd just gotten most of the new-look roster to his home soil a month before camp.

Training camp opens in a little over a month. The fit questions are real, and we'll spend September breaking them down. But the leading indicator arrived early. Ant and LaMelo planned this trip themselves. And they picked Rudy.

For the past two years, covering the Timberwolves was my side hustle. As of today, it's my site.

Welcome to the new TWolves Blog.

Some of you know this URL from a previous life. It's been kicking around Wolves internet for two decades, and I wasn't about to let it die. Everything that was ever published here is still here; the old links still work. But starting today, this is something different: an independent site, run by people who cover this team because we can't help it, with no network above us deciding whether Wolves coverage is worth the budget line.

What you'll get here:

A preview before every game and an honest recap the morning after. Analysis that respects your intelligence. The Daily Howl, a morning brief that reads everything so you don't have to. Wolvespedia, our growing encyclopedia of franchise history: the glory, the scars, and the Joe Smith scandal. And full Lynx coverage, because the best basketball team in this state for most of the last decade deserves better than a courtesy paragraph.

And the thing I care about most: the comments.

If you've spent time in a great game thread, you know what it's like: the rec that says "we all saw it," the running bit that outlives the season, the 2 a.m. overtime delirium with three hundred strangers who feel like neighbors. That experience is the whole reason this site exists. We built our own comments platform from scratch: game threads for every game, recs, replies, the z-key (if you know you know). It's ours. Nobody can take it away, sunset it, or "streamline" it into a Facebook plugin.

The rules are simple: be funny, be smart, be wrong loudly and own it. Don't be a bigot. That's about it.

We're starting small. It's just me and a couple of writers you'll meet soon, and we'll be building from there. The schedule just dropped, the roster got a lot more interesting this summer, and the Lynx are the best team in the WNBA. There has never been a better time to have a place to talk about Minnesota basketball.

Pull up a seat.

— Derek