The time and energy required to maintain hardcore sports fandom is barely rational and rarely worth the investment. On the other hand, if I were to explain to an uninitiated stranger why it’s nevertheless a good deal, I would start with the Minnesota Timberwolves.
They are a maddening basketball team, full of clunky offense and bad decisions that will make you miserable, but also replete with the sort of indelible characters that make the sport feel twice as alive and every playoff win turn borderline euphoric. One week ago, only days after calling out every Denver Nuggets player by name, Jaden McDaniels exploited Nikola Jokic’s matador rim protection to put up 32 points and 10 rebounds on 13-25 shooting, all while ruining Jamal Murray’s life on defense. It was my favorite game anyone’s played all season.
In broader strokes, for the third straight year we’re into the second round of the playoffs, and the Wolves have come further than anyone expected. They were supposed to lose first round matchups with KD and the Suns in 2024, Luka and the Lakers in 2025, and Jokic and the Nuggets two weeks ago.
Most of this year’s skepticism was health-related. Superstar guard Anthony Edwards finished the season battling something called “runner’s knee” (patellofemoral pain syndrome), an injury that hampered him through the second of the season and clearly limited him in the first round against a Nuggets team that was considered a real threat to win the title (the same injury kept Steph Curry out two months for the Warriors). When Edwards then went down with a hyper-extended knee on his other leg, halfway through that Denver series, on the same night the Wolves lost their other starting guard, Donte DiVencenzo, to a torn achilles tendon, Minnesota looked cooked.
And yet… It’s 10 days later now, and the Wolves are tied 1-1 with the Spurs and heading back to Minnesota for massive playoff games tonight and Sunday. San Antonio is still a reasonably heavy favorite to win the series (-310), to be clear, and after Minnesota stole Game 1, the Spurs went out and won by 40 in Game 2. Still, despite the odds, or maybe because of them, I have to salute a team that now brightens my spring every single year.
Start with Edwards. He was pigeonholed by many as an athletic gunner early in his career, and before he was even drafted there were questions about his work ethic and whether he loved basketball. The work ethic questions may have been fair; Edwards has talked honestly about having to adapt to what’s required at the pro level, including what was required by Steve Kerr and the Warriors at a pre-draft workout (“They was continuously telling me, ‘You didn’t work hard enough. If we had the No. 1 pick, we wouldn’t take you.’”).
And then Ant adapted. He’s improved various aspects of his game every year he’s been in the league, and now stands as one of the ten best players anywhere. Just as important, though, I’ve spent the past few years on GOAT highlighting his emotional intelligence and leadership. Edwards has been charged with managing partnerships with Rudy Gobert, Julius Randle, and Karl-Anthony Towns—three mercurial, insecure personalities, with clunky offense that’s difficult to build around—and the 24-year-old has made it look easy.
Listen to Edwards in any press conference and he’s quick to deflect praise onto teammates, and when he’s critical or demanding of his co-stars, he’ll usually pair that with disarming humor and charm. In general, he’s confident and relaxed, but also tough, and plays incredibly hard, leading by example. He’s also coachable and deferential to Chris Finch, an underrated quality in a franchise player and an asset that makes it much easier to run a healthy organization. Altogether, Edwards is everything a team could want in a leader, and just about everything fans could want in a superstar. He returned from that hyper-extended knee after nine days, played very well for most of Game 1 against San Antonio, and then after a triumphant win, took accountability for running out of gas and nearly blowing it for Minnesota in the final three minutes.
Beyond Ant’s leadership, there is also the redemptive arc of Rudy Gobert and a Wolves-Jazz trade that was widely panned four years ago. Gobert plays offense like he’s got cinderblocks for hands and feet, and while defensively he can be spectacular, after winning four Defensive Player of the Year awards and losing in the playoffs each of those seasons, even his defense has been questioned by fans who didn’t trust him to stay on the court against teams playing smallball. Gobert is not quite a punchline, but he’s not taken seriously as a championship-caliber star, yet he just spent two weeks putting Nikola Jokic in hell and looking like a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
Randle, too, has been consistently successful while being regularly (and somewhat accurately) crushed by the basketball intelligentsia for bad defense and sloppy, ball-dominant offense. Jaden McDaniels is a tremendous player in theory (and was phenomenal in Game 6 last Thursday), but he’s constantly, constantly, in foul trouble. I can’t overstate how many times I’ve found myself rooting for the Wolves over the past few years and subsequently losing my mind at ticky-tack fouls from an off-balance McDaniels that then render him unplayable for the rest of a half. This happened Wednesday: McDaniels picked up his third foul with 9:49 left in the second quarter in Game 2 Wednesday, and an 8-point game was blown open from there, with Spurs closing the second quarter on a 29-13 run.
Elsewhere, Terrence Shannon, a second-year guard who’s stepped up huge in DiVincenzo’s absence, had been buried on the bench for most of the regular season. Earlier this week he was asked about facing Victor Wembanyama, who had 12 blocks in Game 1, and Shannon said, “He gonna have to block it every time, I ain’t gonna stop going downhill. I told him that when he said a little something… He gonna have to block it every time, man. I know he ain’t gonna block it every single time.”
Bones Hyland is a streaky, shoot-first backup guard who’s now been thrust into the rotation after being cast aside by the same Nuggets team that Minnesota beat last week. Mike Conley is 38 years old and was considered washed up four years ago, but he somehow continues to provide valuable playoff minutes, and he’s beloved by the entire organization. Conley had to be traded for salary cap purposes earlier this season, but he was ultimately traded twice in February, making him eligible to re-sign with the team two weeks later.
“Everybody focused on what he says, but more so he’s always an ear to listen,” Donte DiVincenzo said after the initial Conley trade. “Always has a perspective that you respect and appreciate so that doesn’t change in terms of always being able to talk to him, but it’s just a little bit different, felt a little bit weird today.”
“Hopefully we can get him back,” Edwards added in February. “I don’t really know how it goes, but I keep hearing he can come back. Hopefully he sees this. We want you back, Mike. He know we miss him.”
“Nobody expected him to play,” Conley said of Edwards after Minnesota stole Game 1 this week. “It was just his level of commitment to the game. Not just to the game, but to his teammates.”
Ant’s health aside, none of these guys were supposed to be here. Gobert is great, but he’s 33 years old, his defense should be getting worse, and if you left him in a gym by himself he couldn’t score 15 points. Randle has been in trade rumors every year for a decade. If Conley retires and becomes a Minnesota assistant coach next season, no one will be surprised. For now, he’s playing 20 minutes per game in the second round of the playoffs.
What I love most about the Wolves is the reward they give to people who have been paying attention. That dynamic, by the way, is the inverse of many stories the NBA offers today. Study many stars and teams up close and it’s easy to become disillusioned with what sort of behavior is rewarded, who’s succeeding, and at a general level, how annoying everyone is. Not so with Minnesota.
Anyone who follows the league closely is well aware of all the Wolves backstories and the reasons this probably won’t end well for either the individuals or the team, and that makes it all the more delightful when they show up and make it work anyway. And for all their limits, the Wolves are nothing if not fearless, physical, and capable of locking in to meet the moment against good teams that are favored to beat them. Chris Finch is one of the best coaches in the league (though nowhere to be found in this poll), Edwards is a full-blown superstar in his prime, and the supporting cast is huge, athletic, and as talented as they are frustrating.
I’ll be shocked if the formula above ever leads to an actual championship, and who knows whether they can beat the Spurs this weekend. That isn’t the point, though. Watching sports to see who plays the smartest and wins the most is a horrible idea. For anyone interested in that experience, the Thunder have not lost a game in the playoffs so far.
For everyone else, the teams that win you over with heart and character and charm are what make sports more compelling than any other entertainment in the world. The Wolves have aced those categories for three straight years. And they’re not dead yet.
Life Comes at You Fast
One thing I’d forgotten about the NBA Playoffs is how quickly and violently everything can change. For seven months of a plodding regular season the biggest stories in basketball often get repetitive, and then the playoffs arrive and entire eras can be upended across seven days. Consider the above Jaylen Brown screenshot a monument to that dynamic. Boston blew a 3-1 lead in the span of a week, and instead of playoff games, the team is now engulfed by Twitch streams and fake trades. The same thing happened to the Nuggets between Game 2 and Game 6 against the Wolves (albeit without the subsequent Twitch streams).
On the flipside, two weeks ago the Knicks were a punchline at risk of losing to Atlanta and trading half their team, and now they look like the best team in the East. The top-seeded Pistons, as recently as the first half of Game 6 seven days ago, looked like they would end their season in disgrace. Since then, Cade Cunningham has announced his arrival as a real deal superstar, averaging 36 ppg in games 5, 6 and 7 to come back from a 3-1 deficit to Orlando. Now Detroit’s right back in it with a shot at the Finals. Who knows where we’ll be by next Friday.
Finally, if the topic is playoff-induced upheaval, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one familiar anchoring point. Another Kevin Durant team flamed out in spectacular fashion this spring, the Rockets may entertain KD trades as early as June, and earlier this week Colin Cowherd said, “KD is like buying a boat. The first day you have it and the first day you sell it are the two happiest days.”
That is the best take of the playoffs so far.
The Devil You Don’t Know
Completely unrelated to basketball, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the biggest movie in America and looks primed to be one of the highest grossing movies of the year. I have no special insight to offer on the sequel’s success, but I’ll just note that the enduring appeal of the original should be a reminder to Hollywood that the best path to mainstream appeal is not making a story in which everyone, everywhere is represented in some way, but by rendering hyper-specific worlds and stories (demanding bosses in high-end fashion and magazine publishing) that are compelling for their originality and authenticity, and which mass audiences can then relate to (everyone has had a nightmare job and a terrifying boss). Plus, people always enjoy huge stars and beautiful people having a great time across stories that don’t demand anyone think too hard.
The reason for including this item, though, is a confession that the piece of content I’ve enjoyed the most over the past week was a podcast interview with the woman at Vogue who served as Anna Wintour’s lead assistant during the period depicted in the first film. She was played by Emily Blunt in the original movie (a character also named “Emily”), and in the movie she terrorized Anne Hathaway’s “Andy” character as much as Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, based on Wintour). As I learned last weekend, the “real” Emily was named Leslie Fremar, who’s now a successful Hollywood stylist, and who spent the last 20 years not publicly identifying herself as Wintour’s lead assistant and a quasi-villain in both the book and movie that swept the nation 20 years ago.
I recommend the interview to anyone who’s seen the first movie about 25 times, or anyone who needs something completely unrelated to current events. Come for Fremar’s memories of the book and movie being released, and stay for her takes on author Lauren Weisberger as a Vogue employee and lessons from working with Wintour. Like my experience with the movie itself, I had a great time.
The “Geo” in Geopolitics
I’ve written extensively about the current administration’s approach to China and why the claims that Trump is “accommodating” China are bizarre and at odds with lots of countervailing evidence. I won’t repeat myself on that point, but it remains incredible that almost every week there is a new op-ed from former Biden Administration officials claiming, as one did this week, that Trump is making a “historic mistake” by appeasing Beijing.
In any event, I came across a tweet from a writer and fund manager Michael McNair this week that offers a better keystone to understand what’s happened over the past 15 months:
The real lesson of the Strait of Hormuz is how effectively autonomous systems can create a maritime denial problem that even the best blue water navy in the world can do little to combat.
If your enemies have physical proximity to launch autonomous systems into the chokepoint, it’s nearly impossible to keep them open.
That’s why it’s so important for the US to clear the Chinese proxies from the Western Hemisphere before a potential Indo-Pacific conflict.
Imagine a Taiwan scenario where Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba were launching autonomous systems around the Florida Straits, the Yucatan Channel, and the Panama Canal, while Chinese triads embedded with Mexican cartels were doing the same from the Pacific coast against US ports. It would be crippling. And the US wouldn’t have the resources to deal with it. The only real way to eliminate the threat is to eliminate the onshore launch network.
But China is much more vulnerable to this kind of maritime denial strategy than the US is. Geography is arguably China’s biggest strategic weakness. It’s surrounded by potential adversaries in a ring that’s almost perfectly suited for autonomous maritime denial. China has become self-sufficient in a lot of areas, but it still needs imported food and energy, and its economy is still heavily reliant on exports. They must be terrified by what they are seeing in the Strait of Hormuz.
McNair’s analysis continues from there, but autonomous weaponry aside, I found it a useful reminder that one of the prevailing themes of the past year is that geography still matters. Countries have to secure their regions and secure their critical inputs, preferably close to home. Even after 40 years of globalization and the development of elegant supplier networks across dozens of countries and hundreds of industries, the world is not, in fact, flat.
And to be clear, to the extent military tensions persist and geographic chokepoints continue to be levered and disrupted, that is bad short-term news for everyone who’s become accustomed to the deflationary impact of a frictionless global economy. On the other hand, if disruption becomes a new baseline, it’s comparatively good medium-term news for the United States, a country with more favorable geography than anyone in the world (energy self-sufficiency, tons of arable land, two oceans separating it from adversaries). We’ll see where it goes—I would bet de-globalization trends are more relative than absolute, but this is why deterrence around Taiwan is so important, and why China’s response to any sustained and intensified decoupling effort remains a giant variable.
Related to this subject: I enjoyed Janan Ganesh, in an op-ed at the Financial Times, observing that our current decade began with a cascade of hype surrounding the metaverse and the promise of a borderless, digital future for billions of people, only to give way to repeated reminders in Ukraine and now Iran that the constraints of the physical world are the forces that shape destinies on every continent. The metaverse hype, mercifully, has not survived even half a decade.
But speaking of the digital world…
The Economics of Vice
From Brad Littlejohn at Commonplace.org:
The professional sports leagues are tripping over one another to sign the most lucrative deals with the new gambling tycoons. Kalshi has taken out 30-foot-high ads on the sides of buildings across D.C. Meanwhile, the federal government, far from trying to rein in this orgy of exploitation, has announced its intention to deregulate the whole domain using the dubious authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to preempt state-level action. It’s the same move, incidentally, that the administration has taken for states seeking to regulate the epidemic of addictive “AI companions,” the other emerging scourge of our youth rapidly displacing social media addiction, which seems almost quaint by comparison.
Sports gambling, prediction markets, AI companions, pornography, and social media all have at least two things in common. The first is that their native habitat, and prime accelerant, is the smartphone. The second is that they are vice industries. If we are to have any chance of salvaging a lost generation of young men and women, Americans need to rediscover in a hurry why vice markets are not and can never be free markets, and why the only prudent course of action is to ban or at least aggressively regulate them.
That piece was well-argued and echoes a sentiment I expressed earlier this year. Regulating for morality and social health is an impulse that’s both unnatural to the current generation and feels increasingly urgent. I’m sure I’ll write more about all this at some point, because the problems are not going away, and as Littlejohn notes, are inseparable from technology. For the time being, though, I recommend reading a cogent articulation of a cultural and legal blindspot that underlies disturbing trends everyone can sense, but no one knows how to address.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.