Exits: Silence is not enough

In a brittle, cruel winter, Minnesotans showed up for each other. The Timberwolves stayed out of it.

Normally, the coldest week of the year is the biggest news over winter in Minnesota.

The coldest week of the year is consistently in January and it’s usually below 0°F for multiple days at a time. Sometimes schools close, sometimes they don’t, there’s not really a temperature threshold or any rhyme or reason to that. If you’ve never experienced being outside in the cold below 0°F, it permeates your bones. It gets up your nose and between your teeth and makes you wonder if it will ever be warm again. Walking to the bar or the grocery store or the bus is an endeavor that requires many layers and a certain amount of determined grit. This thing is important, I must suffer through. Some people describe Minnesotans as a hearty bunch. Personally, I think the cold makes us brittle. Hardened, but liable to break under heavy tension.

The Timberwolves were inconsistent all season. As an inconsistent team does, they went on win streaks, and they went on losing streaks. Their longest losing streak was a five game stretch in January, from the 16th-25th. I don’t want to draw too much of a conclusion from the timing of this stretch. It would be unfair to players to say that they lost because of any one thing. But this five game stretch fell in between the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration enforcement agents. It was also the coldest week of 2026 so far, and one of the coldest in the past decade.

Many have blamed the Timberwolves inconsistency on not having a traditional point guard. Some have pointed to injuries, including Donte DiVincenzo’s season-ending achilles injury, and others (especially on social media) have opined on a lack of drive and will. I hesitate to blame the players’ perceived laziness for team issues. These are athletes competing at the highest possible level in their field. They have trainers and dieticians and a schedule I would crumble under immediately. A lazy NBA player, to me, is an oxymoron.

That, however, does not excuse or explain the fact the Timberwolves are a self-described emotional team. Chris Finch has been up front about it, Tim Connelly in the front office has been up front about it, and the players have been up front about it. What being “emotional” in this context means remains pretty undefined, but I think they are pointing out that these players have feelings that affect their gameplay without having to own up to the cause of those feelings.

This approach makes sense. It’s not a healthy media environment for players to express emotions off the court in any meaningful way. If you say a tidbit in a presser or on social media that reveals any part of your personality, it’s clipped, cut, captioned and exploited on 100 different sports aggregation accounts.

It cannot feel good to be an NBA player (or really any famous person) as a human being right now. Fame is a gun, says modern philosopher and poet Addison Rae. It’s dangerous and photogenic and powerful and desirable to people who don’t understand how it works. And lots of famous people point their fame blind. I think of the lowercase c conservative mindset of Paul McCartney that partly led to the end of The Beatles. The protest songs John Lennon wanted to make were too political for him.

We’ve come a long way (derogatory) since the social justice jerseys in the 2020 NBA Bubble. The backlash to politics in sports has swung us so far in the opposite direction since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, that no player on the Timberwolves gave a direct statement about the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Other players in the league did, Chris Finch gave a statement, and the team postponed their Sunday game the day after Renee Good was killed. The stadium crew also did a moment of silence before that game vs. the Warriors. But Anthony Edwards went on the record pretending not to know what happened because he’s “not in tune with everything.”

I just don’t think the Wolves stood a chance after staying silent through this moment. After all, how can you claim to represent a city you don’t even bother to pretend to care about?

Photo credit Bill Streicher

Minnesota is very much still healing after Operation Metro Surge. Minneapolis and St. Paul are small cities cosplaying as large ones. We all know each other (or at least the degrees of separation are very minimal) and we all recognized the exact sidewalks and neighborhoods where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed. I will never forget Greg Bovino using the bathroom at the Speedway near my apartment and the pepper spraying of protestors in the eyes steps from a park I like to hoop around at.

But the way we saw neighbors stepping up for one another was built on the framework of injustices past. This was the same city and state that protested in the middle of a pandemic after the murder of George Floyd.

What happened here was awful, but it tapped into the basic instincts of neighborly love and recognizing human beings as worthy of life and dignity. It was one of the most life affirming things I’ve ever witnessed as a lifelong Minnesotan. The joke is, “A Minnesotan will point you in any direction besides their house” as a signifier of our brittle nature. But the minute pressure was put on us, we snapped free of the brittleness into a community that cared for each other. The same thing happened this winter in a way that was so primal and so necessary during a moment where the rich and powerful are decrying empathy at any chance they get.

On one hand, I don’t blame individual Timberwolves players for not speaking out. There’s no current precedent that would suggest it’s a good idea nor in their favor politically or financially. There was just an entire article in The Atlantic about how Adam Silver won’t be interviewed, at all. Not about sensitive issues, just in general. Why should we expect any different from the players in his league? These men are inaccessible by design. Swiftly cut off from the outside world because how can you make massive profits on a product when the product doesn’t appeal to everyone?

The Spurs making the Finals feels particularly triumphant to me partly because Victor Wembanyama was one of the only players to go on the record in January, saying he was “horrified” by the shootings. His outspoken compassion and emotions endear me to him in a way that scares me for his future. I hope he is well prepared and has lots of support in his personal life.

The bitter cold in Minnesota was the least of our worries that week in January. People were out in the streets protesting in weather that freezes the snot inside your nose. Personally, as someone who works in local media, the five losses in a row for the Timberwolves barely registered on my pain scale. I don’t remember really caring about them at that point. It was a season of discontent for me, the inconsistency was apparent from the very first time I watched them this season. But in my eyes, the losing streak was a harbinger of the flippant surrender we saw in their final game against the San Antonio Spurs. My sister made us stay til the end of the game in the arena to “sit in the shame.” The shame was palpable.

Maybe the emotions the Wolves felt in the back half of this season were disappointment and sadness. Maybe the emotion they felt was relief. We’ll never know. Silence is golden. Silence is marketable. Silence is not enough.