Jaden McDaniels Is Ready for This
The Minnesota Timberwolves’ defensive ace missed last year’s Nuggets series after he broke his hand punching a wall. After a year spent learning to control his emotions, McDaniels has his shot at redemption—but can he and the Timberwolves defense wrestle control away from the defending champs?
Walking back to his hotel in Denver after the Minnesota Timberwolves’ final practice before Game 1, the head of the snake of the NBA’s most suffocating defense was brimming with coiled energy. “I’m excited,” said Jaden McDaniels, “but I’m super antsy.”
“Just because I didn’t get to play this team last year in the series,” he continued, “and this time, it’s in the second round, so it just means everything more to me this year.”
In a frustrating final game of the 2022-23 regular season, McDaniels punched a concrete wall and broke his hand. In the second quarter of that same game, Rudy Gobert swung at teammate Kyle Anderson in a timeout. That wasn’t how Tim Connelly, who relinquished a war chest of picks and assets for Gobert, envisioned the now-four-time Defensive Player of the Year using his imposing standing reach. Those outbursts capped off what had been a tense, injury-ridden season for the Timberwolves. Without McDaniels, they lost to the Nuggets in five games.
In a series rematch one year later, Minnesota raced out to a 2-0 lead as McDaniels used his second chance to channel his motivation—a fusion of guilt and desire—into controlled aggression. “The Nuggets are a ‘smarter team,’ so I might not take as many risks defensively,” he said, in a monotone voice that belies his intensity and lends him an air of villainous detachment. In the first two games, McDaniels’s long, sinewy, knifelike limbs were the last thing Jamal Murray saw before he threw double-clutched prayers toward the rim, before he made his first dribble 90 feet from the basket. McDaniels chased Murray like an ice skater on stilts. Even when he’s not in front of you, you’re worried that he’s right behind you.
But Nikola Jokic caught up to the coverage and the Nuggets won the next three games, bringing Minnesota to the brink of elimination by using quick, calm, high-IQ attacks that ate at the young pups’ composure. “We’ve just gotta find ways to stay mentally strong,” Gobert said after Game 4. “When the game is high intensity, we’ve gotta be able to slow down and keep our poise, keep our execution offensively. We can’t panic. It’s just a learning experience for us.”
The growing Wolves are still prone to the follies of youth, and the margin of error—dictated by the Joker’s laser-focused vision—has never been thinner. Survival, for both McDaniels and Minnesota, hinges on how quickly they can bounce back from their mistakes.
It took awhile for McDaniels to be able to talk about the most publicized outburst of his career, to laugh at the jokes he sees on social media. “It was hard to get like this, to be honest,” he said. “I never was someone to do interviews, never wanted to talk.”
Last year, in a tilt against the Pelicans with seeding implications, McDaniels, playing sick and sucking wind, spent the first quarter desperately trailing behind Brandon Ingram. Frustrated by consecutive blow-bys, he picked up a quick foul, and then another, throwing Pelicans big Larry Nance Jr. onto the hardwood in a tussle for an offensive rebound. “To be honest,” he reflects over the phone, “I shouldn’t have played.”
But that was just the beginning of a downward spiral. Pulsating with rage, McDaniels beelined to the locker room tunnel, punching a curtain covering a concrete wall. The issue, according to McDaniels, was his inability to see the consequences of his actions—literally, in the case of the wall, and figuratively, when it came to his failed pursuit of Ingram. There was a cost, even if it only revealed itself in hindsight, to playing so fast and loose with his long, unruly limbs.
The impulse to try to erase smaller mistakes with home run gambles and late, overaggressive swipes was the same impulse that led to the punch: The biggest problem wasn’t the original mistake, but McDaniels’s inability to let it go. The same intensity that made McDaniels one of the best defensive players in the league—the best, to hear him tell it—was making it hard for him to stay on the court. “This,” Wolves coach Chris Finch told McDaniels, “is on you. This is something that you have to change about your narrative.”
In the days after the punch, McDaniels was wracked with guilt. “I didn’t really want to come around the team after a self-inflicted injury,” he says. “I felt bad for myself. I wasn’t out there battling with them.” Messages of support for McDaniels poured into the Timberwolves group chat: Everyone makes mistakes. You’re not the only one in the world that’s done something like this. Gobert, who had his own reckoning to do, told McDaniels about a time he punched a wall out of frustration, when he was 15.
As part of his pregame routine this season, McDaniels talks to a psychologist and visualizes potential situations that could trigger a negative emotional reaction. Their work is geared toward honing his intuition in the throes of volatile moments, meeting the split seconds between action, reaction, and another possible reaction with awareness. Before Game 3 of Minnesota’s first-round series against the Suns, the Wolves predicted Devin Booker would try to provoke him. Sure enough, with the game slipping out of Phoenix’s hands, the two got into a verbal spat. McDaniels remained stoic, and the duo walked away with double technical fouls.
“It was cool just knowing that I could control my emotions during the game,” he said. “Even if it’s in a heated moment. It’s a little superpower.”
Anthony Edwards’s now famous edict—“They got KD, we got Jaden McDaniels”—rang in McDaniels’s mind all series, as did Kevin Durant’s easy scoring exploits against him in their regular-season jaunts. “If we don’t win, or if I don’t do good versus him,” he thought to himself, “this is all going to fall back on you.” McDaniels, a prideful and intense defender who hates being scored on, had to make peace with the fact that Durant was going to get his, and that he couldn’t let that put him on tilt or make him disengage.
Late in Suns-Wolves Game 3, after making a prayer he couldn’t see but had to believe, the greatest scorer of his generation turned to McDaniels and told him, “Shit, your long-ass arm made me shoot it higher. That’s why it went in.” It was a compliment veiled as an admission veiled as a mind game, a desperate imploration that you often see in the exhausted, disbelieving faces of McDaniels’s opponents: My God, will you just let up? It was also confirmation that McDaniels had succeeded. “I would just look at him like, ‘You want me not to contest you?’” That, for better and for worse, has never been an option for McDaniels.
It’s how McDaniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and Edwards suffocated Murray into a frustrated stupor by the second quarter of Game 2. Like when McDaniels and Alexander-Walker trapped Murray in the corner to start the quarter.
Risk, for a team that has led the playoffs in total deflections, is a schematic underpinning. Minnesota is at its best when it manipulates its timing, collective intuition, size, and speed to mitigate the potential consequences of its gambles. In one representative possession, McDaniels’s mark, Reggie Jackson (an average shooter), trailed the play and set up at the logo, giving McDaniels an opening to help Alexander-Walker trap Murray. Later, when McDaniels mulled trapping Murray again, Karl-Anthony Towns pushed him into the play and switched onto Jackson. Later in the quarter, after Murray used a stepback to break free from Alexander-Walker, McDaniels jumped into the play to contest him as soon as he took off.
A few minutes later, McDaniels was guarding Michael Porter Jr. but tracking Murray with his eyes. When Murray separated from Alexander-Walker and raised up for a jumper, McDaniels waited until he was in the air—all but fully committed to the shot—to jump into the frame, and contest him. Murray hesitated to hit Jokic on the roll, rushed his patented baseline jumper, and was goaded into a contested mid-paint 2. By the end of his shift, with frustration mounting, impulse took over. Watching from the sideline, Murray literally threw in the towel.
Minnesota’s philosophy hearkens back to the operating principle McDaniels took away from the punch: “Everything you do in life will come with consequences,” he says, “but you’ve got to take risks to learn.”
In the final two minutes of Game 4, Minnesota trailed by seven and McDaniels, guarding Murray, implored one of his teammates to pick up Aaron Gordon, who was dribbling the ball up the floor. But Gobert waited for him at half court. The adjustment by Denver, taking the primary ballhandling duties out of Murray’s hands, ameliorated the threat of McDaniels’s ravenous ball pressure, allowed Denver to get into its sets more seamlessly, and opened up its offense, helping the Nuggets rip off three straight wins.
In the regular season, the Nuggets were 39-3 when their offensive rating was higher than 120, and 0-9 when it was lower than 105. Minnesota held them to 107.2 and 90.8 in the first two games. McDaniels combined for just five points but was a plus-40. Denver has since shifted the context of the series, averaging 127.7 points per 100 possessions over the last three games, and Minnesota has struggled to keep up.
McDaniels’s offense is prone to inconsistency. In Game 5, the Nuggets clogged Edwards’s driving lanes and dared Minnesota’s shooters to beat them. McDaniels has made just two 3s so far in the series. Before the matchup against the Suns, the Timberwolves scouting team had McDaniels participate in offensive rebounding drills, crashing in from the corner to build necessary muscle memory. “[Finch] has been helping me a lot,” says McDaniels, “just finding different ways how I could add four, six points to my average.” The Nuggets are a top-five defensive rebounding team, though, and they’ve turned the tap off in transition.
After spending the season successfully improving his mid-paint and closeout game, McDaniels regressed from the 3-point line despite working on his shot, admitting that he was probably thinking too much. “I feel like the more you worry and think about it when you do get the shot,” says McDaniels, “you’re going to be nervous and shaking, because you’ve been thinking about it the whole time.”
In a lot of ways, what ails him is what ails the rest of the team: When the ball gets taken out of Edwards’s hands, McDaniels is still learning who he’s supposed to be and what he’s supposed to do. Towns has been a fruitful option in the post, but he’s struggled with inconsistency and foul trouble. Gobert isn’t a creation threat, and Mike Conley’s status for Game 6 remains up in the air. McDaniels’s responsibilities fluctuate alongside his production, on a game-by-game basis, depending on these multivariate factors. The question, with an elimination game on the horizon, isn’t whether the young Wolves will figure it out, but how fast.
After clanking a forced layup attempt in the third quarter of Game 2, a frustrated McDaniels bolted down the locker room tunnel after checking out of the game. No walls or wrists were harmed on the way, and he was back in the game by the fourth quarter, after regulating his emotions. “Early in the series,” says Finch, “he was a little frustrated that he wasn’t shooting the ball well, but I haven’t noticed that bothering him too much.”
McDaniels has figured out how to stay on the court. The next step, for him and for the Timberwolves, is surviving the ebbs until they can find their flow.
