Chris Finch said something Monday that at least one write-up has read as a shot at Julius Randle. “We’ve traded moodiness for giddiness,” Finch said before the preseason game at Madison Square Garden.
I think that reading misses the better half of the quote. Finch also named the new problem, and a few hours later against the Knicks the Wolves showed what it looks like. The giddiness is real and it is working. It also came with Ball’s game-high five turnovers and a 67% team night at the free throw line, and those are the parts a loose team has to clean up before October 21.
What Finch actually said
Per the Yahoo Sports write-up of Finch’s pregame comments, he started with Ball. “He’s always in a great mood. Always comes in smiling. He and Anthony have a shared quality: They’re really hard to stay mad at,” Finch said. “And they do some things that you want to get mad at.”
Then the line: “We referred to ourselves as a moody team in the last couple of years at times, and it’s probably gotten in our way. We’ve traded moodiness for giddiness, so we’ve got to kind of get back to some sort of equilibrium. But it’s been fun to go to work every day so far.”
Finch said “we referred to ourselves.” He never names Randle, or Naz Reid, who left in the same trade. And the last sentence of the thought is the one nobody is quoting: “we’ve got to kind of get back to some sort of equilibrium.” Finch is saying the pendulum has swung, he likes where it has swung, and he knows it needs to come back to the middle.
He said the same thing about Ball’s game in July, when he told a Bleacher Report podcast, “If you look at the numbers, there’s no denying that everybody’s productivity goes up when he’s on the floor,” as quoted by Sports Illustrated. That was the case for Ball as an offensive engine. Monday was the first game where I could see both halves of it.
The giddy half: 122-104 at the Garden
The Wolves beat the Knicks 122-104, per Yahoo Sports. They shot 42-for-78 from the field and 18-for-34 from three, per Yardbarker. That is about 54% overall and 53% from deep. The Knicks shot 25% from three, and Minnesota won the rebounding 39-28.
Anthony Edwards had 26 points on 8-of-16 shooting, 5-of-8 from three, in 25 minutes. Jaden McDaniels had 22 on 8-of-12, 4-of-5 from three. Ayo Dosunmu added 11 and hit three of his five threes.
Ball scored 10 on 3-of-7 shooting in 22 minutes, and he had a game-high seven assists, per CBS Sports. That works out to roughly 11 assists per 36 minutes, from a player who sat out Saturday’s game. NBA.com’s preview had Ball at 5.0 assists a game and Edwards at 16.5 points entering Monday, so both beat their preseason averages.
This is what Edwards told us at media day he wanted, as I wrote then: a point guard so he doesn’t have to bring the ball up. He took 16 shots and the passer next to him took seven. McDaniels, who I think should shoot more threes with Ball around, hit four of five. Giddiness, on the floor, is easy shots for the people who should be getting them.
The other half: what the joy has to clean up
Two numbers from the same box score are the equilibrium part.
First, the turnovers. CBS Sports has Ball with five, a game high, on a night when he also had the game-high seven assists. A point guard with seven assists and five turnovers in 22 minutes is a loose point guard, and it is the first thing opponents will test. (Who plays behind him is in our 2026-27 Wolves roster and depth chart.)
Second, the free throws. The Wolves made 66.7% of theirs, per Yahoo. I made the case earlier this month that Minnesota gave away points at the line last season by missing, not by being fouled less. Randle took 6.3 attempts a game last season, per Basketball Reference, and he and Reid took 619 of the team’s 2,072. A team that lives on threes and drives from Edwards will not fix the line by smiling.
Then the shooting. The Wolves took 34 threes in 78 shots, or 44% of their attempts, and made 53% of them. Those rates will come down, and when they do, the margin for turnovers and missed free throws goes with it.
What equilibrium looks like
A team that lost in the second round last season and had spent two years calling itself moody has swapped it for a point guard who is “always in a great mood,” and the Wolves scored 122 points on the defending champions.
What I want to see when the season opens October 21 in Miami is the boring version of the same team. Ball under three turnovers a game. The Wolves at the 75.2% they shot from the line last season (29th of 30 teams, per Basketball Reference), as a floor. Edwards still getting 16 clean shots, and a bench that can hold a lead.
If the giddiness comes with that, Finch’s line was the best thing he said all preseason.