The Minnesota Timberwolves had just concluded the first official practice of their 2026-27 NBA season late last month when their center, Rudy Gobert, was asked how it felt to be 34 while a dozen of the other players on the roster are no older than 26. 

“It is interesting,” he replied with a bemused smile, creasing the new-look visage of his shaved head and dark goatee that had his coach, Chris Finch, joking that he looked like a Russian gangster. 

“But I feel wise and fresh at the same time. It is a good place to be.”

Since that time, the Wolves have played four of their six preseason contests and are just a week away from the start of the regular season. In that time, it’s become increasingly obvious that the sustained health and savvy of Gobert is likely to be the most important factor in how the new-look Timberwolves fare this season. 

Much of the attention has naturally gravitated toward the acquisition of LaMelo Ball, a wizard of creative ball movement and pace who will boost the productivity of reigning superstar Anthony Edwards and the rest of the Wolves offense in ways that should simultaneously enhance the efficiency and galvanize the aesthetics of the team’s performance. 

But in order to acquire Ball, the Wolves had to first clear salary-cap space by trading Julius Randle for miniscule assets. They then included Naz Reid and draft picks in a trade package that brought Ball from Charlotte after his six years with the Hornets. For the past two seasons, Randle and Naz, who are both power forwards, have been the primary backup centers when Gobert rests on the bench. The year before that, the backup was Karl-Anthony Towns (subsequently traded for Randle and Donte DiVincenzo), another big man who played beside Rudy and then slid over to center when Gobert needed a break.

Related: The Chris Finch Interview, Part 1: Wins are built on defense, but what is defense built on?

In other words, punting both Randle and Naz not only grossly decreased the bulk and quality of depth at the Wolves’ power forward position — it placed the role of backup center squarely in the lap of French teenager Joan Beringer. 

There is almost universal agreement about Beringer’s towering upside. He possesses the size, coordination and sacrificial thirst to become an above average big man in relatively short order. But the cavernous hole in his current profile is his lack of experience. In terms of NBA action, he tallied a mere 314 minutes in his rookie year last season with the Wolves, buttressed by just three games for their G League affiliate, the Iowa Wolves.

But the backstory is equally sparse. Beringer confesses he didn’t pay any attention to basketball until a growth spurt at age 14 diverted him from soccer and judo. Before the Wolves drafted him last year, he played just over 50 games combined in the EuroCup and as a professional in the Adriatic League for Slovenia. Now he is being asked — counted on — to log approximately 15-20 minutes per game on a regular basis against the best basketball players on the planet, for a team with championship aspirations.

Watching him thus far in the preseason is a milkshake of marveling how far he has come in such a short span and grudgingly admitting how far he still has to progress to capably fulfill his role on the team. Experience teaches you both how to compete with opponents and how to mesh with your own teammates. Beringer never had the stairsteps that come with adolescent devotion to the sport; the steadily increasing speed and physicality at each level, which would have enabled him to slowly ramp up with that engagement, individually and in systemic tandems with four other players. 

He can absorb the playbook, the blueprint for the X’s and O’s, but the fundamentals are stretched by spontaneity, the act-and-react that makes hoops such a beautiful game. When should he leave his man to help, or play his part in an initiated rotation on defense? When should defending the shot be flipped into getting into position for a rebound? What skilled nuances are inevitably left out of the scouting report? For that matter, how well does he know the vices and virtues of his teammates — or how those things are developing within himself? 

Right now he is a still somewhat motley bag of blossoming awareness and  remedial lessons, enjoyably spiced by amazing grace, anxious gaffes and admirable grit. He turns 20 in November. 

In the games where Beringer gets into foul trouble or otherwise plays himself off the court, the pivot to other options aren’t promising. Veteran Trey Lyles (the second-oldest player on the roster at 31) has some experience as a 6-foot-9-inch, 234-pound smallball center. The Wolves could also lean more often into deploying 6-foot-9-inch forward Jaden McDaniels in the middle of a zone defense, which worked well in specific situations last season. And there is an open, 15^th spot on the roster if spelling Gobert becomes a more blatantly injurious problem. 

Related: The Chris Finch Interview, Part 2: Can the Wolves change a tiger’s stripes?

But all this presupposes Gobert is able to sustain the type of workload he has averaged during his four seasons in Minnesota — 32.3 minutes per game for 73.5 games during an 82-game season. Anything significantly less than that makes the lofty goals and ambitions this team has set for itself highly flammable.

One of the reasons the Wolves decided to play Beringer only three games in Iowa was to expose him as much as possible to their development coaching staff — and Gobert’s peerless example. Joan already moves with more coordinated fluidity than Rudy possesses, and has a more versatile skill set on offense. But one can argue that nobody has profited more from their NBA experience than Rudy — a tribute to his obsessive dedication to the details of his craft, the health of his body, and his unremitting desire to prevent opponents from putting the ball in the basket. It is how Gobert, widely mocked for his occasional yet obvious stumblebum miscues, has earned the last laugh via four Defensive Player of the Year awards and 11 inclusions on the NBA’s All-Defensive team. 

Coach Finch recently referred to Gobert (on a podcast with Dane Moore) as a “mistake eraser,” alluding to his nonpareil penchant for making the right switch-or-stay decisions, and collating dozens of other variables in a manner that bails out the defensive deficiencies of his teammates on a remarkably regular basis. More often, Finch also says Gobert “raises the floor” of his team’s performance.

With Randle and Naz now departed and the neophyte Beringer learning on the fly, that floor is likely to drop more precipitously when Rudy leaves the game. It is a serious concern. After all, it was just a year ago at this time that Finch was making the “non-Rudy” minutes a defensive priority, and that’s when Randle and Naz were still on the roster. 

Along with crossing their fingers that Gobert’s near-maniacal focus on taking proper care of his body — ranging from homegrown honey to hyperbaric chambers and beyond — remains successful, one of the best things the Wolves could do this season is signal their respect for him more demonstrably. In my annual preseason interview with Finch last month, he openly fretted about the loss of roster veterans who could “speak Rudy,” including his former teammates in Utah and Minnesota, Mike Conley and Joe Ingles, as well as Kyle Anderson. 

Fortunately Gobert’s younger teammates are already demonstrating some fluency in “Rudy.” After years of Timberwolves players turning down Rudy’s invitation to join him in his native France for team-building practice and socialization during the off-season, Ant led the initiative to make it happen this summer. It was a fantastic tone-setter, especially in light of Finch’s comments in our interview that it is now time to “take the diapers off” of Ant and McDaniels in terms of exhibiting team leadership. 

Ayo Dosunmu — acquired at the trade deadline in February and now inked to a 5-year contract — has waxed eloquent while tipping his cap to Rudy’s desire to share his lifestyle discoveries and gourmet tastes with his teammates. McDaniels has long shared an empathy for defensive drudgery with Gobert, a connection that extends to their synergy at both ends of the court. And the heralded newcomer LaMelo notably includes Gobert in his catholic approach to feeding the open shooter on offense, and thus far seems unruffled when Rudy reverse-Rumpelstiltskins layups into turnovers. 

Paying outward respect to Gobert may be less trifling or “kumbaya” than it seems on first blush. Gobert is an exceedingly proud person who has endured petty and pernicious cruelty from an attention-thirsty throng that ranges from prominent members of his NBA brethren to cowardly cretins on social media. The inherent limitations of his skill set have heaped further indignities, be it riding the bench for much of France’s slate of games in the Olympics, to being taken off Victor Wembanyama in the season-ending debacle of last year’s final playoff loss to the Spurs. 

Related: The Chris Finch Interview, Part 3: How does Kuminga find his ceiling?

Through it all, he remains remarkably stoic. And that’s because he is a learned believer in Stoicism, an ancient philosophy self-defined as teaching “self-mastery, emotional resilience and living in accordance with reason and nature.” 

“I’m big on Stoicism,” Gobert said after that first preseason practice. “I’ve read Marcus Aurelius and those type of guys. It is about finding your own type of leadership and your own purpose. Control what you can control and what I can control is how I show up every day.”

Every day. So respect the hustle. If during the course of this season Ant or McDaniels or any of the dozen twentysomethings begins to mimic the discord and absence of focus that betrayed the much-brayed proclamations of maturity voiced by the team at this time last season, Gobert will respond in deed, if not in word. And maybe pull out some safety pins to re-attach those diapers.

The post Respect the hustle: Rudy Gobert’s stoic leadership is a linchpin for new-look Minnesota Timberwolves appeared first on MinnPost.

This post was shared from MinnPost.