MINNEAPOLIS — The Timberwolves weren’t guarding Christian Braun, but they were barking at him. He had been looking forward to it. Stationing himself in the corner in front of their bench, he listened closely to their taunts, trying to locate one voice in particular. It was coming from his left.
As he caught a pass from Nikola Jokic and began to uncork a 3-pointer moments later, his old friend suddenly lunged toward him and shouted, doing his part to distract the open shooter. But Braun was ready for it. “When I catch the ball in the corner, they say the same exact thing every single time,” he said. “So I’ve come to expect it. … It’s a lot of different things from different people. So I try to pick out one or two things that I hear and go for that person.”
Usually, that person is Bones Hyland.
Braun drained the shot and pointed at his former Nuggets teammate. It was the first quarter of Game 1 between Denver and Minnesota, and the trash talk was already flying both directions.
“I’m pretty close with Bones, from when he was here. So he’s obviously a really good dude, and I love going back and forth with him,” Braun explained. “It was funny because I think in the preseason, it was the same exact thing. I caught it in the corner, hit a shot, turned around, looked at him — and it just feels so familiar. Playing these guys. We’ve played them so many times.”
The Nuggets and Timberwolves can’t seem to escape each other. Not in the regular season, when they face off four times as division opponents. Not in the offseason, when their coaching staffs and front offices regularly trade places. And not in the NBA playoffs, where they’re meeting for the third time in four years.
Not all NBA rivalries are created equal. This one has persisted long enough to stand tall as arguably the most compelling of the 2020s. In large part because the only feeling more satisfying than defeating your enemies is that of defeating your friends.
“It’s weird to shake their hands after the series,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said, “because you know those guys so well. But during it, it’s kind of, ‘See you in a couple of weeks.'”
Tim Connelly’s fingerprints on both rosters
The staff connections were already endless, and they’ve somehow expanded over the last year. Most of them were related to Tim Connelly, Minnesota’s president of basketball operations, who previously ran Denver’s front office for nine years. He was the Nuggets’ lead executive when they drafted Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr.; when they hired Michael Malone; when they traded for Aaron Gordon. He was the chief architect of a championship team. But he walked away from Denver less than a year before his vision was realized, taking the Timberwolves job in 2022. Jokic still stays in touch with him.
“I think people see Tim as a general manager, but he is a really good person, really good friend,” the star center said last week. “So I wish people (could) know Tim. Like, (so they) don’t look at Tim as a general manager.”
Connelly took Jon Wallace with him to Minnesota. Wallace had joined the Nuggets in 2019 as a basketball operations associate — a low-level role that included building relationships with players. (Connelly introduced him and Murray via group chat, sparking a friendship.) Then last June, the Nuggets snatched Wallace back from Minnesota, hiring him as their new co-general manager alongside his friend Ben Tenzer — another longtime Connelly disciple who’d been a steady hand behind the scenes in Denver’s front office since 2013.
Wallace and Tenzer’s fingerprints are all over this Nuggets roster, even though they’ve only been in charge for 10 months. They brought in four new rotation players in their first offseason, including Bruce Brown — another link to the Nuggets-Wolves rivalry. It was he who said after Denver won the championship in 2023 that “our toughest series was Minnesota,” despite the first-round clash lasting only five games.
“Jon and Ben, they’re like family. We couldn’t be more proud,” Connelly told The Denver Post earlier this season. “It’s awesome, you know? Josh (Kroenke) has remained one of my best friends. To see Ben’s growth, to see Jon, his rapid ascent, and to see the team’s success, to see DA — there’s a tremendous sense of pride watching your buddies do such great things professionally. And they’re all just great guys. … Four times a year, I want to beat them, and the other 78, you won’t find a bigger Denver Nuggets home than ours.”
Connelly’s audacity as a lead executive has likewise been apparent throughout his time in Minnesota, even though the franchise-altering Anthony Edwards draft pick was before his time. When he traded four first-round picks for defensive stopper Rudy Gobert, he had Jokic specifically in mind. And his decision to partner with Gobert was a full-circle development dating back to his first week in Denver. In 2013, the Nuggets traded away Gobert’s draft rights to Utah for cash and a future second-round pick.
The connections run even deeper. Denver’s general manager before the Wallace-Tenzer tandem, Calvin Booth, ascended with the Timberwolves from 2013-17, first as a scout then as their director of player personnel. Connelly hired Booth away from Minnesota in 2017. Then Booth succeeded Connelly as Denver’s lead executive when Connelly left for Minnesota. Roster-building gamesmanship ensued between the rivals. In the 2024 NBA Draft, Denver originally possessed the 28th pick in the first round — one spot behind Minnesota. Booth was high on Dayton’s DaRon Holmes II, but he thought his former boss might nab the big man prospect at No. 27. Whether those suspicions were valid or a result of subterfuge by Connelly, the Nuggets ultimately traded up six spots to draft Holmes, sacrificing three future second-round picks.
First-year Nuggets coach David Adelman got his start in the NBA as a Timberwolves player development assistant under his dad, Hall of Famer Rick Adelman. JJ Barea was a player in Minnesota at the time and lived in the same building as David. They used to meet up for postgame beers to rehash the night and talk basketball — laying a groundwork, unbeknownst to them, for Adelman to hire Barea more than a decade later. Barea is now one of the top assistants on Denver’s staff, collaborating with Adelman on the offense.
Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch is a former Nuggets assistant under Malone. So is Micah Nori, Finch’s lead assistant. Nori and Jokic talked last week before the playoffs began, with Nori lamenting that he was sick of watching Jokic’s film. “We’ve definitely played, like, 40 times in the last three years against them,” Jokic agreed. They’ve exchanged a sizable amount of good-natured trash talk, both in private and public.
“We were together in the Summer League,” Jokic reminisced, “and he always made me run the lines. And I didn’t get the ball from him. He didn’t trust me at all. And then he always wants to take all the credit for my success right now.”
Hyland was on the Nuggets’ roster the year they won the championship, but he fell out of favor with veteran players and was shipped off to Los Angeles at the trade deadline that season. Three years later, he has found a home in Minnesota, where Connelly took him back. Hyland said this season that he feels no ill will toward the Nuggets. When he arrived at Ball Arena for Game 1 of the series last week, he and Tenzer greeted each other in the back hallways fondly.
Then the ball was tipped, and Hyland assumed his role as an irritant of Denver’s corner shooters.
“It’s fun, man,” Braun said. “They’re a really good team. They’re a competitive group. And this series between the two teams is always really fun for us. … Just a lot of familiar faces. So you bump into the same person a million times. That’s kind of what happens. So it’s a fun series, and I think both sides enjoy playing each other.”
“I kind of felt it in preseason, to be honest with you,” said Tim Hardaway Jr., a newcomer to the rivalry. “Just how kind of physical it would be. Both ends of the floor.”
The players have increasingly bought in over the years, even those without as many connections to the other city. Edwards taunted Nuggets fans at the end of Minnesota’s Game 7 win in 2024, getting on Jokic’s nerves in the process. Regular-season games have turned into classics since then. There was Russell Westbrook’s missed layup in double-overtime. There was Jokic’s 56-point Christmas masterpiece this season, which ended with a frustrated Edwards getting ejected and laughed at by Ball Arena.
Jaden McDaniels upped the stakes this week when he called out several Nuggets players by name, labeling them bad defenders. The Wolves backed up his talk with a Game 3 rout. A first-round series to settle the score had taken another dramatic emotional swing, as these matchups between the Nuggets and Timberwolves tend to do.
“Just playing Denver,” McDaniels said afterward, “really motivates us.”
