‘Warrior’ Mike Conley navigated one of his ‘toughest’ seasons for Timberwolves

LOS ANGELES – A few weeks ago, after the Timberwolves defeated Philadelphia, Mike Conley was answering questions about how the team played. They won, but they weren’t happy with how they performed.

At 37, Conley has seen everything in the NBA, and he often serves as the team’s unofficial spokesperson when things are tough. If Conley sounds concerned about how the team is playing, then everyone else should be.

But then the conversation turned to how difficult this season has been for him individually, how he started slowly, had to play through various injuries and regain the form he knew was in there, but those physical ailments were holding back.

“This season has been one of the toughest ones I’ve had to deal with,” Conley said.

Coming from an 18-year veteran, that carries some weight.

The Timberwolves have a 1-0 lead in their best-of-seven NBA Western Conference first-round series against the Lakers after a dominating 117-95 Game 1 performance Saturday night. Game 2 is Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena, with their veteran point guard performing at a high level.

But it wasn’t easy to get there. Conley has played through a left wrist injury that he said will require surgery when his playing days are over. It was especially bothersome in the offseason and in the early part of the regular season as Conley tried to manage it without surgery, but it affected his offseason preparation. That led to a slow start.

“Obviously, a lot of expectation coming into the season after the year we had, myself included, to not be feeling the best to start the season and not playing the best — those combinations are not good together,” he said.

Was Conley washed, as popular vernacular likes to call it when someone may be close to retirement? Would he be able to still play at the level he needed to for himself and the team? Did he ever have any doubt he could get back to that level?

He always felt the skill and the ability was still there, but if there was uncertainty for Conley, it was if he would ever be fully healthy to allow his talent and skill to show again.

“In the health part, it was like, am I ever gonna get my wrist right?” he said. “Or am I ever gonna get feeling the same where I can hold the ball again correctly, or, not feel pain? And stuff like that. Those are all questions that were staying in my head. Once that went away, the game started to slowly come back together and it’s easier to be confident when you know you’re not feeling something crazy every time you flick your wrist or dribble the ball or play defense.”

The numbers eventually got back to where he liked them. Conley deferred a lot of the season in an effort to get his teammates going, so he only averaged 8.2 points per game on 1.9 fewer shot attempts, but he finished the season shooting 41% from three-point range. He can still be lethal from outside when needed. And even while he was playing through pain, his effort never waned.

“Usually a lot of times we point out during film sessions, like the coaches point out, that Mike is the oldest guy, but he’s the one that competes the hardest on a lot of plays,” center Rudy Gobert said. “It’s really a great way for him to lead the younger guys to this level of competitiveness, professionalism.

The wrist wasn’t the only thing bothering him.

Conley, in the first season of a two-year, $20.75 million contract, dislocated a finger around the time of the All-Star break, another injury he mostly played through. There was just management and upkeep with other parts of his body throughout the course of the season, to the point that he would sit some parts of back to back games for rest purposes, something he didn’t do last season, but was more open to doing this one.

That could be hard for Conley to take at times, he always wants to play; it might affect his rhythm when he doesn’t. He also wants to set an example for younger players on the team that they shouldn’t take games off, and he never let the team see how much of a toll the injuries might have been taking on him, even though they knew it.

“Mike a warrior, man,” Anthony Edwards said that night in Philadelphia. “Every game I come in like, if he get hurt prior to that game, I come in and I’m hurting and I see Mike, he got his outfit on, getting ready to play. I always tell myself, ain’t nothing wrong with me. Because he’s 37, man. He still plays the game like it’s his first time playing it. He love the game. You grow fond of someone like that.”

Edwards said he looks at Conley as an “uncle-slash-big brother” which is a sentiment a lot of Wolves on the team have for him.

But just because he’s older in NBA years doesn’t mean he’s old in how he acts or plays. He still leads pre-game huddles with a little dance he does that gets his teammates smiling just before tipoff, and in Game 1 against the Lakers, when some thought he might be a liability for the Wolves, Conley had nine points and three steals, including one moment when he ripped the ball from LeBron James, and was a plus-13.

“You can’t ask for nobody better than Mike Conley,” Edwards said.