No, the sky isn’t falling on the Timberwolves. Not yet, anyway. It’s too early in the NBA season to declare anything a disaster, particularly for a team that made a seismic deal just a few days before the start of training camp.

Remember, there are 70 more games to play over the next five months, with the next occurring Friday in Sacramento.

The Wolves are 6-6 and just lost consecutive games in Portland. But guess what? The Knicks, the team on the other end of the Karl-Anthony Towns trade, are 5-6, and just lost at home to Chicago on Wednesday. Adjustments aren’t easy.

That doesn’t mean both teams can’t be better in the long run for the move they chose to make. Still, the growing pains are difficult to endure. But they’re tolerable, if they indeed are a step toward growth. For the Wolves, there’s no certainty that’s what’s occurring at the moment. Everything looks disjointed. The defense lacks any teeth. The offense struggles with decision- and shot-making.

A team that prided itself on imposing its will night in and night out a year ago is too often the side taking body blows throughout games at the moment.

The Wolves are .500 with three straight bad losses to teams that aren’t going anywhere fast. Two of their wins required late-game heroics. Frankly, they’re a tough watch at the moment.

It all feels very reminiscent of the start of the 2022-23 season. Fresh off the Rudy Gobert trade, Minnesota’s roster pieces seemed to fit together like ketchup and peanut butter. The Wolves looked incapable of getting back in transition on defense. The offense was bogged down by a lack of spacing and understanding of how to utilize Gobert.

They opened that season 5-8 with a number of embarrassing blowout defeats. Twice in a week’s span, they fell to a San Antonio team that went on to win 22 games that season. Sound familiar?

Most will pin that season’s struggles on the calf injury that sidelined Towns for much of the season. But Minnesota was 10-10 and in the process of getting blown out by the Wizards when Towns went down. The experiment was not working. And it wasn’t obvious the tide was going to shift in the Wolves’ direction.

Of course, everyone knows what happened from there. Minnesota dealt D’Angelo Russell for Mike Conley and Nickeil Alexander-Walker at the trade deadline that season. Those two filled a couple of Minnesota’s biggest needs. Continuity was created over the course of the next season-plus, and the Wolves reached the 2024 Western Conference Finals with the second-best team in franchise history.

But it’s that result that seemingly has fans so discontent at the moment. The Wolves appeared to be on the cusp of a championship. Now they’ve taken a step back. That’s not fun. It’s frustrating.

And there’s a significant unknown as to whether that backtrack will indeed be brief and lead to two subsequent steps forward.

The 2024-25 Wolves have yet to establish any sort of identity. The losses of Towns and Kyle Anderson are felt, while the additions of Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo simply haven’t been additive enough. Perhaps that will change with time. Chemistry and continuity generally need to be cultivated throughout the peaks and valleys of a season.

But a few more glimpses of potential throughout the journey would go a long way toward appeasing Wolves supporters who justifiably wonder if these pains are precursors to progress to come or just more pain.