Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert only played 32 games together last season.

NBA basketball returns Oct. 24. We are counting down the days like the seconds on a shot clock — literally, that’s what we’re doing. As of Oct. 1, our writers will list 24 storylines heading into the 2023-24 NBA season.

A new storyline will drop each day. Here is No. 13:

The Timberwolves should know by midseason if the Rudy Gobert-Karl-Anthony Towns experiment is working out or not.

This is not a patient league. One complete NBA cycle — from the Draft, through an offseason, into the preseason, followed by the regular season and the playoffs — can feel like a lifetime of stability when 29 other organizations are spinning through countless changes. “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse” doesn’t allow for a lot of thoughtful pondering and reflection on a personnel move made two or three years ago. A year does not qualify as a small sample size, not in the NBA.

A half-season? That would have been enough in 2022-23 to assess Minnesota’s grand experiment — or in Starbucks’ terms, venti — of teaming Gobert with Towns for a new millennium “Twin Towers” approach. But the pair of talented, not–completely–redundant bigs only logged 32 games together from start to finish due to Towns’ mother-of-all calf strain injury.

The Wolves went 16-16 with the tandem in regular season, AT&T Play-In Tournament and playoff games combined. They outscored teams by an extra 0.4 points per 100 possessions with both on the floor in the first 27 compared to a minus-7.6 net in the five-game elimination against Denver.

Allowing for some acclimation to a new team, Gobert looked a lot like his old self, with stats near his career averages (with a dip in blocks) and familiar rim protection. Towns was the one adjusting his game more profoundly, with only one-fifth of his shots coming inside three feet last season compared to one-third through his first seven seasons. His 3-point percentage (36.6%) fell to its lowest rate since his rookie season. Also, it remains to be seen post-injury and at age 28 if he’ll have the quickness needed to defend out on the floor when Gobert has his and the other Wolves’ backs inside.

There already were rumblings this summer that GM Tim Connelly might shop Towns as part of the move to flip Minnesota’s keys to Anthony Edwards. It would be naïve to think the February trade deadline could come and go with the Wolves essentially telling their fans, “Well, we’re still assessing…” on the Towns-Gobert gamble.