It’s a great season to be a Minnesota Timberwolves fan, with the team currently leading the NBA‘s Western Conference. Stars Karl-Anthony Towns and Anthony Edwards have undeniable chemistry; veteran Mike Conley shows real leadership on the court; center Rudy Gobert is gunning for his fourth Defensive Player of the Year award. This is the kind of basketball you can get excited about.
But the Timberwolves have an additional, not-so-secret weapon you won’t see at the Target Center in Minneapolis. In fact, he’s never even been there. He’s a superfan who cheers the squad from more than 5,000 miles away in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, posting outrageous content on X/Twitter in response to their wins, repeatedly going viral while drawing baffled responses from around the web — and even members of rival teams. This is Rodrigo Barbosa, the singular voice behind the gonzo “Timberwolves Brasil” — the guy who will share a GIF of a wolf putting a woman’s entire head in its mouth, with the Portuguese caption “THE WOLF IS VERY HUNGRY,” when the T-Wolves beat the Indiana Pacers to go 19-5 overall.
“I really liked playing NBA Live on PlayStation” in the early aughts, Barbosa tells Rolling Stone, by way of explaining his introduction to the American league. “From then on, I started watching NBA games. Plus, I also played basketball in high school. I became a Timberwolves fan in 2004, the season the team reached the Conference Finals and Kevin Garnett” — forever his biggest idol in basketball — “was the MVP.”
A 30-year-old with an advertising degree who works in social media, Barbosa is one of many Brazilians who maintains an online fan feed for an American cultural export. (The number of Brazilian accounts devoted to Taylor Swift updates alone is rather astonishing.) He’s also not unique in his long-distance relationship with an NBA franchise, nor his willingness to push the envelope in demonstrating his passion: a Brazilian fan account for the Phoenix Suns memorably posted AI art of shooting guard Devin Booker kissing the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Dončić, while “Golden State Warriors Brasil” has joked about performing sexual favors for Steph Curry using a suggestive video of a fish eating what appears to be a giant eel.
But, for the moment, Barbosa has them all beat. He just hit the 100,000-follower mark and is the talk of NBA Twitter — partly due to the apparent incongruity of Brazil and Minnesota, though mostly because the Timberwolves are looking like championship contenders, and with each victory, observers know to expect something out-of-pocket from the leader of the pack. Though he launched the account in 2018, it really started to take off at the beginning of the 2023-2024 season, as Barbosa experimented with fetishistic videos evidently sourced from “furry” and “vore” subgenres. (While not explicitly NSFW, you probably don’t want to get caught watching this stuff the office, so consider yourselves warned.) Other animations, though less sexual in nature, were just as confusing.
“This started two years ago, when I had the idea to post a ‘wolf video’ whenever the Timberwolves won,” Barbosa says. “Before, I only used one video, of a Brazilian musical rhythm called ‘funk,’ where a wolf danced holding an umbrella. My followers liked it and I decided to ‘increase the possibilities’ of wolf videos. Some videos I found on the internet, others my followers send to me. I decide which one to post basically on victory day.”
The clips have occasioned shock and delight from U.S. fans. “What did I just watch?” a redditor on r/timberwolves asked of a recent video. One commented, “It’s Timberwolves Brasil’s world and we’re just living in it,” with another agreeing: “We just might be in the golden era for Wolves memes.” In a different thread on the subreddit, a Brazilian user explained what might be getting lost in translation. “In Brazilian Portuguese the word we use for eating can also mean fucking,” they wrote, “and Brazilians use this terminology a lot, for various purposes, but in this case it basically means that the wolves will fuck you up. To keep things fun it evolved into other videos of wolves eating things, and furry porn.”
Barbosa claims the fetish stuff isn’t anything he’s into personally. “No, man,” he says. “I only look for funny videos that have wolves in them. Just that.” And he’s also not up on the world of furries — a subculture based on anthropomorphized animal characters, and while its not explicitly sexual, they are sometimes inserted into pornographic scenarios. “To be completely honest, until last year I didn’t even know what furry was,” he admits. “I always thought they were ‘funny wolf videos.’ I had no idea there was a community (or fetishes) about this. Timberwolves wins are my fetish. My only fetish!”
After Timberwolves Brasil attracted notice from American sports commentators in late October with a disconcerting video of a giant wolf greedily sucking on (and then devouring) a humanoid leopard figure, even NBA pros began keeping tabs on the account. “They can’t keep getting away with this,” tweeted the Boston Celtics’ Oshae Brissett after Barbosa posted another vore animation to mark their loss to the Timberwolves. Barbosa, who was apologetic and complimented Brissett on a “great game,” tells Rolling Stone that becoming this kind of sensation abroad was a “big surprise” for him.
These days, the Timberwolves faithful look forward to Barbosa’s next horny tweet, while fans of other teams dread giving him the opportunity to humiliate them in the post-game ritual. Yet he’ll always be more than a curator of wolf memes and erotica, a fan who criticizes the team’s missteps and disseminates breaking news about its players — like on Monday, when he shared Anthony Edwards’ statement on leaked DMs that appeared to show him urging a woman who sent him images of a positive pregnancy test to “get a abortion lol,” and sending her $100,000 as encouragement to do so. (Edwards later said, “I made comments in the heat of a moment that are not me, and that are not aligned with what I believe and who I want to be as a man.” Barbosa called Edwards’ behavior “regrettable.”) Despite the scandal, of course, Barbosa looked forward to the night’s game against the Miami Heat, “amid controversies” involving Edwards. He had already posted a taunting image of the Heat’s Jimmy Butler fleeing a pack of ravenous wolves.
“I hope people have fun and also stay informed about what’s going on at Timberwolves,” Barbosa says. “I made the account for Timberwolves fans in Brazil, that was always my goal. But I’m extremely happy that people are having fun with the ‘wins videos.’”
Barbosa had the pleasure of seeing the Timberwolves play the Orlando Magic when he went on a trip to Disney World in 2018, but he’s yet to make the pilgrimage to Minneapolis. “Unfortunately, I’ve never been in Minnesota, it’s my big dream,” he says. “My connection with the region is precisely because of the Timberwolves, even though it is miles away.”
If he does get there someday, he’s in for a warm reception. “I feel embraced, especially by Minnesota fans,” he says. Sounds like he’s going to keep these howlers coming.