Chiefs boss Dave Rennie hailed the Sunwolves fightback after his team were made to work hard before claiming a 27-20 win in Hamilton on Saturday.
The home side raced into a 20-3 lead at half-time but could only score one more try in the second half, as the vistors came storming back, and the two-time champions failed to secure a try-scoring bonus point.
That left Rennie frustrated but he said the visitors have shown great improvement since the start of the season when they suffered an 83-17 defeat to the Hurricanes in Tokyo.
"They're a lot better side than they were round one," Rennie told Stuff.
"I thought they played well, they certainly kept the ball in hand, and challenged us.
"The game was a lot tighter at the end than we would have hoped.
"We made pretty hard work of it."
Despite losing just once – to the Stormers in Cape Town in Round 7 – the Chiefs have made hard work of putting away away the competitions unfancied sides as last weekend they were also made to work hard before they claimed a 16-7 win over the Western Force in Perth.
"We've won eight out of nine, but we really have high expectations around the quality of our performance, and really tonight was, not even about how many points we score, but to try and put a performance on that we're bloody proud of, and we still fell short tonight," added Rennie.
"After last week's performance against the Force we were pretty clear on what every team brings to this comp. The key for a lot of those is you've got to put them out of it early. At 20-3 we had an opportunity, but we needed to score first [in the second half] probably."
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