SAN FRANCISCO — Anthony Edwards grabbed the rebound of a missed shot from Gary Payton II, loped down the right side of the court and used a screen from Jaden McDaniels to create just enough space. He rose and buried a 3-pointer, giving the Minnesota Timberwolves a 106-105 lead with under five minutes to play.
After it splashed through, Edwards turned and skipped back up the court, sensing his opponent on the ropes and getting pummeled by a 15-3 surge. At that point in the game, Edwards was 10 of 13 from the floor, including 5 for 6 from 3-point range, the best thing the Timberwolves had going in an up-and-down game.
Two nights after burying the Warriors with a “masterclass” performance in the fourth quarter of a win, it was easy to see that he wanted to walk into Steph Curry’s house again and throw his feet up on the coffee table with his shoes on.
However, what followed on Sunday was the exact opposite. A missed 3, a missed turn-around jumper, a missed floater, another missed 3, an airballed 3, a turnover on a bad pass and a missed drive, all in the final four minutes. The run of futility played a big role in Golden State pulling away for a 114-106 win that ended Minnesota’s four-game winning streak.
“Just hero shot after hero shot,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch lamented.
Edwards declined to conduct a postgame interview after the game, saying that he had been fined by the league for cursing during his interviews. But as teammate Julius Randle was being interviewed, Edwards still made his feelings known to those around him.
“I just got to f—ing play better,” Edwards said. “I gotta find my teammates when they put three or four (defenders) on me. F—ing terrible by me.”
There were some notable differences in the two fourth quarters in the Bay Area. Edwards dominated on Friday night with Naz Reid at power forward and, mostly, with Mike Conley at point guard. On Sunday, Finch went with Randle at power forward and Nickeil Alexander-Walker as the pseudo-point guard.
Finch had good reasons for both decisions. The Wolves were getting pummeled on the glass by Kevon Looney, Draymond Green and Jonathan Kuminga, creating second chances for their offense in the first half to keep the Wolves from blowing them out. Randle had a team-leading 11 rebounds in the game and Reid was just 1 of 6 from 3-point range, negating some of the shotmaking advantage that favors putting Reid into the lineup.
In the backcourt, Conley was having another strong game, but it was Alexander-Walker who sparked the team’s fourth-quarter comeback. NAW scored 10 of his 19 points in the period, including back-to-back 3s after the Wolves fell behind by nine points about midway through the quarter. As important as Conley generally is to the Wolves, Finch couldn’t justify pulling the red-hot Alexander-Walker.
“Nickeil was going good,” Finch said. “I thought about putting Mike out there, but Kiel was going good.”
The numbers on the season in the clutch are almost comically in favor of going with Conley down the stretch.
In games that are within five points with five minutes to play, Conley has a net rating of 13.3 points per 100 possessions. He is not only the only Timberwolves player with a positive net rating in the clutch, he is the only one by a country mile. Randle is second on the team with a minus-14.1 rating. You read that correctly. The second-best clutch rating on the team is almost 27 points per 100 possessions worse than Conley’s league-leading number. Edwards is third at minus-19.5, a dreadful number.
“I think he took some tough shots,” Finch said of Edwards. “I think he finished 1 of 7 and those are shots that are hard to make over and over and over.”
Sample sizes are still small enough to be misleading this early in the season, but those numbers roughly match the eye test so far. When Conley is on the floor to give the Timberwolves a true point guard, an organizer and a man with a plan, they look good. But when the point guard is off the floor, things just fall apart.
Edwards has to work harder for his offense, and the ball movement that creates good looks for himself and his teammates slows down when Edwards and Randle, two isolation scorers, are monopolizing the usage. Randle was 0 of 4 in the quarter after not playing at all in the final period on Friday night.
Conley played 3 minutes. 29 seconds in the fourth on Sunday and the Wolves were outscored by five points in those minutes, so it wasn’t like he was particularly sharp either.
Rudy Gobert lauded Edwards’ patience and maturity after the game on Friday night, joking that it felt like Christmas when Edwards hit him for lob dunks on back-to-back possessions as the Wolves pulled away.
“It wasn’t Christmas today,” Gobert quipped. “It was Halloween today.”
A crack like that is right up Edwards’ alley. The 23-year-old has always displayed a high emotional IQ in the locker room, and he often will make jokes built on a foundation of truth to get a critique across to a teammate without alienating him.
On Friday night, Edwards said with a laugh that even Randle played defense in that victory and “I’ve never seen him play defense before.”
Randle was sitting right next to Edwards and let out a laugh at the comment. But there was truth layered into the remark. Randle has been one of the most inconsistent defenders on the team, and this was Edwards’ way of gently urging him to up his effort on that side of the court.
Gobert said the Wolves know that there are going to be some times that Edwards does not make the right decisions at the moment. But they also know that no one in that locker room will be more upset with him when things go wrong, as they did on Sunday night, than Edwards will be with himself.
“It’s great that he’s holding himself accountable because he knows that in those situations a lot of times we depend on him making the right play,” Gobert said after the loss. “He’s gotten so much better at doing that. It’s good. Him being in those situations and being aware, it shows that he cares and that he sees what’s happening out there.”
Besides, there were plenty of other reasons the Wolves lost this one as well. The Warriors destroyed Gobert and the Wolves on the glass, especially in the first half when they racked up 15 second-chance points off of nine offensive rebounds.
“When our mind is distracted, we’re going to give up rebounds, we’re going to give up transition,” Gobert said. “We’re going to start fouling a little more. It’s pretty connected to our focus.”
The Warriors shot just 37.5 percent in the first half, but all of those rebounds gave them eight more field-goal attempts. That allowed them to stay within striking distance, down nine at halftime, rather than getting blown out.
In the third quarter, they caught the Wolves off guard with a concerted effort to pick up the pace. The Warriors pushed the ball off of makes and misses, and the Wolves couldn’t keep up. Golden State scored 44 points in the quarter, shot 73 percent from the field and didn’t turn the ball over to take a three-point lead into the fourth.
“There were a few whistles we didn’t agree with, possessions and plays that we saw differently than the refs,” Alexander-Walker said. “I personally just felt like in that third, we struggled to move from one play to another.”
The Wolves still had a successful road trip by taking two out of three games. They now return home and will have four days off before they host the Los Angeles Lakers on Friday night. Earlier in the season, when the Wolves were flailing during an 8-10 start, a loss like this one would have ratcheted up the angst. But they believe they found their identity in that four-game winning streak and leave the Bay Area believing in themselves as much as they have all season long.
“I think I like where we’re at, not in terms of the standings, but more in terms of the things we’ve been through as a team and our awareness right now,” Gobert said. “A game like tonight, we can exactly feel what happened. With that mindset, I think good things will happen.”
(Photo of Julius Randle and Lindy Waters III: David Gonzales / Imagn Images)
