MINNEAPOLIS — Anthony Edwards sat in front of his locker with an exasperated smile on his face. His former wing man, Karl-Anthony Towns, had just put on a clinic at Target Center, an offensive explosion that wiped out the Minnesota Timberwolves in the blink of an eye.
Towns was nearly perfect, only missing two of 12 shots and hitting all five of his 3-pointers. The box score looked like a video game: 32 points, 20 rebounds, six assists against a defense that had been lights out over the previous 10 games. It looked so easy for him, even against reigning Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert.
For Edwards, everything was difficult. He grinded out 17 points on 16 shots. Every time he turned the corner to try to drive to the rim, there were three New York Knicks waiting for him, unconcerned about the non-shooters they were leaving on the perimeter. The Timberwolves have scored more than 110 points one time in more than a month, and that was 111 points in an overtime loss to the Houston Rockets.
Edwards was asked what has to happen to get the offense moving in the right direction, and that is when it became clear the All-Star does not see this skid as the kind of slump most teams hit at some point in a long season.
“They not gonna like what I say, so I’m just gonna keep my answers to myself,” Edwards said after the 133-107 loss to the Knicks.
Twenty-six games into the regular season, the Timberwolves have not been able to find any answers to boost their fledgling offense. They started out fine thanks to elite 3-point shooting. But as soon as that regressed, the offense has been stuck in mud. Only two teams have worse offensive ratings over the last 10 games than Minnesota’s 105.3 points per 100 possessions. The fit for Julius Randle, acquired from New York in the Towns trade, has been clunky at best. The other player the Wolves received from the Knicks, guard Donte DiVincenzo, is mired in a terrible shooting slump and looks wholly uncomfortable with his role in the offense.
The optics of it all were hard for Wolves fans to stomach in a nationally televised game against the Knicks, the first time Towns played at Target Center since the trade. Mike Conley was 1-for-5. Naz Reid was 1-for-7. Randle scored just 9 points over the final three quarters after a great start. Gobert attempted one shot. And as Towns kept raining 3s on the Wolves’ heads, the fans started pelting the home team with icy boos like they were in a snowball fight over holiday break.
“We don’t have no identity,” Edwards said of the team’s flagging offense. “We know I’m (going to) shoot a bunch of shots. We know Ju is gonna shoot a bunch of shots. That’s all we know. We don’t really know anything else.”
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The biggest problem the Wolves are facing right now is they have a force of nature at their disposal in Edwards, the kind of player who can, and has, bent entire games to his will with a breathtaking array of shot-making from all levels. When Edwards is at his best, he is knocking down stepback 3s, hitting contested midrange pull-ups and driving to the basket with reckless abandon to dunk his opponents into the depths of Mordor, never to be heard from again.
There was so much anticipation for Edwards entering his fifth NBA season and coming off a gold medal win at the Paris Olympics. But the Timberwolves have not been able to provide the spacing needed for lanes to the rim to open. He plays in a starting lineup that includes Jaden McDaniels (32.7 percent on 3s), Randle (35.8 percent) and Gobert, who has attempted 17 3s in 11-plus seasons, most of which have been heaves at the end of quarters. Even the fifth starter in the group, Conley, has seen his 3-point shooting drop precipitously this season, from a career-high 44.2 percent last season to a mediocre 36.5 this year.
That is a long-winded way of saying there isn’t a shooter on the floor who makes the defense think twice about abandoning on the perimeter to cut Edwards off on the way to the rim. The Ant drive is Minnesota’s superpower. It’s the spark that can ignite the group. Opposing defenses are fully aware of the danger that lies within it, so they are selling out to stop it by any means necessary.
“If you watch the game, there’s nothing for me to do when I get downhill,” Edwards said. “Everybody want me to get downhill. I know that’s my strength. I get to the rim, lay the ball up, dunk the ball, but I can’t do nothing if there’s no lanes. It’s not open.”
Much has been made about Edwards’ shot profile this season. His 3-point volume has skyrocketed, from 6.7 attempts per game last season to 10.1 this season. Part of the reason for that is he is making them. Through hard work and dedication, Edwards has turned himself into a deadly long-range shooter with a pretty stroke. He is shooting a career-high 42.4 percent from 3 and leads the league with 111 3s made.
All those long bombs are great from an analytic standpoint, a throwback player adapting to the modern game to give his team the best chance to win. But they also bail the defense out and are much more beholden to rhythm and flow than the rim attacks that are generally more immune to shooting variance.
The Knicks’ plan Thursday was clear — limit Edwards’ shots and make other Wolves beat them. With Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby hounding him on the perimeter, and Towns, Precious Achiuwa and any other defender in the same ZIP code collapsing on him when he went to the rim, Edwards made only three shots in the first half. The game got out of hand in the second quarter, when the Knicks outscored Minnesota 26-2 in the first six minutes.
Edwards simply had nowhere to go, and none of the other Wolves was capable of hitting shots to force the Knicks to divert their attention. For a good portion of that disastrous opening six minutes of the quarter, the Wolves half-court offense devolved into a series of no-pass or one-pass possessions, generating forced looks from outside that clanked and fueled the Knicks’ transition game.
“I think our spacing needs to be at an elite level for anything to function well,” Conley said. “But a lot more cutting, a lot more energy into that. Creating layups, creating two-on-one opportunities. Guys putting bodies on them and sacrificing that aspect of the game, moving the ball, trying to keep the ball moving and not sticky on one or two guys.”
Coach Chris Finch has come under withering criticism from fans for his inability to get the offense going. When Finch was hired away from the Toronto Raptors to replace Ryan Saunders in 2021, he was hailed as an offensive expert. But his teams, in general, have been far better on the defensive end, especially since Gobert’s arrival in 2022.
Chris Finch calls a play against the LA Clippers at Intuit Dome. (Kiyoshi Mio / Imagn Images)
Finch prefers a free-flowing offense where players react in real time to what the defense is doing and play off that. It’s a more organic philosophy, but this team does not seem well-suited for it. With two isolation-heavy players in Randle and Edwards, Finch has started to preach the importance of structure, of calling set plays to make sure everyone follows their responsibilities and the freelancing does not derail their possessions.
“Been trying to call a lot of sets, a lot of plays throughout that part of the game, but we’re gonna have to get back to doing what we always do,” Finch said. “We know what works. When we move the ball early, get other guys involved, shots will open up.”
Conley is the quarterback of the offense, and he said after the loss that Finch will have to continue leaning on structure until the players show they are capable of the freedom to make their own decisions.
“When you’re in a structured play, you have the ideal spacing,” Conley said. “Guys know exactly where they’re supposed to be. When it’s more free-flowing, you’ve got guys cutting into different spaces and getting random in actions, and you might get an overloaded side that pops up in there and the spacing can get jumbled up.”
Conley and Edwards said this was not a coaching problem. Finch and his staff, they said, have provided strong game plans and tried to make adjustments throughout the games. It is on the players to execute at a higher level.
“It’s not on the coaches at all. It’s on us,” Edwards said. “We out there playing, but we got to make it easier for each other. Coaches put us in great position, too, man. We just don’t do it.”
More structure could also help the Wolves get to an action that has been reliable in producing good offense. The Conley-Gobert pick-and-roll has been a staple for them the last two years but has not been as prevalent this season.
Getting Gobert involved in the offense in some fashion is important. When he does not get touches, his defensive intensity drops dramatically. That was the case against the Knicks when Gobert did not attempt a shot in the first half and took only one all game. The trickle-down effect was short closeouts from him on Towns on the perimeter and a galling lack of attention to the glass. The Wolves were outrebounded 57-37, with Gobert only getting four of them. The Wolves were outscored by a staggering 37 points in Gobert’s 22 minutes.
“I didn’t like my energy, my activity, my physicality,” Gobert said. “I thought I was absent tonight.”
That is unacceptable for a player who prides himself on being a consistent leader by example for the younger Wolves. Right now, with their offense in shambles, the Wolves have to be on top of things on defense. They have the No. 1-ranked defense in the NBA over the past 10 games, in large part because Gobert’s activity has been off the charts. When he doesn’t show up, the Wolves don’t have a prayer of winning a shootout.
“On every aspect, offensively, defensively, they out-competed us,” Gobert said. “They were playing more as a team than we did. They defended more as a team than we did. They just beat us on every aspect of the game.”
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There is a move Finch could make to try to breathe more space and movement into the offense. Moving Reid into the starting lineup would give Edwards another shooter on the floor who could be harder for a defender to leave on the perimeter. Reid made 41 percent of his 3s last year on his way to winning Sixth Man of the Year. He is shooting much worse this season, just 34.6 percent, but that could be adapting to playing next to Randle in the frontcourt after spending last year with either Towns or Gobert by his side.
The Wolves had to make a similar change last season when Towns went out in March with knee surgery. They went 12-6 in the 18 games he missed, posting a respectable 115.3 offensive rating, 12th in the league during that span. Reid started 13 straight games in which he was available at the end of that stretch. Minnesota went 10-3 in those games with a 116.4 offensive rating.
Moving Randle to the second unit could put him in more of a featured scorer role if he’s not sharing the floor as much with Edwards. There is no indication this move is close to happening. Finch coached Randle in New Orleans and is one of his biggest supporters in the organization. The coach believes in Randle’s ability to create his own shot in the half court and find others for good looks as well. There is also a political element that has to be considered. Randle is the 30-year-old vet with All-Star nods on his resume and a player option on his contract for next season. Moving from New York to Minnesota a day before training camp was a lot for him and DiVincenzo, so exercising some patience might be the prudent move.
But there is one area in which the Wolves cannot afford to be patient any longer, Conley said. They have to get into the gym and practice more right now to try to iron out the offensive issues. At this time of the NBA calendar, with the holidays approaching and the games coming, teams can often forego practice time for rest. Sitting at 14-12 and tied with two other teams for eighth place in the Western Conference, the Wolves don’t have that luxury. They have to find a way to close the gap between a defense that has, for the most part, been very good and an offense that can’t seem to get out of its own way.
“We can’t take days where we take practices off or have an easier day,” Conley said. “We might need to be in there a little bit longer to accomplish both of those things. We want our defense to still be good, but offensively, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, and we know it. That’s going to require a lot of time and effort to be put into that side of the ball.”
(Top photo of Anthony Edwards: Bruce Kluckhohn / Imagn Images)
