Minnesota is a bad team right now. The Timberwolves have dropped four straight and 7-for-9, and in that stretch they rank 25th in the league. The defense that has propelled this team to the top of the West has been pedestrian this season (twelfth in the league).
Anthony Edwards had a harsh assessment of what’s wrong with the Timberwolves after they blew a 12-point lead midway through the fourth quarter and fell to a shorthanded Kings team on Wednesday night, with quotes from his rant via Chris Hine of the Minnesota Star Tribune And Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic.
“I don’t like frontrunners. I’m not a frontrunner myself. I hate to have frontrunners or to think we have frontrunners on the team. I don’t think we do. It looks like we were the frontrunner tonight, 100 %.
“We were down, no one wanted to say anything. We got up and everyone was cheering. … We go back down and no one says anything. That’s the definition of a frontrunner. We as a team, including myself, we were all frontrunners tonight.”
“It’s like we’re not even happy for each other out there,” he told Rudy Gobert as he walked out. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”…
“Internally, we’re so soft as a team,” Edwards said. “Not against the other team, but internally we are soft. We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Just like we play with a bunch of little kids. Everyone, the whole team. That’s just possible.” We can’t talk to each other. And we have to figure it out, because we can’t go down this road…
“As many of us are, all 15 of us, we go into our own shells and just grow away from each other,” he said. “It’s obvious. We can see it. I can see it, the team can see it, the coaches can see it. The fans booing us. That’s crazy, man.”
Two things are very different from last season and this season in Minnesota: How much of that is due to the preseason trade of Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo is up for debate. Although, it is certainly part of it. For example, DiVincenzo played 1% of his minutes last season in New York, this season he had to do it 66% of the time and that is not his natural fitness or strength. It shows.
The first thing that’s different is what Edwards was ranting about: a clear lack of cohesion in the locker room that extends to the field. Last season, all the news coming out of Minnesota’s locker room was about how good they were together, and every night they simply played harder than the team they were facing. They won a lot of games with that. As Edwards exposed, that’s not the case this season.
The second thing is defense. Last season that was the identity of this team, the Timberwolves were the best defense in the NBA. This season they are twelfth in the league (and slightly worse, fifteenth in the league, over the last nine games). The team’s defensive net rating was 3.7 points per 100 possessions better a season ago and could keep them in games for a night (or a quarter) — or win them — when the offense was struggling. Not this season.
None of these problems are easy solutions.
