Minnesota is a bad team right now. The Timberwolves have lost four in a row and 7 of 9, and are 25th in the league in that stretch. The defense that propelled this team to near the top of the West is pedestrian this season (12th in the league).
Anthony Edwards took a hard look at what’s going on with the Timberwolves after they blew a 12-point lead midway through the fourth quarter and fell to a depleted Kings team on Wednesday night. Chris Hine of the Minnesota Star Tribune a Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic.
“I don’t like frontrunners. I’m not a frontrunner myself. I hate having frontrunners or thinking we have frontrunners on the team. I don’t think we have any of those. It looks like we were the frontrunners tonight.” , 100%.
“We were down, nobody wanted to say anything. We got up and everybody was cheering. … We get down again and nobody says anything. That’s the definition of a frontrunner. As a team, including me, we were all frontrunners.” tonight.”
“It’s like we’re not even happy out there,” he told Rudy Gobert as he left. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”…
“We’re soft internally as a team,” Edwards said. “Not to the other team, but we’re soft inside. We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Just like us playing with a bunch of little kids. All of us, the whole team. We just can’t.” We don’t talk to each other and we have to figure it out because we can’t go down this road…
“As many of us as there are, all 15 of us, we go into our own shells and just drift away from each other,” he said. “It’s obvious. We see it. I see it, the team sees it, the coaches see it. The fans boo us. It’s crazy, man.”
Two things are very different from last season in Minnesota to this season — 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 certainly belongs to it. For example, DiVincenzo played 1% of his minutes last season in New York, he’s had to do it 66% of the time this season and that’s not his natural conditioning or strength. It shows.
The first thing that’s different is what Edwards gushed about — the apparent lack of cohesion in the locker room that carries over to the court. The talk of Minnesota’s locker room last season was how together they were and they simply played harder than the team they faced every night. That won them a lot of games. As Edwards revealed, 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. They are 12th in the league this season (and slightly worse, 15th in the league, over the last nine games). The team’s net defensive rating was 3.7 points per 100 possessions better a season ago, and it could keep them in games — or win them — on a night (or quarter) when the offense struggled. Not this season.
Neither of these problems is easy to solve.