Minnesota is a bad team right now. The Timberwolves have dropped four straight and 7-of-9, and in that stretch they have the 25th-ranked offense in the league. The defense that propelled this team to near the top of the West is pedestrian this season (12th in the league).
Anthony Edwards had a harsh assessment of what is wrong with the Timberwolves after they blew a 12-point lead midway through the fourth quarter to fall 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. Myself, I’m not a frontrunner. I hate to have frontrunners or to think we have frontrunners on the team. I don’t think we have any of those. It look like we was frontrunners tonight, 100%.
“We was down, nobody wanted to say nothing. We got up and everybody cheering. … We get down again and don’t nobody say nothing. That’s the definition of a frontrunner. We as a team, including myself, we all was frontrunners tonight.”
“It’s like we’re not even happy for each other out there,” he said to Rudy Gobert as he walked out. “I’ve never seen nothing like this in my life.”…
“We soft as hell as a team, internally,” Edwards said. “Not to the other team, but internally, we soft. We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Just like we playing with a bunch of little kids. Everybody, the whole team. We just can’t talk to each other. And we’ve got to figure it out because we can’t go down this road…
“However many of us it is, all 15, we go into our own shell and we’re just growing 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 f****** booing us. That (stuff) is crazy, man.”
Two things are very different from last season to this season in Minnesota — how much of them is due to the pre-season trade of Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo is up for debate. Although, it’s certainly part of it. For example, DiVincenzo played 1% of his minutes at the point last season in New York, this season he’s had to do it 66% of the time and that’s not his natural fit or strength. It shows.
The first thing that’s different is what Edwards ranted about — an obvious lack of cohesion in the locker room that is carrying onto the court. Last season, all the word out of the Minnesota locker room was about how together they were, and nightly they would simply play harder than the team they were facing. That won them a lot of games. As Edwards laid bare, that is not the case this season.
The second thing is defense. Last season that was this team’s identity, the Timberwolves were the best defense in the NBA. This season they are 12th in the league (and a little worse, 15th 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 — or win them games — for a night (or a quarter) when the offense struggled. Not this season.
Neither of these issues are simple fixes.