Timberwolves

12/3 RECAP: Butler Unsatisfied After Timberwolves Edge Clippers 112-106

It was anything but pretty, but they’ll take it. Most of them.

“You can’t take no team lightly,” Karl-Anthony Towns said after his Timberwolves narrowly defeated the Los Angeles Clippers 112-106. “We came in with a great game plan, we came in with a fresh mind. We were ready to play.”

The Clippers came into the game with an 8-13 record, but had recently come off a stretch where they had lost 12 of their last 13 games. They’re as injury-plagued as a team comes, with Danilo Gallinari, Milos Teodosic and most notably Blake Griffin missing substantial time, including Sunday’s game against the Wolves.

The Wolves, while missing key role player Nemanja Bjelica, have had the fortune of mostly good health this year, and are enjoying their best start to a season in over a decade.

But as the final score indicates, the play by the Wolves did not indicate the massive difference in on-paper advantage. If not for a dominant fourth-quarter performance from Jimmy Butler, who scored 20 points in the fourth alone, the score would have looked very different.

But the game never felt safe, even when Butler was going off. While much of the team seemed content with just escaping with the win, the game’s hero refused to conform.

“Like I’ve said time and time again, we’ve got to start guarding somebody,” Butler said. “It’s really bad, really noticeable, and everybody capitalizes on it.”

It was a close affair throughout the game, and the defense was the sole reason why. The Wolves held a slight advantage almost the entire way, but the bad defense was its most glaring in the fourth quarter.

In that quarter, the Timberwolves allowed the Clippers to shoot 52 percent from the field, giving up a slew of dunks and open 3-pointers.

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While on the floor, the team often looked disoriented on the floor, the players seemed to share the same message as head coach Tom Thibodeau.

“Miscommunication, it was awareness,” Thibodeau said. “We’re talking to each other, and they’re racing the ball up the floor. The fourth quarter is so different, and we have a lot to do in that area.”

While the tone may have been a bit different, his leading scorer this season seemed to have a similar opinion.

“It was miscommunications,” Towns said. “It was going through our defensive gameplan, but also was trying to talk to each other in moments.”

Even if the miscommunications were there – and on some plays, they were very much there – certain statistics were still glaring after the game, and made it hard to chalk the bad defense up as “just one of those things”.

Austin Rivers, whose shooting hasn’t been impressive this season, shot 7 of 8 from 3-point range, and finished with 30 points, five rebounds and five assists on just 14 shots.

Rivers and Lou Williams alone edged the Wolves in 3-point shooting, and the Clippers nearly doubled Minnesota’s efforts. The point guards for the Clippers had a big role in Sunday’s matchup, but were ultimately the only major cog keeping them relevant.

His matchup, Jeff Teague, did a great job keeping pace with Rivers through the first quarter, but quickly fell off. Seven of his nine points came in that first quarter, and he didn’t sink another field goal for the rest of the game.

It was also a game the Wolves got some help from the officials in. DeAndre Jordan was called for five personal fouls, though several of them appeared to be “phantom calls,” or at least calls with incidental contact from Jordan and his opponent.

And while Jordan was able to shoot a perfect 8 of 8 from the field, they were still able to capitalize on the touchy foul calls, and come away with a close win.

Of course, looking past the fact that the Wolves were barely able to scrape one out against one of the worst teams in the league, they’re also the first half of a back-to-back.

The good news? It’s against another injury-plagued team, the Memphis Grizzlies.

The bad news? It’s their second back-to-back in the last week, and for a team that has looked fatigued in that span, flying to Memphis to play a game the following day is not a promising next step.

Still, as frustrated as Butler might have been after Sunday’s matchup, he refuses to allow fatigue to be an excuse going into Memphis.

“I think everybody in this locker room wanted to be a professional basketball player and play 48 minutes if they could,” he said.

But Butler he can’t do it alone. Not every night.


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