On a night where the Timberwolves notched their 13th win in a row, the natural inclination to celebrate didn’t feel appropriate.
Yes, the Wolves haven’t lost at home since Dec. 16 – a brutal loss to the Phoenix Suns. Despite whatever faults the Wolves have exposed themselves to over this confusing-but-exciting season, they have clearly developed a homecourt advantage.
That is important.
On Sunday night, the Sacramento Kings – a team with one of the worst road records in the league – came in and nearly beat the Timberwolves.
While some of the stat lines would indicate the Wolves had a mostly-good night, the mood of the players following the game suggested otherwise. Jimmy Butler didn’t take post-game questions, while Karl-Anthony Towns and Tom Thibodeau came right out and said it.
“We didn’t play well, but we did enough to win in the end,” Thibodeau said, bluntly, following the game.
In most cases, doing “just enough to win” is a good thing. In the grand scheme of things, it is. Cliche as it might be, a win is, in fact, a win. But this win didn’t feel like the previous 12 wins at the Target Center.
It felt like their six-point win over Orlando, their 11-point win over Phoenix or their five-point win over Dallas.
What do those games have in common? They all happened within the first quarter of the season; a time when the Timberwolves were still figuring each other out.
In that aforementioned stretch – Nov.1 to Dec. 10 – the Timberwolves were actually in the middle of the pack defensively – 16th in defensive rating – but their offense looked like a bunch of guys playing together for the first time.
Butler wasn’t scoring like he was expected to, Towns’ inconsistent defense sometimes led to erratic offense and Jeff Teague still didn’t look comfortable in his new digs.
At the time that was more excusable. On Sunday, it was a bit more confusing and potentially concerning. What’s especially frustrating about this stretch is what Wolves fans have seen from their team in the very recent past.
For a month and change, the Timberwolves had the best net rating in the NBA, a top-two offense and a top-five defense. Butler had a stretch of true MVP-caliber basketball, while Towns and Andrew Wiggins began playing the best stretch of defense in their respective careers.
They were beating good teams and doing it in convincing fashion.
On Sunday, it felt more like the early November stretch, and has for a while.
“It’s a long season, it really is,” Jamal Crawford said following the win. “There will be highs and lows, but if we can find ways to win games like this when we aren’t technically at our best, then it’s a good thing for us.”
The struggles started almost immediately.
De’Aaron Fox got the Kings off to a hot start, scoring four shots of the game and dropping 14 points in the first quarter. They gave up 29 first quarter points to the team with the second-worst offensive rating.
Towns got out of his personal offensive funk – “funk” meaning a lack of shot attempts, more than anything else – dropping 17 in the first half and 29 overall.
Down the stretch, he hit one of three 3s that got the game into a more comfortable position for his team, and had a couple of massive blocks that got the crowd into it.
The biggest was the two-part block – first from Towns, then from Wiggins – that might have been the team’s biggest fuel injection in the second half.
Still, after a game where he filled the stat sheet on both ends of the floor, Towns’ mind was fixed around the defensive issues.
“We didn’t hustle as hard as we usually do to play with the energy,” he said. “We didn’t play with that same urgency.”
Towns is right. Over the past 14 games – a stretch where the Wolves have gone 6-8 – the Wolves are 29th in defensive rating over that stretch, only ahead of the Suns.
The last time the Timberwolves lost at home was, funny enough, to the Suns. The Kings have performed to a level similar to Phoenix this year, and nearly handed the Wolves a loss they aren’t used to.
If they keep up at the recent pace they’ve been on – which extends back to their narrow losses to Chicago and Cleveland on the road – the win streak will continue to be in jeopardy.
The good news? The Wolves seemed to figure things out in the fourth quarter.
They still allowed 47.6 percent shooting from Sacramento in that quarter, but also dropped 36 points of their own. Most importantly: they made big plays down the stretch; game-impacting plays that notched them the win.
The “double block” featured above was one of them. A trio of fourth quarter steals from Tyus Jones was another example. Good late-game shooting from Butler and Jeff Teague is another.
“We pulled it together in the fourth quarter,” Towns said. “That’s what the good teams do, regardless of how the first three quarters went. We picked it up in the fourth.”
The fourth quarter, thankfully, was more reminiscent of the quality basketball shown in December. The timeframe when they looked elite.
The first three quarters were more like the beginning of the season, when they didn’t really know what they were.
The Wolves know what they can do, and should know how to get back to where they were to start the year. As they enter All-Star weekend, they’ll have that to count on.
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