After an impressive Game 4 win with their backs against the wall, the Minnesota Timberwolves are headed back to Denver for another win-or-go-home game. While no NBA team has ever come back to win a playoff series after starting down 3-0, the Wolves still have a lot to play for. Primarily, pride is on the line, as Anthony Edwards implied after the Game 3 loss. He told the team, “I’m not getting swept,” before proceeding to put on a stunning performance and willing Minnesota to a win.
Beyond that, the Wolves also have the chance to prove to the national media, the fans, and themselves, that the two-big experiment can work against a good team. At the very least, they can show that it’s moving in a positive enough direction that they can justify spending next season trying to find a consistent winning formula. It will be much easier to justify keeping most of the same team around next year if they are able to win Game 5, and take the series to 6 or even 7 games.
And who knows? If there’s any team that could make history by winning a series after starting down 3, it would be this year’s Wolves. Not because I believe they’ve suddenly become world beaters after one playoff win. It’s because this team does things that doesn’t make sense all the time. They lost to several tanking teams in the regular season, then strung together a bunch of wins against good teams, just when you think the season is over.
All I know is we have to expect the unexpected with this iteration of the Timberwolves.
Of course, before achieving these lofty, unrealistic, and historically unprecedented goals, the Timberwolves need to start by winning Game 5. The Denver Nuggets are a well-polished machine on offense, and has three incredible shot-makers including two-time MVP Nikola Jokic. But they also have weaknesses, particularly on defense. The Wolves picked at a few of those weaknesses successfully in Game 4, and the 3rd quarter of Game 3. If they can build on some of those things in Game 5, they will have a legitimate chance to win again.
Denver’s defense was solid but ultimately average throughout the season. They ended the year with the 15th-best defensive rating in the league at 113.5. Their perimeter defenders are extremely disciplined, and they don’t let you get a lot of wide open shots as we’ve seen in Games 1 through 4. But although they hustle and execute their plans well, their top 3 players, Jokic, Jamal Murray, and Michael Porter Jr., are not great one-on-one defenders. Of course, because they’re all such talented offensive players, they ended the year with the fifth-best offensive rating at 116.8, and the best record in the Western Conference.
Still, everyone in the league has a weakness that can be situationally exploited, even a two-time MVP and offensive mastermind like Jokic. Rim protection is his. If the Timberwolves want to give themselves the best chance to win Game 5, that’s an area of Jokic’s game they should attempt to exploit. The Wolves didn’t drive into the paint enough in Game 1, and only scored 36 points in the paint.
The offense was stagnant in many ways, and the loss happened for a multitude of reasons. However, the Timberwolves didn’t force the issue, even though it’s one of Denver’s few weaknesses. As a result, they only scored 80 points. In Game 4, the Wolves, especially Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns, were very intentional about trying to get to the rim and forcing Jokic to make defensive plays. Minnesota found success in continually driving to the hoop, and scored 54 paint points, tying Denver in that category for the first time in the series.
Driving into the paint also has benefits beyond just being the easiest place to score on the court against the Nuggets. It also forces Jokic to be active in more plays on defense and expend more energy. Jokic is absolutely essential to Denver’s offense, and they need him in the game as much as possible to reach their peak as a team. Most teams are worse without their superstar playing. However, Jokic’s on/off numbers in the past few years are the stuff of legends, and are a big part of why he won MVP last year. The Joker does so much for his team when he’s in the game, that when he’s off the court, the Nuggets don’t operate in the same way. Therefore, Denver’s lack of depth at center makes them less capable of treading water without him.
As a result, the Timberwolves should do anything that they can do to keep him off the court — beyond “breaking the code” and pulling a Dillon Brooks or Draymond Green-like dirty play. The three ways to do that are tiring him out so he needs extra bench rest, getting him into foul trouble, or making him so upset that he does something to get himself ejected. Say, for example, pushing someone in the back.
The last option is fairly uncontrollable and could result in serious injury, as it did for Markieff Morris, of course. Therefore, the Wolves should focus on the first two options. They need to do their best to make Jokic run and work hard on both ends of the court. Beyond just driving to the rim, and putting pressure on him to block shots, they should also try to put him in switches in pick-and-roll and make him run more than he’s used to.
Jokic is in great shape, but almost everyone has an exhaustion breaking point. The Nuggets want to actively avoid tiring him out early in the playoffs because they are hoping to make a finals run. Therefore, the Timberwolves should see if they can tire him out so that he has to spend more time on the bench. If fatigued, Jokic is more likely to make more mental mistakes toward the end of the game, like the free throw he missed at the end of regulation in Game 4. Minnesota shouldn’t go so far out of their way to hunt him that they stop running their normal offense. They just need to be intentional about getting downhill into the paint and making him run.
Similarly, the harder you make any defender’s job in the NBA, the easier it is for them to foul out. We learned this over the course of the season with Jaden McDaniels. He guarded the opponents’ best players in almost every regular season game unless they were a center. Partly as a result of that, he ended up committing the second-most fouls in the NBA this season. Jokic is a fairly disciplined defender, and knows his team needs him on the court, which can both work to his advantage and his disadvantage in specific situations. Just like KAT, if you can get him into foul trouble, Jokic will play more tentative defense, contest shots less heavily, and be even less of a deterrent around the rim. Better yet, Michael Malone will have to bench him.
We witnessed the effects of Jokic’s foul trouble in Game 4. After he picked up two quick fouls early in the first quarter, Jokic was less aggressive on defense. His foul trouble forced Jokic to take a stationary position in the paint to avoid fouls, instead of moving with the driver. That made scoring around the rim easier for the Wolves, especially Ant, who started taking advantage of Jokic’s tentativeness. On one possession, Edwards Euro-stepped right around Jokic for an easy layup.
While this isn’t a fool-proof strategy for winning, it is an effective way to force Denver’s hand and make them pull out all the stops to win. Jokic has already fouled out once this series in Game 1. But it didn’t matter because the Wolves were already down by over 20 points before it happened late in the game. Still, it proves that you can bait Jokic into making dumb fouls. If the Wolves can do it in a game that they are still in, it could be devastating for the Nuggets.
Making Jokic carry the Nuggets worked for the Timberwolves in Game 4. Although he put up an incredible individual stat line, Jokic didn’t have enough gas in the tank in overtime to keep making ridiculous shots or facilitating to his teammates. The Wolves did a great job making things hard for everyone else on the team, especially Murray, who has been amazing in this series so far. If the Wolves can keep making Jokic work on every possession and focus on exploiting a few of his weaknesses, they may have a chance to continue extending this series.
