There was an uneasy feeling inside Target Center Sunday afternoon as the Minnesota Timberwolves and Utah Jazz trotted back to their locker rooms at halftime.
Vegas had Minnesota as a 23.5-point favorite to win, the largest spread for any team since 2008. It was Game 82, and the Timberwolves had to win to secure a top-six seed. If they lost, they would have landed in the Play-In Tournament.
Theoretically, being such stark favorites would add to the fanbase’s confidence that the Wolves would take care of business, but it did the opposite. The fans knew the importance of the game as they packed Target Center to the gills on Sunday and were extra-tuned for tip-off. However, excitement turned to anxiousness when the Wolves held a one-point lead at halftime.
It would not have been the first time the Wolves lost a game they were heavily favored to win. Minnesota went 40-23 when favored this season, the 15th-worst record league-wide of the 20 teams that were favored to win at least 30 times. Regardless, a loss would have been unpardonable, considering the circumstances.
Minnesota eventually pulled away, riding Anthony Edwards’s 43-point performance to a 116-105 win. The Wolves didn’t make it as easy on themselves as they should have, but that’s how their season has gone. The bottom line is that they did their job. Still, they finished with the worst of the four possible outcomes they had entering Sunday’s slate of games.
The Timberwolves have traveled on a bumpy road all season, and it will not stop in the playoffs. Minnesota enters Game 1 of the first round as underdogs against the Los Angeles Lakers on the road, going up against two future Hall of Famers. It’s a challenging matchup that few teams particularly desire in the Western Conference.
The hard road always seems to find this team. However, given how they’ve played against superior competition in unfavorable situations, it is probably exactly where the Wolves want to be and how they want to travel.
“Super proud of their body of work this year,” Finch said regarding his team on Sunday. “We didn’t make a big trade in the middle of the season to sort things out. We didn’t fire coaches to try to sort things out. They sorted it out themselves. Those guys made the right adjustments and sacrifices and figured out who they needed to be as a team.”
After much soul-searching early in the year, the Wolves have discovered who they are over the last two months. Minnesota closed the season with a 17-4 record. They registered the NBA’s second-best offense and seventh-best defense during that span.
Fans have struggled to buy into this year’s team after last year’s Western Conference Finals run. It was hard to blame the rubes – the Wolves were an untrustworthy team for most of the season and remained so until the end. They let a 24-point fourth-quarter lead disappear in Milwaukee on April 8. They also allowed the Brooklyn Nets and Jazz to hang around for too long in the final week of the season. Further feeding into the fanbase’s skepticism, 13 of Minnesota’s final 17 wins came against teams with a sub-.500 record.
Those are all fair points of concern, but the Wolves also made it known that they are at their best in the face of chaos when their backs are pinned against the wall. Their 140-139 double-overtime win was evidence of that. So was their 123-104 win over the Detroit Pistons in the game before, when they had to buckle down after a brawl that led to seven ejections.
Something brews within the Wolves when the world is against them. It’s the same something that they struggled to brew consistently for most of the season, especially in games where sportsbooks favored them to win. That something typically starts percolating at the hand of their confident ring leader, on and off the court.
“Don’t give a damn,” Edwards said when a reporter asked him postgame on Sunday if he has a preferred playoff opponent. “We ready.”
Edwards said this as the team waited in the locker room for the Los Angeles Clippers-Golden State Warriors game to conclude – the final domino to decide playoff seeding in the West.
The Wolves could have finished as high as fourth, which would have allowed them to hold home-court advantage in the first round against the Clippers, whom they swept 3-0 in the regular season. Minnesota could have also finished fifth, matching up against the Denver Nuggets, whom Minnesota also swept 4-0 and have not lost to since Game 5 in the second round last season.
Either the Clippers or the Nuggets would have been favorable matchups for the Wolves on paper, but that would not have fit the vibe of this season. Even when Minnesota has done its job – winning on Sunday and finishing the regular season 17-4 – they’ve always taken the hard road.
Instead of potentially holding home-court advantage or going against a team the Wolves have recently dominated against, they are opening the postseason at Crypto.com arena, one of only two Western Conference arenas they went winless in this season.
Luka Dončić‘s game-winner over Rudy Gobert in Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals still clouds the minds of many Wolves fans. It is still hard to escape it, even almost a year later – the Dallas Mavericks included it in their thank-you video to Dončić during his return to Dallas.
He now plays alongside LeBron James, forming one of the most lethal scoring duos in the NBA. The Wolves can throw multiple players at Dončić (Jaden McDaniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Edwards, and Jaylen Clark). They also have Julius Randle, who has a blend of size, physically, and speed, all of which is necessary to guard LeBron or perhaps even Dončić.
Still, Hall of Famers tend to do their thing and dominate games. The Wolves experienced that first-hand in the WCF last year, helplessly watching Dončić and Kyrie Irving average 59.4 combined points.
After trading for Luka, the Lakers only went 19-13 to close the season. However, they were 18-10 in the games with Dončić in the lineup while maneuvering through an injury bug that caused LeBron to miss seven games. They are also 31-10 at home on the season. LA has succeeded against bigger teams, like the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Lakers are littered with plenty of options—both schematically and roster-wise—to expose a big team like Minnesota.
Therefore, it is unsurprising that Las Vegas favors the Lakers -195 to win the series.
The Wolves are in a familiar place. Not only did they go 9-10 in the regular season when they weren’t favored to win – the second-best underdog record in the NBA – but they were also underdogs against the Phoenix Suns and Nuggets last season in the playoffs.
There are few greater stages than playing in Los Angeles in the playoffs. Edwards will undoubtedly be ready to rise again, playing against two all-time greats. His 43 points led Minnesota to take care of business on Sunday. It will take more than just that to win in the playoffs, which Minnesota knows well.
It will take the Wolves, particularly McDaniels, to defend Dončić without fouling while hunting Luka on offense. They must rotate with conviction against LA’s three-point-centric offense. Gobert must play on the level he has been over the last three weeks, getting revenge on Dončić and dominating the paint. Randle will have to beat the playoff allegations. It will also take the coaching staff coming into the series more prepared than their opponent, as they did in the first round last season against Phoenix.
Above all else, Minnesota must thrive with its back against the wall again. The Wolves have repeatedly proven that is where they are at their best. It’s something fans can finally buy into after a season of uncertainty. Sportsbooks and the massive contingent of fans in Tinseltown may be confident the Lakers will advance. Still, Wolves fans should be just as confident that their team can pull off another postseason upset.
