Jaden McDaniels knows what the Minnesota Timberwolves must do to upset their first-round opponent and advance in the playoffs for the third straight season.
He entered Saturday’s Game 1 against the Denver Nuggets with 31 playoff games started and fresh off the best regular season of his career. McDaniels knows that the playoffs are completely different than the regular season. To win, teams need a different mentality. They need to fully realize the importance of each and every play.
“It’s hard to play a perfect game,” McDaniels told the media during practice on Friday. “But trying to play a perfect game, really.”
Perfection in the playoffs rarely means a 30-point blowout. Sure, those games happen sometimes. But Game 1 between the Wolves and Nuggets was never going to be that. A “perfect” game for Minnesota on Saturday would have been avoiding a prolonged stretch in which the Nuggets claimed momentum in their home arena by capitalizing on the imperfections that bound the Timberwolves to the sixth seed.
McDaniels and the Wolves have played enough against Denver to know that. However, they looked too much like their fitful selves in Game 1, as the Nuggets won 116-105.
“You can’t mess up on the scout or the game plan details,” McDaniels said at practice. “That goes a [long] way, and every possession counts. So if you mess up one possession, they hit a three, it’s really magnified.”
All too often this season, the Wolves would mentally check out, losing focus on a play-by-play basis. Their defensive intensity would dull, and their offensive execution would decrease. In the playoffs, those habits are deadly.
And because the Wolves were unable to kick those tendencies as the regular season closed, it made sense as to why they were such heavy underdogs and why the ESPN panel of writers all picked Denver to win the series.
However, early on in Game 1, the Wolves fully understood the weight of the moment. They built a 33-23 lead after the first quarter, holding the Nuggets to 6-of-22 (27%) shooting and forcing six turnovers with the type of defense that charged Minnesota throughout its seven-game series against Denver in 2024.
The Wolves were forceful at the point of attack, with McDaniels uprooting Jamal Murray as he brought the ball up and Rudy Gobert being forceful with Nikola Jokić.
On the other end, Minnesota shot 12 of 23 from the floor and 4 of 8 from deep. McDaniels led the Wolves with 10 points on 3-4 shooting, indicative of Minnesota’s productive ball and player movement. Shots were falling, and their defense was stingy. That has been typical for the Wolves this season, but rarely in a good way.
When the Wolves have gone through spells of missed shots, their defense has suffered. And as soon as their offense cooled off on Saturday, Minnesota’s defense lost its edge and allowed Denver to find a groove and inject Ball Arena with life.
Even though the Wolves battled and stayed close all afternoon, in many ways they lost Game 1 in the second quarter — a 12-minute stretch that showed they were still far too much like the team they were in the regular season.
“Just mental mistakes,” Gobert said. “I feel like we played with the right mindset tonight, and we just got to sustain adversity a little better mentally, more than anything. We gave ourselves a chance to win this game … A little more mental toughness and we can flip that over.”
Minnesota’s ball movement evaporated in the second quarter, giving way to isolation possessions that made it easy for Denver — which ranked 21st in defensive rating this season — to force misses. The Nuggets won the second quarter 39-29. They shot 11 of 16 from the floor and 11 of 12 from the free throw line.
The purposeful, movement-heavy offense abandoned the Wolves in the second. They grew apart and looked all too much like the team that sputtered through March.
McDaniels, who Chris Finch has long referred to as the barometer for their offensive success, took one shot in the quarter. With Anthony Edwards still not at 100% because of a right knee injury that forced him to miss 11 of 14 games to close the season, and Julius Randle struggling to score, the Wolves needed McDaniels to be nearly perfect.
But for that to happen, they needed to keep him involved and to keep him composed. Neither of those things happened after the first quarter.
McDaniels wrapped up Christian Braun in transition after he missed a shot in the third. Then, a few possessions later, McDaniels pushed Jokić in the back, and the officials assessed him an unsportsmanlike technical foul.
After the first quarter, the Wolves began deviating from the game plan, making ill-advised decisions, and letting their emotions get the better of them — doing exactly what McDaniels knew couldn’t happen, and looking far too much like the moody team they were in the regular season.
Gobert did as good a job as possible defending Jokić in the first half, holding the three-time MVP to six points on 2 of 4 shooting. Minnesota’s defensive game plan was to let Jokić work one-on-one without sending egregious double teams.
But late in the second quarter, Randle collapsed to help defend Jokić in the paint, leaving Spencer Jones open for a three, which he buried. Finch and Wolves assistant coach James White were incensed on the bench.
“A lot of composure issues,” Finch said postgame. “We’ve got to make more solid, smarter plays, … We’ve got to be more composed.”
Denver shot 30 of 33 from the free-throw line in Game 1. Murray went 16 of 16 from the free-throw line himself. The Wolves went 14-for-19 as a team. Whether or not the Wolves had reason to be frustrated by that discrepancy, they needed to do a better job of staying composed when calls went against them.
“We’ve got to survive the mental frustration of fouling,” Gobert said postgame. “I think we have to understand that we are the underdogs, and that we are definitely not going to get more calls than them. So we’ve got to accept that. And no matter what is being called on the floor, we can’t let that distract us. I think tonight we had too much frustration that carried over on the next possessions.”
The Timberwolves don’t need to play perfectly to beat Denver, but they must try. They must try to be better than the team they were in the regular season. They need to remain present, focused, mature, and realize the importance of each possession. The Wolves need to prove that they can right their regular-season wrongs in the playoffs.
But after Game 1, the jury is still out on whether they are capable.
