MILWAUKEE — When the smoke cleared from an epic Minnesota Timberwolves defeat, coach Chris Finch said exactly what he had to say.
Losing a 24-point lead with 10 minutes to play against the Milwaukee Bucks on a night when the Wolves could have moved up to the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference playoff picture was not a disaster, Finch said. It was not indicative of a team with an inherent flaw of being unable to sustain a quality level of play against a team that is more than beatable.
No, this was just one of those bizarre nights in the NBA, when Bucks coach Doc Rivers’ act of desperation to go zone at the start of the fourth quarter flipped the game on its head, from 95-71 Minnesota with 10:32 to play to 110-103 Milwaukee when the final buzzer sounded. No need to panic, Finch said. No need to wallow. Shrug it off and move on to the next, even more important, game in Memphis on Thursday.
“It’s a bad fourth quarter against a zone defense,” Finch insisted. “I don’t think it’s a microcosm of the season.”
Finch could not sit at the table in the back hallways of Fiserv Forum and validate the question. That wouldn’t have looked great with three games to play, including a showdown with the Memphis Grizzlies up next. But the reality is that this was a microcosm of this thrilling, frustrating and baffling Wolves season. Through three quarters, the Wolves were playing with a crispness and focus that had them dominating the Bucks. They looked like a team that was going to win its sixth straight game and give itself a chance to not just get out of the Play-In Tournament, but to host Game 1 of a first-round series.
Then, with everything right there in the palms of their hands, they just … stopped. They stopped doing everything they were doing in those three quarters to build that lead, stopped moving the ball, stopped moving their bodies, stopped knocking down shots, stopped contesting on the other end, stopped taking care of the ball.
Minnesota in the first three quarters of the game: 56 percent field-goal percentage, 39 percent 3-point percentage, 22 assists, five turnovers and 90 points.
Minnesota in the fourth quarter: 20 percent shooting, 16.7 percent from 3, three assists, nine turnovers and 13 points.
“We just kind of froze,” Finch said. “We didn’t move the ball. We just over-surveyed. When we did make the pass to the middle of the floor, it was late, and then turnover, turnover, turnover.”
Milwaukee went on a staggering 34-3 run in the quarter, using the zone defense to reduce the Wolves to a mistake-prone, slow-reacting embarrassment. Star Giannis Antetokounmpo was quiet through three quarters, with just 10 points on 4-of-9 shooting with eight rebounds and eight assists. He scored 13 points in the fourth quarter on 5-of-6 shooting and was a preposterous plus-29 in 10 minutes, 32 seconds on the floor.
That is the Timberwolves season, right there. Win five in a row and start thinking about climbing in the standings, then collapse against the Bucks. Win five in a row at the end of January, then drop home games to the Washington Wizards and Sacramento Kings. Beat the Oklahoma City Thunder twice, the LA Clippers three times, and the Denver Nuggets all four, the last of which may have broken their division rivals. Lose to the Portland Trail Blazers twice, the Golden State Warriors three times before the Jimmy Butler trade, Milwaukee twice, once at home without Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard and then this one on the road without Lillard.
It is possible that Finch saw a collapse like this coming. He wasn’t enamored with the focus and quality of play from his team after each of the Wolves’ previous two wins against tankers in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. It was easy to see after those games that the coach was worried about a slippage in the team’s play while they are in the middle of a fight for their playoff lives.
For three quarters on Tuesday night, the Timberwolves were rolling. Naz Reid and Donte DiVincenzo had broken out of their mini-slumps following their suspension for the fight against the Detroit Pistons. Rudy Gobert was controlling the paint. Anthony Edwards and Jaden McDaniels were attacking the rim. Most importantly, the ball was zipping around the offensive end, generating great looks all over the floor.
Not taking anything for granted, Finch sent out what has been his best and most intelligent lineups to start the fourth quarter. Mike Conley, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, DiVincenzo, Reid and Gobert have a net rating of plus-32.9 points per 100 possessions of non-garbage time minutes this season, per Cleaning The Glass. It is the best net rating of any regularly used five-man lineup in the NBA. Gobert had a put-back dunk and DiVincenzo hit a 3 to push the lead to 24, and the Wolves appeared to be in total command.
Then things started to go sideways. Gobert missed a layup. Reid missed a 3.
The Bucks cut the deficit to 16. Timeout, Finch.
He put Julius Randle in for Gobert. Reid forced a hook shot that missed. Alexander-Walker turned it over.
The Bucks cut it to 14.
Finch subbed Edwards for Conley and McDaniels for Alexander-Walker. Edwards and DiVincenzo missed two more 3s. DiVincenzo made an errant pass for another turnover.
The Bucks trimmed it to eight. Timeout, Finch. Again. In the huddle, they talked about how to handle the zone, the importance of moving the ball side to side to create open looks, of making quick, decisive passes to get the Bucks scrambling.
“Guys were talking,” Finch said. “They were talking, definitely. It’s on me. I’ve got to get us better shots.”
Searching for any kind of lineup combination that would click, he brought Conley back for DiVincenzo, but the misses and the turnovers kept coming. The Bucks scored 12 fast-break points after having just four in the first three quarters. While Edwards, Reid and DiVincenzo clanked away from 3, Antetokounmpo knocked one down on the other end.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
“It was hard for every last one of us to get a look when they was in the zone,” Edwards said. “It messed us up. Big shoutout to Milwaukee.”
A meltdown this spectacular with stakes this high has to be owned by everyone. Finch was right in that he has to find a way to get through to his players on how to attack a style of defense that is often a last resort for an opponent because of how easily so many smart teams can dissect it. Maybe he played Randle and Conley too much on a night neither one had it, but the options were few at that point in the game.
Edwards scored 25 points, but he was just 10 of 27 from the field and 2 of 11 from 3-point range. In the fourth quarter, he missed all four of his shots, which all came from 3-point range, had both of his turnovers and managed just one point.
DiVincenzo scored eight of the team’s 13 points in the quarter but also had two bad turnovers. Randle was 0 of 1 with two of his five turnovers in the game, and he didn’t grab a rebound in more than nine minutes on the floor. Conley and Reid both went 0 of 3 in the quarter. Gobert committed three fouls while the Wolves’ defense fell apart. McDaniels was 0 of 1 with zero rebounds in six minutes.
“Everybody in here is p—– off,” DiVincenzo said. “But just regroup and come back because we know we have a huge game on Thursday.”
A win would have put the Wolves (46-33) in fourth place thanks to the tiebreakers. Instead, they fell all the way to eighth, just behind the Grizzlies (47-32), a team that has had their number in the past. That makes the game in Memphis a must-win if they want to keep their hopes alive of climbing out of the Play-In Tournament.
“The next game is the biggest game of the season,” Edwards said.
That’s why so many of the Wolves were taking this collapse in stride. There is no time for them to get derailed. They are on the end of a long, five-game road trip and they have to find a way to scratch out a win and then come home and beat the Nets and Utah Jazz. Do that, and there is a good chance they will be in the top six.
Finish off that game against Milwaukee on Tuesday night and they would have been in the driver’s seat. Now they are in the sidecar, holding on for dear life as they whip around a hairpin turn. It’s what this season has been. But the thing about a rollercoaster ride is that just when you least expect it, the direction changes.
There have been stretches of the season when the Wolves look like a bona-fide contender in the West, only to stub their toes on a mediocre team and bring the doubts back to the surface. But just when this team looks to be sunk, they put a run together and revive hope. That is also part of their DNA.
That resilience is what they were leaning on Tuesday night in the wake of a massively disappointing defeat.
“We have to acknowledge what happened, but don’t let the world blow up just because of this,” DiVincenzo said. “We have to respond on Thursday.”
Who knows what the Timberwolves will look like in Memphis? Maybe they will come out and respond emphatically, beating an opponent that recently fired its coach. Or maybe Memphis will continue to exert what seems to be a mental edge over the Wolves and push them closer to having to go on the road to start the Play-In Tournament.
With this team, it’s impossible to say. Because remember that, yes, the Wolves gave up a 24-point fourth-quarter lead to lose to the Bucks. But they also came back from 24 points down in the fourth quarter to beat the Thunder in February.
“I have every confidence that we’ll be able to bounce back,” Finch said. “We’ve got good guys. They’ll shake it off. We’ve had some tough losses before in the season. We didn’t expect to go undefeated over our last 10 games. It doesn’t matter how it comes, where it comes. If it comes, we’ve got to go and get the ones that are still there to be got.”
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(Top photo of Naz Reid: Michael McLoone / Imagn Images)
