The Minnesota Timberwolves are heading in a bad direction. It's early, sure. Maybe they'll turn this around and in a month we'll all be singing a different tune. But right now, they're spiraling and Anthony Edwards is not happy about it.
After the Wolves (8-10) lost their fourth straight game, and seventh in their last nine, on Wednesday, watching a 12-point lead with a little over seven minutes to play not just disintegrate, but actually turn into an 11-point loss courtesy of a 29-6 closing run by the Sacramento Kings, Edwards sounded off on his team.
"We've been trying to figure this out for the whole year, man," Edwards said of the Wolves' defense, which has been significantly worse than last season's elite unit. "We thought defense was our identity, and it's not looking like that. Our identity right now, me and Mike (Conley) was talking about it, I think is we soft as hell as a team, internally. Not to the other team, but like internally we soft, like we can't talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids, just like we playing with a bunch of little kids. Like everybody, like the whole team, we just can't talk to each other and we gotta figure it out, man, because we can't go down this road."
There was a lot more where that came from.
"Sometimes it's tough because like looking at everybody, and everybody got a different agenda," Edwards said. "It's like, what the f--- am I supposed to say? I'm trying to get better in that aspect to figure out what the hell to say to get everybody on the same agenda because everybody right now is on different agendas. And I think that's one of the main culprits of why we're losing, like everybody out there got their own agenda like I guess their imagination of what supposed to be going on and what's really happening."
But wait, there's more. Edwards called the Wolves "frontrunners" and said the team has been "growing apart," per Timberwolves reporter Chris Hine of the Star Tribune.
Edwards also made sure to acknowledge the, shall we say, decided displeasure of the Wolves' fans who got their hopes up after last season's conference finals run only to watch the team, in the immediacy of trading Karl-Anthony Towns, come crashing back to the more typically frustrating and frankly more recognizable reality of, well, being a Timberwolves fan.
"The fans f---in' booing us. That shit is crazy, man," Edwards sais. "We're getting booed in our home arena. That's so f---in' disrespectful, it's crazy."
Here's a snippet of Ant's comments:
Anthony Edwards kept it 💯 when I asked him about the teams defense. He said the identity of this team is “We soft as hell” pic.twitter.com/a9P9Mf4nX0
— SneakerReporter (@SneakerReporter) November 28, 2024
Suffice it to say, Edwards is not pleased, and if you follow the NBA with even a modicum of interest you know that he is not one to hold back his opinion. Dude showed up on an Olympic team that featured the likes of LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant and declared himself the No. 1 option.
He has every right to be that confident in himself, by the way, and surely that's where a lot of this frustration is stemming from. He knows how great he is, and he can't stand playing on an 8-10 team that is trending toward the play-in tournament, at best, in the ruthlessly unforgiving Western Conference.
There are structural problems with this team. The offensive spacing is consistently compromised with the presence of Julius Randle and Rudy Gobert. Donte DiVincenzo was supposed to be a shooting boon, but he's having his worst 3-point campaign since his rookie season. Defenses can paint pack, or at least sink down, notably into Edwards' driving lanes, with virtual impunity because there isn't any shooter they truly fear other than Edwards, who is, as a consequence, being forced to jack up five more 3-pointers a game than he did last season.
He's making them, so far, at a 43% clip and scoring 28 points a night. He's doing his part, but the offense, as a whole, is cramped and sluggish, perceptibly lacking juice. Losing a player of Towns' offensive caliber might explain some, if not a lot of, that struggle. But the defensive falloff?
How can that also be attributed to the Towns subtraction? We're not exactly talking about Bill Russell here. In fact, Towns, for all his offensive dominance, is currently killing the Knicks' defense. To be fair, Randle isn't much better than Towns, and in fact might be worse simply by virtue of being shorter. But this can't explain a team that was a historic defense suddenly not even being a top-10 unit while surrendering over four more points per 100 possessions.
The formula should still be in place. It's the same players, after all. Perimeter attack dogs in Edwards and Jaden McDaniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker either completely clogging traffic or funneling it to an elite rim protector in Gobert. But it's just not the same.
Defense is about energy as much as anything else, and the energy around, and it seems like inside, this team last year was a positive force. This year it's a negative one. All you had to do was listen to Edwards talk on Wednesday night to deduce at least that much.
