The only thing Minnesota Timberwolves fans have wanted to see from their team all season long has been a heartbeat.
They booed the Wolves off the floor in back-to-back losses to the Houston Rockets and Sacramento Kings earlier in the week. Their ire was drawn not because the Wolves were losing games. It was how they were losing them, shoulders slumped and energy low without an ounce of fight to be seen.
At the start of the fourth quarter on Friday night against the LA Clippers, Naz Reid made them look.
It started with the Wolves clinging to a 72-68 lead and Clippers wing Jordan Miller surging up the court in transition. He missed a tough layup, and Reid hustled back in transition to be in position for a rebound, starting a flurry of winning plays from him born of the desperation from a four-game losing streak.
On the Clippers’ next possession, Terance Mann was streaking down the court for an easy layup when Reid did his best LeBron James impression with a soaring chase-down block to wipe another two points off the board.
THIS BLOCK 🫣 pic.twitter.com/ZnhOOskjF2
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) November 30, 2024
Donte DiVincenzo broke out of a terrible shooting slump with a 3-pointer on the other end, and suddenly a crowd that had its eyes glazed over by a combination of tryptophan and Timberwolves turnovers was on its feet, roaring its approval and begging for more. Naz obliged.
With the game tied at 80 and under eight minutes to play, DiVincenzo threw an ill-advised bounce pass at Rudy Gobert’s ankles. The ball bounced around the Wolves half court like a pinball, squirting out past the 3-point arch and on its way out of bounds for what was going to be another Timberwolves turnover. Instead, Reid dove to the floor and tapped it to DiVincenzo, who banked in a 3 just before the shot clock expired.
a DDV 3 👌 pic.twitter.com/TUHCiQ5nFe
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) November 30, 2024
Target Center bumped Nas’s hip-hop anthem, “Made You Look” in tribute to Reid’s work ethic. It’s a song that normally signals a scoring binge, but Reid is one of several Wolves who has yet to find an offensive rhythm this season. So he took pride in impacting the game in other ways on Friday night.
“I’m not just an offensive player. When my shot’s not falling, I’m always going to try to make the extra effort in some way, shape or form,” Reid said.
The Timberwolves have a term of endearment for the kind of plays that Reid was delivering in Friday’s 93-92 win. They call them “big little plays,” according to Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who had a few of his own on his way to 12 points and 10 rebounds.
“The game had turned against us, and he turned it back by getting those plays, particularly that chase-down in transition was huge,” coach Chris Finch said on Reid.
The Wolves needed every one of them on a night when they shot 41 percent from the field and turned it over 21 times. The offense was largely inept, but Minnesota kept itself in the game with pure desperation. They had lost seven of their previous nine games, a ghastly skid filled with missed shots, ole defense and bad body language. The vibes were such that Edwards gave a blunt critique of their lack of connectivity after collapsing against the Kings on Wednesday night.
“Everyone’s still a little too into their own struggles,” Finch said before the game. “We just gotta be better when we give ourselves a chance to win.”
If the shots aren’t falling, the only way forward is with sweat equity. Edwards was just 7 of 21 from the field, but he teamed up with Gobert, Alexander-Walker and Jaden McDaniels to hold Clippers star James Harden to 20 points on 20 shots. Gobert was just 3 of 7 from the field with three turnovers, but he also made his presence felt at the rim on defense and grabbed 12 rebounds. Julius Randle made several aggressive plays as the low man in the Wolves defense and grabbed 10 rebounds to go with 11 points.
“Those are winning plays. We talked as a team how we want to win and change it around and get back to who we are defensively,” Edwards said. “Those are things that we gotta do over and over and over again, no matter how tiring it is, how exhausting it is.”
It was far from a perfect night for Reid. He missed 6 of 9 shots for eight points in 23 minutes. There were a couple of defensive rotations that Reiz was a hair late on, giving Nicolas Batum enough space to launch a 3.
The Wolves had their hands full with the Clippers despite them missing Kawhi Leonard and Norman Powell. If they were clicking on all cylinders and connected the way Finch wants them to be, this would have been a double-digit victory. But every game is a grind for the Wolves these days, and they were happy to finally get back on the winning side of things.
“That’s just the way we need to play regardless,” Reid said. “You see what it does. It’s good for us. We win games like that. I think that’s just how we need to play overall.”
Each time a Wolves player was on the floor for a loose ball or scrambled out to the corner on a defensive rotation, the home crowd’s volume increased as if willing the team to embrace that down-and-dirty style. It was a welcome change for the home team after a couple of ugly performances and it probably wasn’t a coincidence that the struggling DiVincenzo had his best game in a while.
The newness of the situation post-KAT trade and the ongoing chemistry experiment between Randle and Gobert have made the Timberwolves one of the bigger disappointments in the league to this point. Through all of the struggles, they have insisted that they just need some time to familiarize themselves with one another. A one-point win over a short-handed team at the end of a four-game road trip will do little to convince anyone that they have solved their problems. But they have to start somewhere.
“As a group, after the game, I asked them how bad do we want to win?” Edwards said. “If we want to win, we’re gonna do that (stuff) every game. We’re not going to do it one game, and not do it the next game.”
(Photo of Naz Reid and Rudy Gobert: Jordan Johnson / NBAE via Getty Images)
