In a refreshing turn from a year ago, the Timberwolves haven’t turned in too many clunkers this season, and they have made sure to take care of the teams who are down in the standings.
They saved one of those down nights for Wednesday’s national TV audience on ESPN, perhaps trying to throw the rest of the league off the scent that they might be deep playoff contenders this season.
But after three and a half quarters of uninspired play, the Wolves closed strong to beat the Western Conference-worst Spurs 102-94.
The Wolves (16-4) trailed 77-75 with 9 minutes, 16 seconds to play when the shots finally began to fall and the stops piled up on the defensive end. Troy Brown Jr. began the 16-4 burst with a three, and that seemed to finally lift the lid off the basket for the Wolves, who shot 30% from three-point range.
“We played defense. We didn’t play very good defense in the first half,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said. “Rudy [Gobert] went off the floor and our defense just fell apart, which can’t happen.”
Anthony Edwards, Naz Reid and then Brown again hit three consecutive threes while Gobert punctuated the run with a block of Keldon Johnson and a pair of putbacks to give the Wolves a 91-79 lead, their largest of the night, with 4:58 to play.
Edwards struggled in his first game back after missing two because of a hip pointer. He had 17 points on 4-for-17 shooting, but he wrapped up the night when he seemingly came out of nowhere to dunk a Reid miss with 2:53 to play.
Gobert navigated foul trouble in the first half to put the Wolves on his back with 16 points and 21 rebounds. He received a standing ovation when he exited. Reid provided a needed spark off the bench with 15 and nine rebounds.
“[Rudy] made all the difference in the world tonight, as he has been,” Finch said. “This is the best I’ve ever seen him play. … This is the best I’ve seen him play on both ends of the floor.”
The Wolves and Edwards could not have started much slower on the night — Edwards was 0-for-2 in the first quarter and the Wolves had just one point through the first 3 minutes, 38 seconds of the quarter, but the Wolves still led 25-22 after one.
The Wolves had to navigate foul trouble for Gobert in the second quarter after he picked up his third with 9:46 remaining. San Antonio (3-17) more than doubled its score from that point onward. Doug McDermott knocked down three threes and Devin Vassell had 12 first-half points, and the Spurs led by as many as eight before taking a 53-46 lead into halftime.
“I thought first half we generated a lot of really good shots,” Finch said. “We missed a ton of good shots.”
But the Wolves have been a good third-quarter team all season and they opened the second half on a 9-0 run. Another 11-0 run later in the quarter put the Wolves ahead by seven and got the crowd on its feet, but the Wolves couldn’t sustain either stretch of inspired play. The Spurs hung around and closed the quarter on the 9-2 spurt to make the score 71-71 headed into the fourth.
The Wolves finally turned it on after that and avoided one of their most embarrassing nights of the season.