In the wake of Tuesday’s Game 5 dismantling – Minnesota’s second blowout defeat at the hands of San Antonio in these Western Conference semifinals – the Timberwolves repeatedly mentioned gameplan mistakes as a reason for their shortcomings.
“Not knowing the game plan, executing on offense. Like we know they’re gonna come out to be physical defensively, we know how to go against that,” Wolves guard Anthony Edwards told reporters. “And then us defensively, we know our coverage, what we’re supposed to be doing when they’re in pick and roll and I think we just not doing it enough.”
If you watched the Timberwolves in this series and the way they’ve handled – err, not handled – San Antonio’s double teams of Edwards, you may find yourself asking, “What’s the plan here?”
But in the second and third quarter, it was evident. The Wolves ran numerous actions to get Edwards the ball through off-ball actions. And when Edwards did have the ball and saw two Spurs bodies, the offensive plan behind him to punish San Antonio’s additional attention on Minnesota’s superstar was also clear (get a cutter to the middle of the floor).
When Minnesota executed the plan, it succeeded. When it didn’t, it failed.
The former was put on the floor at the end of the second quarter and the start of the third. It allowed Minnesota to erase a massive deficit to knot the affair at 61-all. Then, as Wolves coach Chris Finch put it, “we went away from what was working.”
Julius Randle felt the need to fire off a quick shot. Edwards started to clearly search for his own in the face of multiple Spurs bodies. Actions? Dead. Ball movement? No more.
Execution, patience and urgency were no longer present. For perhaps six minutes Tuesday, the Wolves played championship-caliber basketball. The problem is the Wolves couldn’t produce that for nearly long enough – not to beat a team of San Antonio’s ilk.
“Just didn’t have the discipline, I guess, to do what was working,” Randle told reporters. “Offense is tough to come by. If we find some success in something, we just gotta keep with it and find the discipline and patience to do it.”
That’s long been Minnesota’s problem for, really, the last few years. The Wolves have big, athletic rosters that can physically pummel many foes when they play with the requisite effort and energy.
But they can’t beat up everyone. Eventually, you will run into teams in the NBA playoffs that can match up with you, body for body. At that point, the game comes down to planning and execution.
The Wolves continue to fail in that regard on these biggest stages. But the pockets in which they execute reveals the plan and shows it’s effective. Yet the execution waxes and, more frequently, wanes.
Naz Reid talked to reporters about the balance of following the gameplan but also playing with some “feel.” But, for the Wolves, “feel” too frequently means searching for their own shot – not necessarily for Reid, but for others. And if it takes you even a half second to fight that urge before making “the right play,” you’ve allowed a defense as good as San Antonio’s to have its cake by getting the ball out of your hands and eat it, too, by recovering back into proper position.
These are the matchups in which certain aspects for teams must become robotic, much like they are when you watch the Spurs rotate around Victor Wembanyama on defense. But Minnesota doesn’t spend enough time coding throughout the regular season.
So when resistance peaks, the player with the ball isn’t sharp enough with reads and his teammates around him aren’t sharp enough with their cuts and relocations to compromise the defense with proper spacing.
The end result on those possessions is a muddled mess, which leads to bad shots or live ball turnovers, which lead to easy points going the other way.
And the avalanche ensues, which is exactly how you drop a pair of games by 29-plus points in a single series, much like how Minnesota fell by 26 and 30 in Games 1 and 5 to Oklahoma City in last year’s West Finals.
At these stages, against these quality foes, you have two options: Execute or be embarrassed.
If Option B is circled one more time, the end result will be elimination.
“I can’t really pinpoint, like, why we keep making the game plan mistakes,” Edwards told reporters. “We just got to be better on it. Yeah, it’s just that simple. We just got to be better at it. Whatever the coaches draw up for the game plan, we got to go out and execute it at the highest level.”