DETROIT — It wasn’t hidden, the long faces, the wayward looks carried by the Minnesota Timberwolves as they slipped back to the .500 mark with a loss to the surging Detroit Pistons on Saturday night.
There’s no shame in losing to these Pistons, who are a game within the .500 mark, winners in six of their last seven, and already surpassed last season’s 14-win mark. But it’s the way the Timberwolves showed up that night and too many nights this season.
There’s an acknowledgement they are a totally different team, swapping out Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle in a shocking pre-training camp move. An adjustment was expected, with the team no longer having Towns’ spacing from the 3-point line to clear out room for Anthony Edwards. But this has been rough.
The chemistry on the floor has been, to put it kindly, off — and nobody’s really denying it. Randle’s style is clunky, as it always has been. While it’s worked at other points of his career, he’s not a strong fit on this roster. Getting off Towns’ long contract to get under the restrictive second apron was the motivation for the Randle deal, and the basketball is suffering.
What makes matters worse is Towns’ seamless transition to the Knicks, where he looks like a borderline MVP candidate with a starting five unit that ranks among the most productive in the league — and Randle wasn’t a great fit in New York, either, after Jalen Brunson’s ascension.
It’s not to dump on Randle; he’s having his best shooting season from 3 since the 2020-21 season — the year there were hardly any fans in arenas — and overall, shooting 48 percent from the field, his best since 2018-19.
But it certainly doesn’t look smooth, and his defensive lapses come into focus when he broods. It doesn’t feel like anyone is exempt, and the book is out on the scouting report.
They’re 10th in the West, at the final play-in spot, a game ahead of the Sacramento Kings and 1.5 ahead of the Phoenix Suns — two teams who’ve underwhelmed and discussed or made big changes.
“Every game matters, especially in the West,” Rudy Gobert said. “We have confidence in who we are and who we can be as a team, but it has to show on the court. We have to focus on the things we can control and everything else will follow.”
The lack of chemistry is detectable among themselves, so you know opposing teams sense it and jump on it at the first sign of doubt. It was the Pistons, playing on the second night of a back-to-back and still adjusting to the loss of third-year guard Jaden Ivey earlier in the week, who had the springy legs and bouncy spirits early in the game on Saturday.
“I think we can be a lot better with body language. I think our effort is too hit or miss,” veteran point guard Mike Conley said. “When things are good, you get a little more. Things go south a little bit, you find guys hold their heads a little more. … We don’t get back (on defense) as quickly, we complain about calls. All those things are habits we need to break, find ways to get to the next play and just be better.”
Edwards, the superstar growing into his own voice, his own standing in the league and in the team’s locker room, has had a few sessions with the media where he’s laid out his frustrations — most recently, the constant double teams he’s facing that force him into being more of a facilitator and long-range shooter than devastating driver to the basket.
Saturday, in a thrilling showdown with Detroit’s Cade Cunningham, showed what the league has to offer in terms of its under-25, American-born superstars as Edwards supplied his antidote for those blitzing double-teams.
He launched and launched and launched triples all night — hitting on 10 of his 15 attempts on his way to a career-high 53 points, but looked tired at times, and that contributed to his six turnovers to just two assists. Cunningham played a more balanced game because he could, scoring a season-high 40 with nine assists and six rebounds.
Randle didn’t get his first field goal until midway through the second quarter, perhaps not wanting to disrupt Edwards’ rhythm, but by that point the Wolves were down 15. The usually candid Edwards declined to speak to the media following the career night, but it seems his answer this season has been playing pseudo-point guard — which, truthfully, has invited the double teams because Towns isn’t there as a safety valve and there’s no fear of Randle smoothing out the offense when the Wolves have the numbers.
Don’t forget, Gobert is clogging the paint and isn’t the most graceful offensive hub. There was the spot earlier in the season where Gobert had Toronto’s Scottie Barnes sealed in the paint and called for the ball — and Randle ignored him.
Gobert stayed planted and it caused a three-second violation, and in that moment you could see both sides of the argument, but therein lied the problem. Randle doesn’t see Gobert as having the best set of mitts, rightfully, and didn’t want the risk. Gobert, though, did what bigs are taught against smaller defenders and wasn’t rewarded.
Those moments build and fester, even if they were cleared up in the immediate aftermath. And Gobert as the anchor of the defense has to have Randle’s back, but would he be so wont to rotate over when he won’t get the ball in the most obvious situations?
The human element isn’t just creeping in, it’s firmly in play — changes brought on by a new collective bargaining agreement that prevented the Timberwolves from being in a spot to take the natural next step of playing for June.
Instead, they’re playing for the balance sheet and it’s ugly.
It’s the clunky offense, it’s the spotty defense that used to be a hallmark when this team jumped out to a 25-9 start at this point last year. The Wolves led the league in efficiency last year, and now they’re ninth. That second-round series where they collectively choked the life out of the then-defending champion Denver Nuggets seems like a distant memory.
“A certain nature of the thing, you forget what got us here and think because we got there (last year), we’ll get there naturally,” Gobert said. “We’re not a team who can turn the switch on and off. The year prior, we overcame a lot of challenges that made us hungrier and brought us closer together. Last year, we knew what we needed to do and we knew what was holding us back.
“It was maturity and consistency and attention to detail, especially defensively. This year, yeah, there was a trade, but I don’t think that should affect our identity, defensively.”
What they all agree on, though, at least privately, is that this isn’t a team adjusting to a league that circles them on the schedule this year — they’re not shrinking from expectations of teams coming for their necks.
They just don’t have it right now, and it’ll be the midseason mark before you know it. And at that point, it’s not just an early season anymore — the inconsistency will be their identity, if it isn’t already.
“Sometimes we make it harder on ourselves than we need it to be,” Conley said. “We have guys overworked for opportunities, opposed to making simple reads or simple plays. It’s one through five, not sprinting and clearing out each other, cutting for each other, screening, all those things go into how you connect it.”
The season is slipping away, and if the answers are available, someone had better find them.
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