The Minnesota Timberwolves eliminated the higher-seeded Los Angeles Lakers Wednesday night, in Game 5 of their first-round series. The final score, 103–96, suggests a closely fought contest, but what it really shows is the Timberwolves missing way more than the usual number of three-pointers, plus, sure, some dignity in defeat from the Lakers. Minnesota led in Los Angeles for every minute of the first half, and often by double digits; the Lakers scrambled back in the third quarter, but Minnesota just eased away without a whole lot of extraordinary effort down the stretch of the fourth. You had the sense, by the end, that if these teams played for another two or six or 30 games, the Wolves would spend the bulk of the time ahead by 11 points, with some wobbles in there to account for streaky shooting.
Lately when the Timberwolves win, you expect it to be because Anthony Edwards did something cool, or possibly even incredible. It's hard sometimes even to imagine how this year's Timberwolves win games without their All-NBA shot-creator creating and making lots of shots for himself. When they edged the Lakers in Game 4, it was largely because Edwards manufactured a huge fourth quarter against an exhausted Lakers lineup missing any semblance of rim protection. Not so on Wednesday: Edwards made just five shots in 42 minutes in Game 5, bricked all 11 of his three-point attempts, and finished with just 15 points, tied for his fifth-lowest scoring output of the entire season. He scored just once in the fourth quarter, and made it to the free-throw line not at all. That is not to say he played poorly—Edwards grabbed 11 rebounds on the night and was credited with eight assists, did not turn the ball over even once, and had a game-high three steals—but the Wolves never got, and in the end never needed, one of his big signature scoring explosions.
So how'd they do it? It brings me only the darkest pleasure to report this, but Rudy Gobert kicked the absolute hell out of the Lakers. "Rudy was a dragon," explained Edwards, after the game. "He was a dragon from Game of Thrones tonight." Without interrogating too closely what this metaphor might indicate about Gobert's breath, it's fair to say he terrorized those who opposed him. The huge Frenchman posted playoff career-highs in points (27) and boards (24), and owned the paint the way a grizzly bear dominates the terrain around a fresh kill. Kevin Harlan called him "a one-man wrecking crew at both ends" amid a sequence in the fourth where Gobert got his huge outstretched hands to just about every missed shot, blocked a layup, threw down a huge put-back dunk, and even bottled up LeBron James in an isolation. This was a dominant performance from a guy who has occasionally been played off the floor in other playoff series in his career.
JJ Redick made the choice ahead of Game 5 to start the same unit he'd run into the ground in the second half of Game 4. It was at least an interesting choice: Redick noted before the game that his team was "giving up 40 points a game" to the Timberwolves on second chances and in transition. He meant it by way of highlighting turnovers as an area of performance that the Lakers could control, but it's funny that his team subsequently went out and gave up 18 offensive rebounds and 20 second-chance points, mostly due to Gobert's enormous physical advantages. Probably the choice of personnel was not pure ego, but Redick reacted very strongly to questions earlier Wednesday about the thought process behind his lineup decisions, in particular the one that led him to leave five exhausted and undersized players on the court for an entire half of playoff basketball. Prodded about whether he had an assistant or two in charge of tracking substitutions, who could help him manage the rotation a little more carefully in Game 5, Redick threw a little mini-tantrum and then stormed away from the lectern.
"Are you saying that because I'm inexperienced, and that was an inexperienced decision that I made? You think I don't talk to my assistants about substitutions every single timeout?" asked an absolutely seething Redick. "That's a weird assumption." Perhaps Redick was feeling particularly touchy about the subject after he received a rare public callout from no less an authority than Lakers deity Magic Johnson.
However Redick happened to arrive at the lineup change for Game 5, it super did not work. Early on and then again in the game's closing stages, Julius Randle made a point of exploiting the Lakers' absolute lack of rim protection. The real beneficiary was Gobert, who hadn't otherwise been a factor offensively in the series, but who was practically salivating after the fun he'd had against Los Angeles's small crew in the back half of Game 4, noting that "it was getting harder and harder for them to keep me off the boards." Gobert made 12 of 15 shots from the floor, ripped down nine offensive rebounds, and (with the exception of a nasty first-quarter poster dunk from Rui Hachimura) in general just tormented and demoralized every Laker who ventured into the paint for any reason, finishing the night a game-high plus-18 in 39 minutes.
In Redick's defense, his Lakers might just've been doomed in this series. For however choppy their regular season might've been, the Timberwolves are good as hell, and closed the regular season on a 17–4 tear. They also make a pretty brutal matchup for a team with no real rim protection and also no standout point-of-attack stoppers. Los Angeles was always going to need genuinely ridiculous two-way stuff from Luka Doncic, LeBron James, and Austin Reaves; it's almost painful to imagine a future where the Lakers forced a Game 6 and—heaven truly forfend—a Game 7. The higher-seeded team was generally outplayed in the fourth quarters of this series, partly because Edwards is a damn killer and partly because the Lakers just don't have the combined depth, young legs, or, ah, conditioning to go hard all the way to the final buzzer against so fierce an opponent. You can imagine a fourth quarter of a Game 7 where Redick's small-ball lineup of death is just some slimy puddles that the youthful Timberwolves are happily splashing around in.
About that depth: A key difference between the two teams is how matchups alone could create an opening for a fourth or fifth option like Gobert to have a massive game, while no plausible combination of Lakers was going to make Hachimura or Jarred Vanderbilt into a sudden unstoppable force. I would be receptive to the argument that this series was decided in February, when the Lakers panicked and rescinded a completed deal for Hornets center Mark Williams, leaving them to finish the season with an interior rotation of Jaxson Hayes, an injured Maxi Kleber, and the utterly unplayable zombified remains of Alex Len. For what it's worth, Williams—who got off a dig at Los Angeles's expense Wednesday night—finished the season upright and ambulatory, albeit for an insanely, breathtakingly horrible Hornets team.
There was a funny sequence late in the fourth quarter last night, with the Wolves up by a bucket and neither offense exactly vibing, when Reggie Miller decided that the game needed to be resolved by Minnesota's superstar. "Anthony Edwards has got to make a play," insisted Miller, doing what he could short of deploying a tranquilizer dart to will the narrative away from Gobert. The Lakers immediately forced the ball out of Edwards's hands to Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who'd recently come on as a substitute after Jaden McDaniels fouled out. Alexander-Walker bricked a three-pointer—the Timberwolves missed a hysterical 40 threes Wednesday, the most ever by a victorious team in the playoffs—but the Lakers were by this time so desperately freaked by Gobert that two of them neglected to chase the rebound, so determined were they to bodily remove Gobert from the scene. This allowed Randle to sneak in for the uncontested offensive rebound. The ball swung back to Edwards, defended by Luka Doncic. Edwards drove left, stepped back, and missed a rushed and hotly contested three of his own. This time Gobert got a mitt to the rebound, and tapped it away from the nearby Lakers surrounding him. Edwards gathered the ball, and the possession finally ended with Randle beating a mismatched Reaves into the paint for a layup.
That was kind of the shape of things. The Lakers fought hard and were organized, but they were also short, slow, exhausted, and wearing down. Both Doncic and James were hobbled at points in the second half, but there was just nowhere else for them to go. Los Angeles would string together some sharp-enough rotations to keep Edwards angled away from the paint and then rush out to contest a three, and then the fresher and sturdier and harder-charging Timberwolves—usually but not always Gobert—would haul in the rebound, and the tired Lakers would have to race right back into defensive shape. All those missed Minnesota three-pointers became almost a cruelty, down the stretch.
It would've been more cinematic if the heavy lifting had been done by Edwards, but to his enormous credit he spent most of the key moments of the game coolly deferring, waiting out switches, identifying the mismatches, swinging the ball along to the next man. The Wolves were confident and mature enough to trust that the Lakers simply would not hang with them for 48 minutes. Even when the Lakers made a run in the third quarter, it never felt like anyone in a Wolves jersey felt much pressure. Sure enough, without any strategic or personnel shifts, Minnesota's advantages eventually began piling up again. The Lakers just kind of ... went away, scoring just 16 points on 30 percent shooting across the final frame of their season.
It's fun to think of the Timberwolves taking their present form into the next round, against whoever wins the series between the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets. Now that the series is over, it's clear this was no kind of matchup: Minnesota took its four victories by an average of 10.5 points, and this final one was only truly close for a few minutes spanning the end of the third quarter. For all the hype, the Lakers seem in retrospect like a small-time annoyance the Timberwolves had to clear on their way someplace else, maybe not even enough of a test for us to have learned a whole lot about Minnesota's bonafides. I'm still not sure the Timberwolves have exactly landed on an identity, but what they certainly seem to have is The Horses For It. When Edwards is going, he is often enough. When Edwards isn't going, they at least have the bodies to spread things around. And when things break just right, they have a big infuriating fellow who can go Dragon Mode. They'll take this as a source of confidence going forward; the Lakers, meanwhile, will have a long summer of coming to grips with having been devoured by Rudy Gobert. Awful.
