With 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter of the Minnesota Timberwolves' road game in Milwaukee, Donte DiVincenzo nailed a casual catch-and-shoot three-pointer to give his team a 24-point lead. This would turn out to be the final meaningful bucket scored by the Wolves Tuesday night, as Milwaukee would embark on a 23-0 run, which grew into a 39-8 run, and then concluded in a 110-103 win for the home team. The Wolves' loss was as costly as it was humiliating: Minnesota fell to eighth, one game below the four-way tie for fourth in the exceedingly tight Western Conference. At the same time, this was a fitting result for a team with a season-long inability to get out of its own way.
Blowing a 24-point lead in five minutes takes two teams, though the Wolves made things remarkably easy for the Bucks. After three quarters spent moving the ball and nailing open shots, Minnesota stagnated in the fourth, alternating between Anthony Edwards dribbling a bunch and missing a bad jumper, or one of the guards making a single pass before someone else missed a jumper. They went 4-for-20 in the fourth quarter with nine turnovers, only one of which came during the Bucks' big run. As many trailing teams have done this season, Milwaukee busted out a zone and the Wolves were totally bamboozled, unable or unwilling to make the simple passes required to overcome such a defense. On the other end of the court, Bucks guard Kevin Porter Jr. was getting into the paint at will. Once Milwaukee evened it up, they went back to man, got three steals in four possessions and blew the game open. For once, Doc Rivers's team was on the positive end of a blown lead.
"It’s a bad fourth quarter against a zone defense," Wolves coach Chris Finch said after the loss. "I don’t think it’s a microcosm of the season." Wrong. The story of this paranoid, uneven, often great Wolves season has been the team's crippling inability to be normal in the clutch. Of the real teams in the NBA, the Wolves are comfortably the worst in close games in terms of both volume and efficiency, with 26 clutch losses and a -8.4 net rating in clutch games. That's somewhat shocking for a team with a 46-33 record. If the Wolves simply went .500 in close games, they'd be jockeying with Houston for the two seed, not scrapping to avoid the play-in zone.
The optimist might point out that Minnesota was good enough in the first place to take a 24-point lead on the road against a hot team, and rack up an imposing 26-7 record in non-clutch games. When things click, the Wolves look like a contender, especially on defense with Rudy Gobert patrolling the paint, Nickeil Alexander-Walker harassing the point of attack, and the whole team rebounding at an elite level. The offense has waxed and waned, and while it has relied too much on Edwards making a bunch of difficult shots, the team is healthy at the right time and has begun to integrate DiVincenzo and Julius Randle, who both came back around the start of March. Those two players are critical for the Wolves, who are desperately short on shooting without the former and playmaking without the latter.
"Everybody in here is pissed off," DiVincenzo said. "But just regroup and come back because we know we have a huge game on Thursday."
"The next game is the biggest game of the season," Edwards said. That'd be Minnesota's visit to face the seventh-place Memphis Grizzlies, who are a game ahead of them in the standings. Both teams should be able to navigate the play-in round and make the playoffs, although the possibility of slipping up to the Dallas Mavericks, who are finally healthy, or the Sacramento Kings, who are playing basketball from the past, is truly harrowing. The Wolves can't afford to blow it, again.
