Anthony Edwards didn’t pull any punches after his Timberwolves suffered a 115-104 home loss to the Kings on Wednesday night — the team’s fourth consecutive defeat and seventh in the last nine games.
In a profanity-laced tirade, Edwards referred to his Timberwolves teammates as “a bunch of kids” and blasted their lack of effort on both ends of the floor.
“We thought defense was our identity but it’s not looking like it at all,” Edwards rued. “Our identity right now is, I think, is we’re soft as hell as a team, internally. Not to the other team, but internally, we soft. We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Just like we playing with a bunch of little kids. We just can’t talk to each other. And we’ve got to figure it out, because we can’t go down this road.”
As Edwards alluded to, defense was the Timberwolves’ calling card last season when they finished first in most defensive metrics and rode those strengths to the Western Conference Finals. This season, though, Minnesota has fallen to 12th in defensive efficiency, 24th in paint points allowed (51.6 per game) and 21st in fast-break points allowed (16.4 per game).
The inability to get stops is why Minnesota has struggled to retain leads. This includes blowing a 12-point fourth-quarter lead on Wednesday, a day after an OT loss to the Rockets. Edwards called his team “front-runners” after Wednesday’s loss.
“We look like front-runners for sure tonight,” Edwards said. “We was down, nobody wanted to say nothing. We got up and everybody was cheering and hyped. And then, when we got down again, don’t nobody say nothing. That’s the definition of a front-runner. We, as a team, including myself, we all was front-runners tonight.”
Ouch. That’s harsh. But it could be the exact dressing down the Timberwolves need to return to winning ways. They started the season 6-3 and have gone 2-7 since.
The Timberwolves (8-10) will try to break out of their slump when they host the Clippers and Lakers on Friday and Monday, respectively.
