DALLAS — The cackling and hollering inside the visitors’ locker room could be heard from the hallway, that unmistakable, Oakland City twang filling up American Airlines Center and putting smiles on faces all over the Minnesota Timberwolves roster.
Anthony Edwards sat in front of his locker, volleying lines from the movie “Next Friday” back and forth with Bones Hyland, Donte DiVincenzo, Terrence Shannon Jr. and Julius Randle. This is what Edwards missed most during his six-game absence with a right knee injury, the camaraderie after a win like the Timberwolves got on Monday night, a 124-94 wipeout of the Dallas Mavericks.
“I was miserable,” Edwards said of his two weeks off the court. “I was a little stressed out. I told them I was insecure when I came back.”
There was a playful gleam in his eye. The six games he missed tied a stretch in December 2021 for the longest time out of the lineup in his career. The knee had been aching for several games before a 6-of-17 day in Oklahoma City on March 15 made it clear he needed to rest. He did not even attend the first four games while he received treatment for the inflammation in his knee, so when he finally got back onto the court with his guys, he could not hide his excitement.
“Maaaaan, like a kid in a candy store,” he said.
In fact, he may have been a little too amped up to return. When the Timberwolves took the floor for the opening tipoff, Edwards was nowhere to be found. As the coaches and players looked around, coach Chris Finch finally told Mike Conley to jump onto the floor to avoid a delay-of-game penalty. Shortly after play began, Edwards sheepishly came out of the tunnel to join his teammates on the bench.
He later said he had been using the bathroom.
He checked in with 10:59 to go in the first quarter and settled himself into the game exactly the way Finch wanted. Edwards did not dominate possessions with his dribble, looking to break down overmatched young Mavericks for isolation buckets. Instead, he was a facilitator, aiming to get his teammates shots while Dallas loaded up on defending him.
He fed DiVincenzo for 3, tried to get the ball to Rudy Gobert in the pocket and did not take his first shot until he was on the floor for nearly four minutes. He knocked down an open 3 in transition and checked out of the game after six minutes, having taken two shots with one rebound and two assists. The Wolves won those minutes by 14 points.
Edwards had three more shifts the rest of the game, all right around six minutes, to help him get his wind back. He also played sound defense against the tanking Mavs, the perfect tune-up to get him back in rhythm. He finished with 17 points on 7-of-13 shooting, hit a couple of 3-pointers and had four assists in 22:37. The Wolves outscored Dallas by 29 points in his time on the floor.
Edwards said he felt no ill effects from the knee injury. He cannot miss any of the final seven games, including all four games of two back-to-back sets, to be eligible for NBA awards.
“Ant was awesome,” Finch said. “His defense was outstanding, just let the game come to him, stayed aggressive, made quicker decisions. I thought he was really good. Things looked kind of easy for him as a result.”
They were easy against the Mavericks (24-51), owners of the third-worst record in the Western Conference. But the Wolves (46-29) have precious few gimmes left on their schedule and also learned Monday that forward Jaden McDaniels, injured in last week’s win over the Houston Rockets, is considered “week to week” with patella tendinopathy and a bone bruise in his left knee. He will not need surgery, and the Wolves believe he will be back before the playoffs begin in mid-April.
Perhaps in homage to McDaniels, the Wolves put the clamps on Dallas. Randle, who scored a team-leading 24 points in his hometown, hounded Cooper Flagg into 5-of-19 shooting, Khris Middleton turned the ball over five times, and Klay Thompson went 1 of 8. The Mavericks shot 35 percent from the field, 24 percent from 3 and turned it over 15 times.
“It was good,” said DiVincenzo, who scored 15 points and hit five 3s for the third straight game. “Played the right way. Nothing really changed from that standpoint. Defense was on point again, that’s the focus. We need to focus on that down the stretch.”
Many factors will decide just how far these Timberwolves can go. Can Randle and Naz Reid, their two mercurial power forwards, find some consistency in production and spirit? Will McDaniels get back to full health sooner rather than later? Can the “Twin Turbos” backcourt of Ayo Dosunmu and Hyland be as effective pushing the pace in the playoffs as they have been in recent games?
But so much of it will come down to Edwards. He is their brightest star, the playoff riser who can be one of the very best two-way players in the league. When he is making quick decisions and getting off the ball early against double teams, the Timberwolves have buzz-sawed through the early rounds of the playoffs. When he is playing more deliberately on offense and not paying attention on defense, they are ordinary.
Edwards knows this, which is why he was watching the team so closely while he was out. This season has been a frustrating one in some ways. The Wolves have been a team that has never really gotten on the roll it needed to challenge the Oklahoma City Thunder for superiority in the West. Edwards remembered last season, when Randle missed 13 games in February with a groin issue and spoke of how important it was for him to take a good, long look at the team to truly understand how he fit into the puzzle. When he returned, the Wolves went 17-4 down the stretch and then beat the Los Angeles Lakers and the Golden State Warriors in the playoffs.
Edwards took the same approach over the previous six games, trying to dissect the issues that he saw and determine exactly how he could help solve them.
“Just watching the game from a distance, you start to see what the team is missing, what’s wrong internally, the problems and (stuff),” Edwards said. “I think I needed that, especially going into the playoffs to see what we needed. It was big for me.”
He declined to get into specifics, not wanting to give a public scouting report on what he thought was needed. If the first game is any indicator, he will focus on moving the ball on offense, getting out in transition more often for easier baskets and, per Finch’s request, guarding the opponent’s best perimeter scorer while McDaniels is out.
“Just picking my spots, knowing when to be aggressive, knowing when to make the right play,” Edwards said. “And then just letting Bones and Ayo bring the ball up. I think that’s the main thing for me.”
That last part could be a significant adjustment for the Wolves. The season started with Edwards serving as the team’s de facto point guard. Conley’s ability to do it every night has disappeared with age. DiVincenzo is not the natural ballhandler required of the position. The Wolves determined second-year lottery pick Rob Dillingham was not ready to play such an important role on a team that wants to win the championship, so they traded him, Leonard Miller and a bevy of second-round picks to the Chicago Bulls for Dosunmu.
The trade has been a home run. Dosunmu missed the previous two games with right calf soreness and while his return to the lineup on Monday night may not have gotten the same attention as Edwards’, he was even more impactful. He put up 18 points, 15 rebounds, 12 assists and three steals in 33 minutes. It was his second career triple-double, and he joined Kevin Garnett and Kevin Love as the only players in Timberwolves history to register at least 15 points and 15 rebounds on a triple-double night.
Dosunmu was 8 of 13 from the field and had only one turnover, a sterling performance after missing the games against Houston and the Detroit Pistons.
“It was just one of those things where sometimes you get this late in the season and your body hurts, for sure,” he said. “The first couple times I felt it, I was trying to play through it.”
Ayo Dosunmu wants to take some of the burden off Anthony Edwards. (Jerome Miron / Imagn Images)
Now that he is back, one of Dosunmu’s biggest priorities is to make life easier for Edwards. He doesn’t want their go-to guy having to shoulder all the burden of bringing the ball up the court and initiating half-court sets. Dosunmu and Hyland are natural ballhandlers with a gas pedals always glued to the floor.
Dosunmu is hellbent on pushing the pace and wants Edwards to run with him. Edwards always wants to slow it down and go one-on-one with anyone in front of him. But Dosunmu and Hyland are trying to get the ball then get Edwards running along with them.
“I know he wants to traditionally play slow, but he’s a scorer and he’s an elite scorer,” Dosunmu said. “Me playing fast continuously, if he wants to score he’s going to run and get some easy baskets. One time I hit him, he ran and got a dunk. That helps him get easy baskets.”
If Dosunmu and Hyland prove adept at initiating the offense, it would take an enormous amount of pressure off of Edwards’ shoulders. Few have worked harder than Edwards for everything they have received in this league. Dosunmu wants to make some of his minutes less taxing.
“Ant is a superstar in this league. I don’t want him having to, each and every game, fight hard to get those baskets,” Dosunmu said. “He deserves to get easy baskets sometimes also. I just try to be that guy that can help others also.”
At times earlier in the season, Edwards seemed to be embracing the role of point guard on a PG-less team. During his time away, he watched how these two very capable ballhandlers ran the offense and started to see the benefit.
“The more dribbles I take, the more everybody’s like, ahhhh,” Edwards said, mimicking their frustration. “Just coming off, letting them bring the ball up. That’s their job. They’re point guards. They make it easy for me when they push the pace.”
Far stiffer tests loom, starting with back-to-back games at Detroit and the Philadelphia 76ers on Thursday and Friday. But the Timberwolves walked out of Monday night’s dress rehearsal with added belief in themselves now that Edwards and Dosunmu are back in the lineup. Finch said there was no indication that Edwards would sit out either of the back-to-back games next weekend.
The Timberwolves inched a half-game ahead of Houston for fifth in the West playoff field. But they still have a lot of work left to do. They are 1 1/2 games behind the fourth-seeded Denver Nuggets and four games up on the seventh-seeded Phoenix Suns.
With a happy Edwards back in the locker room, they have a pretty good chance.
“We don’t want to jog to the finish line; we want to sprint through and continue our success and momentum to the postseason,” Dosunmu said. “This was a big step forward.”