A win’s a win’s a win. As a matter of fact, it’s better to win games than lose them. That’s the biggest takeaway from a game like Wednesday night. The Minnesota Timberwolves came in off of a back-to-back with a banged up Rudy Gobert and Anthony Edwards and after playing with their food for three and a half quarters, pulled it together and closed out a team with a dominant final stretch.

 

If you’re an optimist, you’re happy about the Wolves winning three straight games and making the third and fourth quarter mean something offensively. If you’re more on the glass half-empty side of things, it was a pretty arrogant performance that may not have gone the Wolves way if one more of the 1,276,355 current injured Memphis Grizzlies players was taking the floor.

 

Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum, another win gets added to the left hand column and embarrassment failed to fall upon the Wolves as it has in similar situations before, and perhaps that shows a sign of growth.

“I think the [All-Defensive team voters] gotta watch the games,” Edwards said. “It’s not my first time doing this, I have nights like this all the time…where somebody gets hot, or their best player gets hot, and I go shut them down.”

The offense was near non-existent for an entire half of the game. Minnesota didn’t score a single point until the 8:43 mark left in the first, and let Memphis jump out to a 12-0 lead to start things out. The half was capped off by a failure to grab and offensive rebound and a deep Memphis three to give an ultra-shorthanded team a three point lead against the top team in the west.

 

But almost right on cue, a deficit that had swelled to 11 points with 4:31 left in the third quarter, evaporated in just three minutes. Three minutes is all it took for the Wolves to wake up and decide to play a little bit of basketball. The Timberwolves scored on their final nine possessions of the third quarter to enter the final frame with a three-point lead.