LOS ANGELES – Two days after the NBA regular season ended, Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards gathered the team together before their first practice in preparation for their series against the Lakers. He had a message for them, according to point guard Mike Conley.
“Just saying how, ‘This ain’t gonna be good enough, what we were doing at that time. Our ability to turn a switch on and off is not going to be there, so we have to be locked in and ready to go, and it starts in that practice,’” Conley said Edwards told the team. “To have that awareness to say those things at his age is very important, and it gave us a good springboard into the postseason.”
The Wolves have kept that message in mind since that day, and now they are one win away from knocking out LeBron James, Luka Doncic and the Lakers in Game 5 in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
By their own admission, the Wolves are a team that thrives when their backs are against a wall and people doubt them, so how do they keep that mindset when they are up 3-1 in the best-of-seven series and heavily favored to advance?
“We don’t have any choice,” forward Julius Randle said. “We haven’t done anything. We’ve won three games, which is great, but we got one more to finish the job for this series and got to keep moving on. We played good basketball up until this point, but we’re not done.”
Coach Chris Finch said the Wolves focused in Tuesday’s practice on some things that got a little “loose” in their game plan execution in Game 4. It’s good for the Wolves that they have some things to work on instead of thinking they played a perfect game. They have also tried to keep in mind what the general consensus was coming into the series as motivation up 3-1.
As Edwards said after Game 4: “I told them it’s going to be the toughest game that we’ve played all season, all series, because everyone is going to be against us. It’s going to be 300,000 people and then the Timberwolves, players and then the coaches and then the organization that travels. … Back against the wall in enemy territory. These are the moments that we should live for — going on the road and trying to close a team out.”
The Wolves have that experience of closing teams out on the road. Both series-clinching games they won a season ago came on the road — Game 4 in Phoenix and Game 7 in Denver. Perhaps they can draw on that series against the Suns for Wednesday. Few were picking them to advance, and even when the Wolves took a big lead in that series, they didn’t let Phoenix back into it. So even up 3-1 against the Lakers, their backs haven’t come off that wall in their eyes. Especially not with James and Doncic on the other side.
