Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards gets candid in locker room after loss to Kings

In his five seasons with the Timberwolves, Anthony Edwards never talked publicly the way he did Wednesday after the team’s 115-104 loss to the Kings.

As the media awaited him at his locker following the game, Edwards asked, “What you wanna know, why we’re trash?”

Yes, that’s what all Wolves fans would like to know after the team’s fourth consecutive loss and seventh in nine games. The Wolves climbed out of another double-digit hole Wednesday and seemed like they had everything figured out after taking a 12-point lead with 7 minutes, 17 seconds to play. Then it all went away in a flash, as Malik Monk (27 points) and De’Aaron Fox (26 points) took advantage of a porous Wolves defense, one that hasn’t shown up in a lot of big moments this season. Then questionable offense and shot taking, including from Edwards, doomed the Wolves. Fans let out a few boos throughout the evening.

After lamenting this loss — “I’ma take this one,” he said — Edwards got at the larger issues on his mind. First, he accused the team of being “frontrunners” Wednesday.

“I don’t like frontrunners,” he said. “Myself, I’m not a frontrunner. I hate to have frontrunners or to think we have frontrunners on the team. I don’t think we have any of those. It look like we was frontrunners tonight, 100%.”

Then he added: “We was down, nobody wanted to say nothing. We got up and everybody cheering. … We get down again and don’t nobody say nothing. That’s the definition of a frontrunner. We as a team, including myself, we all was frontrunners tonight.”

Later in his comments, Edwards got to the macro problems plaguing this team through an 8-10 start, and he made some of the most damning statements he has made about any of his five Wolves teams. He wasn’t angry or raised his voice. He was contemplative and reflective, searching for answers.

“However many of us it is, all 15, we go into our own shell and we’re just growing away from each other. It’s obvious,” Edwards said. “We can see it. I can see it, the team can see it, the coaches can see it. The fans … booing us. That … is crazy, man. We’re getting booed in our home arena.”

Edwards said everyone, not just the new acquisitions like Donte DiVincenzo and Julius Randle, has “their own agenda” on the floor and he rues that the Wolves can’t communicate with each other like other teams can.

“We soft as hell as a team, internally. Not to the other team, but internally, we soft,” Edwards said. “We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Just like we playing with a bunch of little kids. Everybody, the whole team. We just can’t talk to each other. And we’ve got to figure it out, because we can’t go down this road.”

There have been times of tension before, such as two years ago when Rudy Gobert was first integrating to the Wolves. It ultimately took trading out D’Angelo Russell for Mike Conley to shift the team. But during that time, Edwards rarely was as revealing as he was Wednesday.

“We’re just so negative right now. Last couple years, we was like this,” Edwards said, making a motion to indicate the team was close. “And I just feel like we’ve gradually grown away from each other, which is the craziest thing, because most of us have been together. We’ve got two new players, that’s about it. Everybody else has been together.”

What will it take to pull out of this funk? Edwards said the team isn’t listening to the coaching staff when it comes to game plan execution.

“We got to start doing what the coaches say, we always got something to say back,” Edwards said. “… We supposed to be doing this, and we do something else. We supposed to be in this coverage and we do something else.

“I’m supposed to be chasing somebody, I go under the screen. I’m supposed to be blacking and veering, I don’t veer. It’s just little stuff like that that we’re just not doing. It just comes from not following the game plan and listening to the coaches, man.”

This spiral began last week with a bad loss at Toronto that featured a players’ meeting after the game. Those conversations have continued this week. The Wolves had a hard talk at halftime Wednesday, and they briefly turned it around in the second half. Conley (16 points) returned after a three-game absence because of a left toe sprain and said he was the “instigator” of the team airing out concerns at the break.

“I told the team, we got to be able to talk,” Conley said. “We got to able to communicate and listen. Somebody’s talking to you, not get angry or snap back. We’re all trying to win, and we got that out.”

Like Edwards, Conley said the Wolves have to get out of their own feelings when things aren’t going right individually.

“Trust me, we’ve spoken through the last three losses as a team, as players,” Conley said. “And at the end of the day, man, it comes down to us believing, believing again, believing in what we do. It’s not about you in the big game. It’s not about if you’re making shots, missing shots, if you turn it over. We have to live with each other’s deficiencies. We have to live with each other’s mistakes and pick each other up. And that’s what the message is right now is you can’t be immature about this.”

As Conley walked out of the locker room, he assured reporters that the Wolves would be OK. The 37-year-old has seen and heard it all in his lengthy career, but he might not have heard Edwards sound as bewildered and unsure as he did Wednesday.

“As the person who’s supposed to help try to figure things out, sometimes it’s tough,” Edwards said. “Because you look at everybody, and everybody got a different agenda. It’s like, ‘What … am I supposed to say?’ You know what I mean. I’m trying to get better in that aspect, figure out what the hell to say to get everybody on the same agenda.”