Minnesota trailed Memphis by five at halftime of a game the Wolves needed to win for playoff positioning.
A team that’s so often depended on its defense for the last few seasons, it was the Timberwolves couldn’t rely heavily on that end of the floor Thursday.
The Grizzlies gashed Minnesota to the tune of 72 points in the first half, using an up-tempo attack that consistently had the Wolves on their heels. There are two ways to slow down a team constantly aiming to play in transition. You can get back on defense and match up — which is a difficult solution to attain during the course of a contest — or you can consistently make the opponent pull the ball out of its own net.
The Wolves chose the latter.
Minnesota scored a franchise-record 52 points in the third quarter, going 18 for 21 from the field and 7 for 8 from beyond the arc to build a 22-point lead en route to a 141-125 victory in Memphis.
The Wolves’ third frame marked the highest-scoring quarter by any team in the NBA this season.
While the win left the Wolves in eighth place in the West for the time being, because of tiebreakers and who else plays one another over the weekend, Minnesota is now guaranteed to secure a top six seed in the West and dodge the play-in tournament altogether if it wins its last two games of the regular season against Brooklyn on Friday and against Utah on Sunday. The Wolves will be hefty favorites in both bouts.
Anthony Edwards scored 18 points in that third quarter, while Julius Randle scored 14. Their performances in that 12-minute span were indicative of the entire evening. Edwards was scalding hot from the field Thursday, punishing Memphis’ lack of perimeter defenders and drop coverage scheme in the pick and roll but burying one jumper after another. In total, he finished with 44 points on the strength of seven triples while going 11 for 13 from the free-throw line. The all-star guard also had nine assists.
Randle finished with 31 points, 10 rebounds and five dimes. He also had a pair of buckets in the closing minutes that slammed the door on a furious Memphis rally that briefly resembled Minnesota’s fourth-quarter collapse in Milwaukee on Tuesday, but stalled when the Grizzlies got to within 10 points.
Ja Morant led Memphis with 36 points, and Desmond Bane made six triples for Memphis — who shot 50% from distance as a team — but Bane went 0 for 4 from beyond the arc over the final two quarters, as Minnesota was able to keep better tabs on the sharpshooter in the half court.
Memphis scored on 65% of its second-half possessions that came after a Wolves’ miss or a turnover, but there were only 17 such occasions over the final two frames.
Minnesota shot 55% from the field on a night where it hit 20 triples. And while the Wolves would aim for a better defensive showing, part of the idea of this remade roster this season was that such offensive performances were possible.
And they got one exactly when they needed it.
