The Minnesota Timberwolves are expected to get Anthony Edwards back from a knee injury soon — the star hasn’t played since March 15 and is officially listed as questionable for Monday’s game against the Dallas Mavericks — but the team will still not have the luxury of being at full strength down the stretch. Instead, Timberwolves forward Jaden McDaniels, who left their 110-108 overtime win against the Houston Rockets in the fourth quarter last Wednesday, is now week-to-week due to left knee patella tendinopathy and a bone bruise, the team announced Monday.
McDaniels is Minnesota’s most versatile defender and a candidate for the All-Defensive Team. (He has already hit the 65-game threshold for end-of-season awards.) He is also having the best season of his career offensively, averaging a career-high 16.7 points and 3.1 assists per 36 minutes while shooting a career-high 42.1% from deep. He ties the Wolves’ lineups together, and they will miss him on both ends as they try to position themselves for the playoffs.
Speaking of playoff positioning: Minnesota is 45-29 with eight games remaining on the schedule. The team is tied with the Houston Rockets for fifth in the West, two games behind the fourth-place Denver Nuggets, three games behind the third-place Los Angeles Lakers and four games ahead of the seventh-place Phoenix Suns. There is little danger of falling into the Play-In, but McDaniels’ injury will make it more difficult for the team to improve its standing with a late-season push.
After the Mavericks game, the Wolves will visit Detroit and Philadelphia for a Thursday-Friday back-to-back, go home to host Charlotte on Sunday, then head back out on the road for a back-to-back against Indiana and Orlando and a potentially enormous game in Houston on April 10. (They and the Rockets split the first two games of the season series.) The regular-season finale is at home against New Orleans on April 12.
It is unclear how many (if any) of those games McDaniels will be able to play. He does not need surgery and Minnesota is trying to get him healthy in time for the playoffs, according to The Athletic. Without McDaniels in a 109-87 loss against the Detroit Pistons on Saturday, wing Terrence Shannon Jr. made his first start of the season and logged 25 minutes. Edwards missed that game, though, as did guard Ayo Dosunmu, who is listed as available against Dallas. With Dosunmu dealing with right calf soreness for the last two games, Mike Conley jumped back into the rotation and the starting lineup, but he might start collecting DNP-CDs again with Edwards and Dosunmu in the mix.
As long as McDaniels is out, Wolves coach Chris Finch is going to have to get creative with the rotation. There is no one else on the roster who gives them McDaniels’ combination of perimeter defense, rim protection, floor spacing and secondary creation, so Finch will have to figure out where he can find enough of all that to get by. Don’t be surprised if forward Kyle Anderson, signed off the scrap heap at the beginning of the month, plays a major role as a connector. Anderson is no McDaniels, but he’s switchable and Finch trusts his decision-making on offense.
