Anthony Edwards says Wolves’ starting five has been ‘terrible,’ needs to play ‘like we love the game’

In his postgame scrum Wednesday, Anthony Edwards did not want to focus on the fact that the Minnesota Timberwolves were down 13-0 against the Golden State Warriors about four minutes into the first quarter and down 34-14 heading into the second. The important thing, Edwards told reporters, was that they got back into it.

“I mean, the start was bad,” Edwards said after the 116-115 loss. “We know we gotta get better. But I think it’s all about the finish.”

Edwards is not one for moral victories, “but we fought, so I’m proud of that,” he said.

A few minutes later, though, Edwards, who had two points on 1-for-5 shooting, no assists and two turnovers in his first nine-minute stint against Golden State, was asked what Wolves need to improve in the second half of the season. In response, he mentioned two things: “Boxing out and the start of games.”

Edwards continued: “The starting five, like, we are terrible. Every game, we come out just low-energy. The second group comes in and gives us energy. So I would say the starting group has gotta come out with more energy, like we want to play the game of basketball, like we love the game. And rebounding. We gotta rebound. On the offensive end, we can crash, and on the defensive end, we just gotta — all of us, we gotta box out and go get it.”

On Jan. 6, Minnesota coach Chris Finch inserted Donte DiVincenzo into the starting lineup and moved Mike Conley to the bench. The change has been good for DiVincenzo, who scored a season-high 28 points on 9-for-19 shooting against the Warriors, and it coincided with the Wolves winning four of five games before this one-point loss. Regardless of the fifth player on the court, though, the four-man combination of Edwards, Jaden McDaniels, Julius Randle and Rudy Gobert has generally struggled to overcome their spacing issues this season: In 700 minutes through 40 games, Minnesota has scored 111.6 points per 100 possessions with that quartet sharing the floor, and, despite a stingy defense, has outscored opponents by just 1.5 per 100. 

Those numbers stand in stark contrast to what the Wolves were able to do last season with Karl-Anthony Towns in Randle’s place:

But there is a twist! More than half of the minutes that the DiVincenzo-Edwards-McDaniels-Randle-Gobert lineup has logged this season occurred before it was the regular starting unit, and those minutes went terribly (100 points per 100 possessions, 117 allowed per 100). The sample is far too small to draw conclusions, but in the first handful of games since Minnesota shuffled the starters, that group was more efficient than last year’s starting five and had a +17.2 point differential. That number is down to +10.3 after the Golden State game, but, generally speaking, the Wolves’ starters have been better lately. In fact, after being outscored by six points in their first stint against the Los Angeles Clippers the night the change went into effect (and then winning their second stint by 11 points), they did not lose another opening stint until Wednesday.

It may feel like Minnesota starts “every game” flat, and it definitely dug itself a hole against the Warriors, but Edwards’ statement is hyperbolic. What it points to, though, is that, almost halfway through the season, the Wolves are still figuring out how to make their pieces fit. They were 29-11 at this point last season, and they’re 21-19 now, in the middle of the jumbled-up Western Conference playoff picture: three games separate the fifth-place Clippers and 12th-place San Antonio Spurs, and Minnesota is in eighth, 2½ games behind the former and 2½ ahead of the latter. If this team is going to make a run, the new starting five needs to sustain what it has done offensively, and it can’t afford many more first quarters as ugly as its most recent one.