This from tireless Vikings beat guy Chip Scoggins, who covered the game tonight:

The Wolves blew a chance to enter the all-star break on a positive note because they played poor early and then made a costly mistake late in a 93-92 loss to the Charlotte Bobcats at Target Center.

Despite trailing by 21 points in the first half, the Wolves came back and had a three-point lead with less than a minute remaining. But a botched save attempt cost them a chance to enter the break with their fifth victory in six games. "Yeah it [hurts]," forward Al Jefferson said. "It would have helped if we hadn't got down 20 points. But that's just how it goes. It showed that we were determined to make a comeback and had a chance to win. But we lost by one rebound." That missed rebound was an obvious source of frustration afterward. With the Wolves leading 92-91, Charlotte's Boris Diaw missed a 21-footer with nine seconds left. Both Jefferson and Corey Brewer chased after the ball along the baseline. Brewer flipped the ball right to Bobcats center Nazr Mohammed under the basket for an easy dunk with 5.3 seconds left. "I'm pretty sure if we could do anything [different] we would have done it," Jefferson said. "The ball was going out of bounds and he just threw it back and it went to the wrong player." Said Wolves guard Wayne Ellington: "I think it was definitely bad luck. They both went for the ball to save it. The only thing you can say is you never really want to save the ball under your own basket. He probably should have thrown it a little farther out. Other than that, they were just playing as hard as possible to win the game." Wolves coach Kurt Rambis didn't criticize either Brewer or Jefferson for that play and said it was a collective breakdown by all five players on that play. "It would be easy to say what should have happened," Rambis said. "Obviously that's not what you would want to happen. I think Corey knew Al was behind him and he was trying to get it to Al. But Al thinks he has to go get the ball too. You don't want to normally throw the ball back underneath your opponents' basket, but we also had three other Timberwolves players standing around 20 feet from the basket and not one of them made a move to the basket when that shot went up. They should have all been converging at that time. At that timeout I mentioned that to them. They were one rebound away from a win and they couldn't come up with it."