Before overtime in the Timberwolves' 114-109 victory over the Boston Celtics, Anthony Edwards said Jayson Tatum was talking some "smack" about stopping Edwards on the Wolves' final possession of regulation.
Edwards said he had a message for Tatum: "I'm comin' again."
He wasn't kidding. In the extra session, Edwards had a burst of offensive brilliance on a night when both defenses combined for one of the most exciting early November games at Target Center in recent years.
Edwards scored eight of his game-high 38 points in overtime and added nine rebounds and seven assists to lift the Wolves to a gutsy win against one of the NBA's top teams.
"He loves the moment," Wolves coach Chris Finch said. "We still have to get better with closing out that game in regulation with our decision-making and ball movement. ... But guys who like the moment are often few and far between, and we're lucky we have one on our team."
The Wolves were trailing 105-103 in overtime and Karl-Anthony Towns had just fouled out on a night when he struggled with seven points and seven turnovers. Mike Conley breathed some life into them with a key go-ahead three-pointer before he drew an offensive foul on the other end of the floor.
The crowd was back in a frenzy, and nobody thrives on a raucous home audience quite like Edwards, who hit the next three shots of the game to give the Wolves a 112-105 lead with 1 minute, 30 seconds to play. First, Edwards hit a long two over Al Horford, then came another over Horford from 22 feet followed by a twirling, fadeaway, one-handed shot in the lane.
Edwards did all this — and still played aggressive defense — with five fouls from the 10:49 mark of the fourth quarter. He said he essentially dared the officials to foul him out.
"They don't wanna see me foul out," Edwards said. "That's how I was lookin' at it. I'm tellin' Finchy, 'They foul me out, that's on them.' I feel like they don't wanna see me foul out. So I was still playing aggressive."
This came after there was some questionable decision-making by both teams late in regulation, including some possessions Edwards commandeered when a pass might have been the better option. On one such possession, Edwards did find the open man, Jaden McDaniels, who hit a tying three-pointer with 1:41 left in regulation after he started the game 2-for-10. McDaniels finished 8-for-18 for 20 points. Sequences like that, Conley said, are big for Edwards' maturity.
"His ability to let the game slow down at that time was huge," Conley said. "You've seen times where he gets a little bit rushed and gets stuck in the paint and doesn't know what to do and has to shoot it over two or three guys. He made the right play, right decision when we needed it. Timely decisions and Jaden was huge making the shots when Ant was getting it to him."
For all the excitement Edwards brought, Monday's win wouldn't have been possible without the Wolves defense living up to its No. 1 rating.
For the second time in less than a week, the Wolves handed one of the NBA's elite teams its first loss of the season. The Denver Nuggets last week and now the Celtics have learned just how tough it can be to score on the league's top defense. Tatum had 32 points and Brown had 26, but the Wolves held Boston to 39% shooting overall. Both McDaniels and Gobert excelled on that end, with the Wolves overcoming Gobert's 2-for-11 night at the free-throw line thanks in part to his defense.
"From Day One, training camp, we sat together and we decided that we wanted to be a defensive team," Gobert said. "And I'm really proud of the way, the maturity that we've shown and the approach that we have in the way we take every possession personally. I think that's the mark of a great defensive team."
McDaniels hounded Tatum and didn't let him get anything easy, and when Tatum did score, it was usually because he got someone other than McDaniels switched onto him.
"I think we're super tough. We don't let nobody push us around," McDaniels said. "We're always being physical defensively. I feel like we're a tough team. Super tough."
That much has been evident early in the season. The Wolves appear to be something it was hard to imagine any Wolves team could be: a tough-minded, defensive-focused group. They appear much further along on that end of the floor than they were a season ago, and the defense has been consistently stingy through the first six games of the season. But Edwards wasn't quite ready to say the Wolves have turned a corner.
"It's still early," Edwards said. "I don't know. We still trying to figure it out. We won a good game today, but it's still early. We got a lot more games left. So we still trying to figure it out, man."
That process could be going a lot worse.
