Turnovers plague Timberwolves as they prepare to meet playoff foe

Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said the reason Austin Rivers and Naz Reid were late scratches to Wednesday's loss was because of a "GI bug" that seemed to be affecting players on the team.

Finch said the team was trying to figure out if it was some sort of virus, or just the result of the players having some "bad food."

He did not list having to watch Wolves play basketball as a potential cause.

Rivers was back at practice Thursday and not on the injury report. Reid did not practice and is out for Friday's game at Memphis.

The slumping Wolves, who have lost five of six, will play their first extended stretch of games (the next four) on the road for the first time this season.

The trip begins with Memphis, the team that eliminated the Wolves in the playoffs a season ago.

"We'll turn it around in Memphis, for sure," guard Anthony Edwards said. "I think Memphis will bring it out of us."

The Wolves are currently playing whack-a-mole with their problems. When they solve one, another pops up. They have been moving the ball better on offense — they shot 52,6% and 47% their past two games — but with that increased ball movement they have turned it over more. They rank 25th in the league in turnovers (16.5 per game), and opponents are converting those miscues into points at the other end at a high rate. The Wolves are 27th in the league at allowing points off turnovers (21.3). Phoenix scored 32 points off 19 Wolves turnovers on Wednesday.

"There's a lot of live-ball turnovers. There's a lot of deflating turnovers," Finch said. "Maybe guys are caught off guard, or their frustration level affects their ability to get back, which is not an excuse, for sure. Of course teams are obviously trying to run on us at all moments, every time, and we're giving them more opportunities to do so by turning it over."

Finch said the team is doing a better job of integrating center Rudy Gobert into the offense, but he said they identified six turnovers when they were trying to get Gobert the ball.

"Of those six turnovers, I thought only two were super ill-advised," Finch said. "The other ones were we just didn't complete the play, a pocket pass or a lob we threw off the backboard."

Their overall frustration level in games when things go wrong speaks at the heart of one of the Wolves' biggest problems — overcoming adversity. That quality was on display last postseason when the Wolves blew three different double-digit leads in the fourth quarter of games they lost in that 4-2 series. Memphis would make a run, and the Wolves would seem helpless to stop it.

"You got to resist the urge to make a one-pass shot and just a home run-type play," Finch said. "I think there's a lot of that. Even when we tightened the game up [Wednesday], we took two really quick shots that probably could have driven or moved it a little bit. But that's it, when the game starts slipping away, we want it all back in one play."

The Wolves will be playing their 13th game on Friday, and it was after their 13th game last year they began to turn their season around after a 4-9 start. It's hard to see a similar turnaround coming after how they have played recently. But the same thing happened last season.