Win in New Orleans less than satisfying for Timberwolves

NEW ORLEANS – In one corner of a small, rectangular Timberwolves locker room after their 149-142 overtime win over the Pelicans at Smoothie King Center on Tuesday were the younger players on the team, like Jaylen Clark and Terrence Shannon Jr.

They were talkative, and their mood was upbeat, like you might expect after a win.

In a corner near them were veterans Julius Randle and Rudy Gobert. They weren’t as happy.

Randle sounded like he might after a loss. He spoke in short answers and in a low voice, not with the smile he usually has after victories.

“We got really good games, and we have games like this,” Randle said after fielding a question about the team’s defense.

He added: “When we got energy and we’re playing well, it looks good, and when we don’t, it looks just as bad.”

Mind you, this was after a win. But Randle struck the right tone. There was nothing to be excited about. The Wolves (13-8) had to claw their way back from a 15-point second-half deficit just to force overtime against the Western Conference’s worst team, one that has only three victories and is without injured Zion Williamson and Jordan Poole.

The teams play again here on Thursday night.

Through one quarter of the season, the Wolves defense has been inconsistent at best. Their No. 12 rating is not good enough for the standards they know they can reach. Before the game, coach Chris Finch used the right word to describe how the team looked on that end of the floor.

“Kind of started the season a little bored,” he said. “That’s not something that you want to admit to, but a team that’s had two deep runs, I think we just maybe started the season a little bit flat and bored and just realizing you got to put the work in. It’s going to be tough. The West is going to be brutal, and we just had to get back to playing better defense.”

Then they went out and barely played any in a first half where New Orleans posted 68 points, including 43 in the second quarter. The most damning statistic was the 16-2 edge the Pelicans (3-19) had in fast-break points. That was an indictment of the Wolves’ focus and effort.

Gobert, always the one to remind the team it has to develop winning habits, struck a tone similar to Randle’s.

Finding a middle ground between the joviality in one corner of the room and the seriousness from the Gobert-Randle corner was Edwards, who tried to balance the good with the bad from what happened Tuesday, and where the team was at defensively through 21 games. He said it was tough to defend New Orleans because “they don’t have a go-to guy” they could zero in on. But that wasn’t much of an excuse.

“Finch said something the other day — we can’t just wait for the playoffs to start playing defense,” Edwards said. “It seem like we don’t wanna play these games. It seems like we wanna fast-forward the season to the playoffs and play all-out defense and play super hard, but it just don’t work like that. We got to be ready to play on any given night, and it starts with me.”

Edwards hit the nail on the head. Habits form during the season. Just ask the Thunder, who played championship basketball all last season, while the Wolves were searching all season to get to that level.

One quarter of the way into this season, it seems like they still are. At what point do the Wolves go from being an elite defensive team overcoming some early inconsistency to just being an inconsistent defensive team? It’s a line that’s coming closer into view.