The Athletic: Anthony Edwards owns crunch time for Wolves: 'You don't want me to pass the ball'

Anthony Edwards scored 31 points and hit a key shot late in Minnesota’s win over the Clippers on Thursday.

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LOS ANGELES — The look in Anthony Edwards’ eyes was not one of anger, but of certainty.

He had just hit the latest impossible shot in a season filled with them. With the shot clock winding down and two pit bulls in his grill, Edwards put his head down to get to the corner. It is a place on the court you never want to go when top-flight defenders like the LA Clippers’ Kris Dunn and Derrick Jones Jr. are breathing down your neck, unless you’re Anthony Edwards.

Once he got to no-man’s-land, he put a shoulder into Dunn to set up his patented stepback jumper, then elevated away from Jones, unleashing the kind of preposterous shot that had no business going in.

When it splashed through without even the slightest graze of the rim, giving the Minnesota Timberwolves a 92-88 lead with 42.9 seconds left in a game they absolutely could not afford to lose, Edwards walked right to coach Chris Finch and let loose with a fiery message. In the previous possession, Finch had barked at Edwards to move the ball after he hoisted an ill-advised, heavily contested 11-foot jumper that clanked off the rim.

With the way the night had been going — no one outside of Edwards and Donte DiVincenzo could knock down a shot — Edwards had made a unilateral decision that he would determine the Wolves’ fate.

In that moment, the Timberwolves were not Finch’s team or Tim Connelly’s team or Marc Lore’s and Alex Rodriguez’s team. In that moment, there was no collaboration, no vote taken to see what the right path forward was going to be in a tough, sloppy, physical battle against the severely short-handed Clippers.

In that moment, this was a dictatorship. Edwards was the one calling the shots and taking them.

“I just tried to shoot it every time I touched it,” Edwards said. “Some are gonna say I should have passed, but I’ll be all right. I think we have a better chance of winning with me shooting it.”

When Edwards hollered in Finch’s direction, it could be viewed as an act of defiance, a tear in the fabric binding coach and superstar. However, to know Edwards is to understand that this wasn’t some throwdown to disrespect Finch’s authority. This was a 24-year-old sensation, fresh off winning the Kobe Bryant trophy given to the All-Star Game MVP in this same Intuit Dome, telling his coach that he doesn’t have to worry anymore about the failures of crunch time past.

In his sixth season in the league, he has shown a mastery of the moment that rivals anyone else in the NBA. He has a plan now, and there is no stopping him.

“Me and my coach got the best relationship ever,” Edwards said with a smile after scoring 31 points in a 94-88 victory. “He be right most of the time — 98 percent of the time. He told me to pass the ball tonight, and I should have passed it, but I shot the ball instead and it went in. The basketball gods were on my side.”

Finch didn’t bat an eye at the exchange, dismissing a question about it because he didn’t even recall it. That speaks to the competitive nature of both men. It was a heat-of-the-moment outburst from Edwards, and Finch was so focused on finishing the game that it didn’t even register with him.

“He has incredible confidence,” Finch said. “He’s not afraid of the moment. You’d be surprised that a lot of guys don’t have that. … The key is he has things now that are repeatable that he knows he can get to. I think before he was more ad-lib, and that just helps him settle the game down, read the floor and play a little bit more under control.”

In some ways, both Finch and Edwards were right. It was understandable that Finch pushed Edwards to move the ball more and was frustrated by watching the Clippers turn the Timberwolves into the kind of ISO-heavy attack that makes it so hard for them to get going.

They are at their worst when the ball is sticky, as Finch calls it. The Wolves shot 43 percent, weighed down by Julius Randle’s dreadful 1 of 10 night. They were 7 of 25 from 3-point range before Edwards’ game-sealer, were outscored 30-19 in the third quarter and had only 23 assists against 13 turnovers.

With Kawhi Leonard, Darius Garland and John Collins all out, the Clippers were even worse on offense. They shot 40.5 percent from the field, 22 percent from 3 and turned it over 19 times. There was no way this game should have been as tight as it was.

However, the Timberwolves have a maddening habit of “fighting the game,” as Finch described it, even when facing a short-handed or buried-in-the-standings team.

You can see it in their body language, starting with their two stars — Edwards and Randle. The two of them relax on defense and turn the offensive end into a series of isolation possessions, an aesthetically displeasing brand of basketball that invites the opponent to believe it can win.

This was the fourth straight game they have played against a team missing at least two starters. Like the three that came before this one, Thursday’s game was a too-close-for-comfort slog all the way to the end.

That is where Edwards is right, too. On nights like these, when the ball stops moving and nothing seems to be going well, it is understandable that he takes matters into his own hands. If no one else could grab this one by the throat, Edwards was going to do it himself. It did not matter that he was 2 of 8 in the fourth quarter before that big shot.

“The play before, Finchy, when I took the midranger over two (defenders), he was like, ‘Pass the ball,’ ” Edwards said in his Amazon Prime postgame interview. “I just told him, ‘You don’t want me to pass the ball. You want me to shoot it.’ ”

There was a twinkle in his eye as he said it. Edwards knows when he stokes Finch’s ire. He also knows that Finch has a point when he is upset. The two have been together for all but the first 31 games of Edwards’ career, and straight talk is a two-way street in their relationship.   

Edwards made 12 of 24 shots and met the aggressive, physical Clippers defense with his own force. Until Randle comes out of the funk he has been in for more than two weeks, until Jaden McDaniels and Naz Reid iron out their inconsistencies. Until Ayo Dosunmu gets fully acclimated to a new system, it is on Edwards to carry the day.

“The confidence is there, and that’s half the battle in basketball, if not 75 percent of the battle,” Dosunmu said. “Any time he shoots, I think it’s going to go in also.”

Anthony Edwards returned to Intuit Dome on Thursday, less than two weeks after winning All-Star MVP honors there.

He has worked tirelessly with Wolves assistant Chris Hines on a finishing package designed to make him unstoppable. And he has been exactly that far more often than not this season. The higher degree of difficulty, the better for him now.

“I look forward to the heavily contested, against two people (shots),” he said. “I love those type of shots. I work on those shots all the time.”

What separates him from most everyone else is an unending belief in his ability to deliver. It is more than confidence. It is a refusal even to consider the possibility of failing. When the moment arrives, it never occurs to him that the shot is not going to fall.

“I never really worry about the shot not going in because I just feel like it’s always going to go in because of the work that I put in, the hours that I put in in the gym,” Edward said. “The shots that I get to, I work on those spots every day in practice with C-Hines, after practice at night. There’s no way I’m not going to make the shot. That’s how I approach it.”

There is a danger there as well. One of Edwards’ superpowers early in his career has been an ability to share the spotlight with his teammates. They believe in him and follow him into the fight because he has instilled confidence in them as well. He typically deflects the attention, hyping up his teammates and emphasizing their importance while the world focuses on him.

The vibe has been a little different over these last few weeks. The Timberwolves (37-23) are not playing well. They are struggling with opponents they should handle with relative ease. They are searching for connectivity while chasing a third straight run to the Western Conference finals, and more. Nothing is coming easy for them.

With the car swerving dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, Edwards is tightening his grip on the steering wheel. It is impressive because he is doing what superstars do and putting it all on his shoulders. At the same time, he also risks alienating some teammates who can’t find a rhythm.

The good news is he is helping the team stack wins while they search for flow. The Wolves are 5-1 over their last six games, 10-4 in their last 14 and remain a game behind the Houston Rockets for third in the West, with a huge game at the fourth-place Denver Nuggets on Sunday. It has been ugly, hard … and successful, which is certainly better than the alternative.

Maybe Kyle Anderson, who is on his way back to Minnesota after securing a buyout from the Memphis Grizzlies, will help things with his ballhandling and defensive versatility. Maybe Randle will lock back in and be the overpowering offensive playmaker he was in the first two rounds of last year’s playoffs.

Maybe McDaniels will look more like the player he was in Portland on Tuesday. Maybe Finch will find the right buttons to press with lineup combinations and rotations down the stretch, like he has every other season in Minnesota.

Until that happens, Edwards may have to keep moving away from kumbaya to Kobe if that is what it takes to get the Wolves home-court advantage in the first round, so be it.

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