Julian AndrewsWeb Editorial AssociateTwitter
A promising start turned to a bitter loss on Wednesday, as the Wolves dropped Game 2 of their playoff series against the Rockets in Houston, 102-82. They head back to Minnesota down 0-2 after a hard-fought but ultimately unfruitful couple games for the Wolves.
The Wolves were excellent to start the game, playing excellent defense and holding the Rockets to 18 points in the first period. Andrew Wiggins was all over the floor, Jeff Teague was getting to the paint at will, and Karl-Anthony Towns had seemingly shaken off his Game 1 woes - playing solid defense and doing good work in the post, despite not finding the bottom of the net. It was a strange quarter—sloppy and ugly at times, but it had the Rockets looking confused. The Wolves took a 23-18 lead into the second period.
Unfortunately, the first quarter couldn’t last forever, and in the second period, the Wolves fell apart. The energy and opportunistic play of the first quickly turned into sloppiness in the second, and while the Rockets started taking better care of the ball and hitting their shots, the Wolves did not do the same. Minnesota had too many bad passes, and too many forced jumpers. The Rockets got the benefit of a few whistles, and hit a few threes. All of a sudden, the game was tied, then the Rockets were up, then they were up by a lot. It was 40-55 Houston at the half.
The third and fourth quarters weren’t much better. The Timberwolves got a few stops, but were unable to find any offense of their own. The Rockets forced turnovers, hit threes, and generally did the things they did all season to finish with the NBA’s best record.
The story of this game was the turnovers by the Wolves and Houston’s threes. The Wolves actually out-shot the Rockets 38.8-percent to 36.5-percent, and held James Harden to 2-for-18 shooting, but turned they the ball over 16 times and allowed the Rockets to hit 16 of 52 from beyond the arc. The bad shooting from the Rockets is a positive, but Houston ended up taking 96 shots to the Wolves’ 80, which more than made up for the small difference between their percentages.
On the Wolves side, Wiggins and Nemanja Bjelica were solid, but nobody else stood out. Towns had another rough outing, finishing with only five points, though he did have 10 rebounds. Jimmy Butler shot 50 percent from the field, but only finished with 11 points.
The Wolves return home on Saturday for another shot at this Houston team. It's back to the drawing board for the Wolves between now and then.