Anthony Edwards calls Timberwolves ‘front runners’ who ‘don’t even like each other out there’

Minnesota is a bad team right now. The Timberwolves have lost four straight and 7-of-9, and in that stretch they have the 25th-ranked offense in the league. The defense that propelled this team to near the top of the West is pedestrian this season (12th in the league).

Anthony Edwards had a harsh assessment of what’s wrong with the Timberwolves after they blew a 12-point lead midway through the fourth quarter to fall to a shorthanded Kings team Wednesday night, with quotes from his rant via Chris Hine of the Minnesota Star Tribune and Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic.

“I don’t like frontrunners. I’m not a frontrunner myself. I hate having frontrunners or thinking we have frontrunners in the team. I don’t think we have any of them. It seems we were frontrunners in evening, 100%.

“We were down, nobody wanted to say anything. We got up and everybody cheered. … We come back down and nobody says anything. That’s the definition of a front runner. We as a team, including myself, were all of us frontrunners tonight.”

“It’s like we’re not even happy for each other out there,” he told Rudy Gobert on his way out. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”…

“We’re soft as a team internally,” Edwards said. “Not to the other team, but internally we’re soft. We can’t talk to each other. Just a bunch of little kids. Like we play with a bunch of little kids. Everybody, the whole team. We just can’t talk to each other And we have to figure it out because we can’t go down this road…

“However many of us there are, all 15 of us go into our own shells and we just grow away from each other,” he said. “It’s obvious. We can see it. I can see it, the team can see it, the coaches can see it. The fans are booing us. It’s crazy, man.”

Two things are very different from last season to this season in Minnesota — how much of that is due to Karl-Anthony Towns’ preseason trades for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo is up for debate. Although that is certainly part of it. For example, DiVincenzo played 1% of his minutes at the time last season in New York, this season he’s had to do it 66% of the time, and that’s not his natural fit or strength. It shows.

The first thing that is different is what Edwards spoke about – an obvious lack of cohesion in the locker room that carries over onto the field. Last season, all the talk from the Minnesota locker room was about how together they were, and every night they simply wanted to play harder than the team they faced. It won them many games. As Edwards exposed, that is not the case this season.

The other thing is defense. Last season, which was this team’s identity, the Timberwolves were the best defense in the NBA. This season they are 12th in the league (and slightly worse, 15th in the league, over the last nine games). The team’s net defensive rating was 3.7 points per 100 possessions better a season ago and could keep them in games — or win them games — for a night (or quarter) when the offense struggled. Not this season.

None of these problems are simple fixes.