What a year and a half it’s been for Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch.
Hired mid-season by the Timberwolves in 2020-21, he has quickly become a coach of the year candidate, has already signed an extension to remain with the Wolves, and now is only the third coach in franchise history to take the team to the playoffs (Flip Saunders and Tom Thibodeau are the other two).
The Timberwolves, after beating the LA Clippers in the NBA play-in tournament, will head into the playoffs as a seven seed and take on second-seeded Memphis.
What was it like for the Wolves coach, watching his star player have his worst game of the season, yet his team rally for the win in a raucous Target Center? In a word, passion.
“I'm just most proud of our effort and the passion that we played with,” Finch told WCCO. “And that when things weren't seemingly going well we kept fighting and kept finding a way to make another play, just to stay in it until we were able to find a rhythm and finish the game strong.”
Finch, appearing on the WCCO Morning News with Vineeta Sawkar and Mike Max, talked about the team effort in light of Karl-Anthony Towns’ struggles Tuesday night. Towns, an All-Star and the team’s leading scorer, was held to just 11 points in very limited action with foul trouble. He eventually fouled out of the game midway through the fourth quarter after playing only 24 mostly ineffective minutes.
The head coach said they were prepared for Towns to struggle with the way the Clippers have defended him.
“That's really the essence of a team,” Finch said. “KAT’s been huge for us. He's been our most steady and high performing player all season long. But the Clippers' game plan was clearly to take him out of the game and take him out of his rhythm, both mentally and physically. Get to him as much as they could and in many ways they were successful at it. But other guys stepped up. We have a lot of talent on this team, we have a lot of guys who like the ball in their hands and like the big moment. So, you know, sometimes the game just doesn't go a certain player’s way and that's okay.”
Another very important development for the Timberwolves is the improvement of second year player Anthony Edwards. In his first postseason appearance, it was clear Edwards was ready for the big stage and actually took the game over early in the first quarter while the Wolves were struggling to find points. Edwards scored the first seven of the night, and finished with a team-high 31.
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Edwards is developing into a superstar and his confidence is one of the main reasons for his success according to Finch.
“We've thought this about him since, well certainly since I've got here, that he has something special about him and that is that he's not afraid of the moment,” explains the Wolves head coach. “He has a perfect, perfect sense of timing, when to kind of step up. He got off to a great start, I thought. It really settled our team when we got up. Then we got down of course, but he stayed poised throughout the entire game, even when the game wasn't going his way. He just kept stepping up, kept stepping up and he knew they didn't have a matchup to guard him and that gave him confidence and you could just see, it's growing and growing out there.”
Next up are the Memphis Grizzlies, 56-26 during the regular season and good enough to finish second in the West. The Grizzlies and Wolves will play a best-of-seven series that starts Saturday afternoon in Memphis.
While the Wolves are certainly underdogs this time, the teams actually split the season series 2-2, with both teams winning games at home. Finch says they are ready for Memphis.
“We've been preparing for Memphis for a little bit now,” says Finch. “We were in a scenario down the stretch here where we could have played five or six different teams depending on how the league finished, whether we were in the playoffs, for the play-in, etcetera. So we've been preparing for them. We'll take today (Wednesday) off from practice, the coaches will meet, we'll regroup tomorrow as a team and we'll start installing the game plan. And we were fortunate to have got the result last night. It gives us a couple of days of runway to be able to kind of put this thing together before we go down there.”
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