LOS ANGELES — The concern on Mike Conley’s face could not be hidden two months ago, after his first glimpse of these new-look, Luka Dončić-led Los Angeles Lakers.
Conley’s Minnesota Timberwolves were in Crypto.com Arena on Feb. 27, Dončić’s sixth game in a Lakers uniform. Even though Dončić wasn’t particularly sharp, the Lakers cruised to a 111-102 victory. Long after the visiting locker room cleared out, Conley felt like a member of the Rebel Alliance on Alderaan, craning his neck toward the sky as the Death Star was being assembled.
The Western Conference playoff landscape shook under his feet the day that the Lakers acquired Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks in the most stunning trade in league history. When Dončić and LeBron James toyed with the Wolves in their first meeting, Conley could not help but feel a little sorry for himself.
Dončić and James. Together. Conley was at a loss for words.
“How could they let those two guys be on the same team?” Conley said then. “You spend 18 years working your a– off, and then something like this happens.”
At that moment, the Timberwolves were 32-28, still trying to work through the kinks created by trading Karl-Anthony Towns to the New York Knicks for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo right before training camp started. Conley was encouraged by the progress they were making, but the prospect of having to face a team led by James, one of the greatest players the league has ever seen, with Dončić, who eviscerated the Wolves in the Western Conference finals last season, was a little too much for him to process.
“You’re just thinking, ‘Oh, my God, we’re going to have to go through these guys at some point,’” Conley remembered on Wednesday night. “Whether it’s first, second or third round, we’re going to have to beat the Lakers. And they have Luka and LeBron. What are we going to do?”
When the Timberwolves drew the Lakers in the first round of the playoffs, it was hard to find a national voice who did not agree. With punching bags Rudy Gobert and Julius Randle in the frontcourt, the Wolves were dismissed as legitimate opponents for the mighty purple and gold. After all, we just saw what Dončić did to this defense in a 4-1 conference finals wipeout.
Conley is in his 18th season. He knows he doesn’t have many more bites at the apple. The Wolves were in a logjam in the West with about six teams below the Oklahoma City Thunder. Then, all of a sudden, one of those teams had one of the top five players in the league fall right in its lap. He was crestfallen.
“We have a shot. The West is wide open, and then they get Luka and that just made it 100 times harder,” Conley remembered thinking. “I think that was the sentiment around the league, not just us.”
Two months later, after a 103-96 victory over the Lakers in Game 5 that put the Timberwolves in the second round, Conley stood in the same locker room with an entirely different look on his face. The existential dread was gone, replaced by a triumphant glow from a series that was all Minnesota. That pairing that was so celebrated and so feared, that team that gets so much attention, was no match for a ragtag batch of underdogs who appear to be finding themselves at just the right time.
Behind Gobert’s 27 points and 24 rebounds, the Timberwolves dominated Game 5, at least as much as one team can dominate another when the margin of victory is in the single digits. The Timberwolves were staggeringly bad from 3-point range, making only 7 of 47 attempts. Anthony Edwards, the star whom everyone is falling in love with, scored just 15 points on 5-of-19 shooting and missed all 11 of his 3s. Breakout star Jaden McDaniels had eight points and three rebounds in 18 minutes before fouling out. Naz Reid had three points and two rebounds.
None of that mattered. The Wolves out-rebounded the Lakers 54-37, outscored them 22-4 in bench points, 20-10 in second-chance points and 56-40 in the paint. Randle shook off early foul trouble to finish with 23 points, five rebounds and four assists.
This was a gritty, gutty victory for a team that has needed so much of that this season. From the start of the series to the end, they were the better, deeper, hungrier team, one that built enough momentum in a 17-4 finish to the regular season that they were undaunted by a 3-6 matchup with the Lakers.
“To see that it wasn’t a fluke, that we came in and did this, to see that we were the team that we think we can be regardless of who they had over there, it just says a lot about our resiliency and patience through this whole deal,” said Conley, who hit a key 3-pointer late in the game to give the Wolves some cushion. “Not getting chaotic, not making a big trade or all this stuff because things weren’t as pretty early on. Just really proud that we stuck with it.”
The series began awash in Laker arrogance, with the vast majority of national pundits picking them to win and believing it wouldn’t take them very long to do it. Even after a dominant Wolves win in Game 1, the Lakers still strutted. They clutched their pearls when Edwards taunted Dončić, sure that it would awaken a monster.
How dare he poke the bear? Wolves are cooked now.
Dončić scored 28 points on Wednesday, but was just 7 of 18 from the field and 2 of 8 from 3.
Act like you’ve been there before, Timberwolves.
When the Lakers evened the series after Game 2, they quietly chortled at Minnesota’s confidence, chuckling at how loudly they celebrated Game 1 and even whispering about alleged immaturity in enjoying the night LA nightlife while they were in town.
The Timberwolves won two of the three games played in Los Angeles.
Luka and LeBron will own the Timberwolves in clutch situations.
The Wolves were one of the worst clutch teams in the league this season, but they have been completely different in the playoffs. Three of the five games were considered in the clutch by the NBA, and the Wolves were 3-0 with the best offensive rating (170.0 points per 100 possessions) and second-best defensive rating (82.4) in the playoffs. They outscored the Lakers by 42 points in the fourth quarter in the series.
And all the characterizations about the Lakers being a juggernaut and the Wolves being roadkill? The Lakers won one more game than the Wolves in the regular season. Once Dončić joined them on the court, they were 19-13 with the 14th-rated offense and 17th-rated defense, a net rating of plus-4.4 points per 100 possessions in the games Dončić played.
The Wolves were 19-10 over the same span, with the sixth-rated offense, ninth-rated defense and a plus-7.1 net rating. The Wolves entered the series believing they were the better team, then proved it with a swift dismissal of the Lakers.
“I mean, we beat the best player in the world,” Edwards said of James, who had 22 points, seven rebounds and six assists. “The best player ever.”
Sometimes it has been Edwards, who scored 43 points in the Game 4 win on Sunday. Sometimes it has been Randle, who scored 23 points, made 8 of 16 shots and had five rebounds and four assists on Saturday. Sometimes it has been McDaniels, a defensive dynamo who scored 30 points in Game 3.
On Wednesday, finally, it was Gobert’s turn. The proud center had just 14 points in the first four games of the series. With the Wolves clanking away from outside, Gobert made 12 of 15 shots, 3 of 6 free throws and also had nine offensive rebounds and two blocked shots. After being tormented all year long by the highlight of Dončić hitting the step-back 3 on him in Game 1 of the conference finals, Gobert dunked on Dončić in the closeout game. He helped seal the win with a strong contest on James near the rim and then a putback dunk on the other end in the fourth quarter.
“It feels great, but my vindication is not about beating a specific person; it’s about winning a championship,” Gobert said. “We’ve got a little more work to do for that.”
Gobert, one of the most heavily criticized players in the league, had eight dunks in a performance so dominant that longtime hater and TNT analyst Shaquille O’Neal had to begrudgingly give him some credit.
“You can not like who he is, how he does it, what he looks like, etc.,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said. “When you have this guy on your team, you understand what a professional and a winner is. He’s just such a competitor, as well. He doesn’t listen to the outside noise, we don’t listen to the outside noise.”
Gobert has found a kinship with Randle, who was a career 34-percent shooter in the playoffs in his career before emerging as the offensive stabilizer in his first season in Minnesota. Randle averaged 22.6 points per game in the series and shot 48 percent from the field and 39 percent from 3.
“There’s not a person in the world that can guard (Edwards) one-on-one,” Randle said. “So teams are throwing everything at him. I always tell them, go be great. But if you need me, I’m right there for us.”
The Wolves needed him on Wednesday night. Edwards was moving the ball well, making the right reads and getting others involved. He had 11 rebounds, eight assists and three steals but couldn’t buy a bucket. So he had to lean on his teammates, a strength of this year’s Wolves team.
Gobert joined Kevin Garnett as the only Wolves to have a 20-20 game in the playoffs. Conley buried a huge 3 to put the Wolves up six with 1:22 to go.
In the last two years, Edwards has taken down Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray, and now James and Dončić. If the Golden State Warriors, who hold a 3-2 lead in their series, defeat the Houston Rockets this week, Steph Curry and Co. would open the second round at Target Center. If the Rockets win, it will begin in Houston.
But that is for another day. The Timberwolves were basking in the glow of this decisive victory over the league’s glamour franchise. This has been a long, trying season filled with the ups and downs that come with remaking the roster on the fly. So they were going to take a moment to enjoy a little bit of history, of making it out of the first round in back-to-back seasons for the first time.
“We are certainly going to celebrate this, because this team took a lot of s— through the season, and that was set against the backdrop of a really good run last year,” Finch said. “But every team is different, and every team has to come together, and every team has to go through pain, and every team has to figure it out, and this team figured it out.”
Gobert believes that tension helped the team coalesce.
“We have a bunch of guys who have never had anything handed to them,” Gobert said. “We had a tough beginning of the season, some growing pains. But knowing this group of guys and knowing our mentality and how resilient we are, individually and collectively, I never doubted this group.”
The Wolves started the party before they even left the arena. Were it not for the poor shooting, including wide-open misses from good shooters, the Wolves would have beaten the Lakers by 25 points. They were the better team from start to finish, and they were going to make sure the Lakers understood that.
As he walked past the Lakers locker room on his way to the team bus, Edwards was hollering through the back halls of Crypto.com Arena, mocking the commentator, and Lakers super fan Shannon Sharpe’s rhyme-filled predictions that always end with “Lakers in five.”
Underneath the famous marquee sign that shows the teams who play each other, Edwards bellowed, “Ant-Man, Batman, Superman. Lakers in five.”
The Lakers were conducting exit interviews in the news conference room right next to the locker room. It would have been impossible for them not to hear him.
(Top photo of Rudy Gobert: Harry How / Getty Images)