Timberwolves end losing streak, edge Nets and make play-in tournament

NEW YORK – Timberwolves coach Chris Finch has six players he'd like to play in crunch-time situations. Since the rules of basketball mandate a coach can't put more than five players on the floor at a time, that leaves Finch with a decision in close games: who of Karl-Anthony Towns, Mike Conley, Kyle Anderson, Jaden McDaniels, Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert will sit at those times?

Finch made the choice Tuesday to sit Gobert after a timeout with 4 minutes, 4 seconds remaining and the Wolves down two.

The lineup he put on the floor carried the Wolves to a needed 107-102 victory over the Nets after Sunday's debacle against the tanking Trail Blazers.

Winning guaranteed the Wolves a postseason spot in the NBA's play-in tournament no matter what happens in their final two games as they hold head-to-head advantages over teams that could be tied with them for seventh through 10th place in the Western Conference.

"I want to be out there," said Gobert, who had 12 points and 12 rebounds. "But we have so much talent in this locker room that if once in a while Coach decides to not put me out there, I'm still going to give the best energy I can for my team, my teammates. I would expect the same from anybody else."

The Wolves wanted to punish the Nets as best they could for going small, and while they still had a center on the floor, Finch went with the quicker, more offensively-capable Towns (22 points), who then proceeded to go to work on the offensive end against an undersized frontcourt. That strategy carried out a message Towns was referring to when he gave some cryptic-sounding quotes after Friday's loss to the Lakers: that the Wolves needed to take better advantage of matchups.

"That's what I was talking about the other night, doing a better job of utilizing what we have instead of trying to outplay them in the chess game," Towns said. "We could just play checkers."

Towns looked more like himself than Sunday, when he put up just three shot attempts. That was something for which Finch took responsibility. Towns said he has a "great relationship" and the two talked it out.

"He's got to get more shots, there's no doubt about it," Finch said. "It's on me. We came into this game with the mind-set not just to get him on track, but also to take advantage of what we knew was gonna be a matchup because they play a lot of small lineups."

It helped Towns that a rejuvenated Anthony Edwards, who said he is feeling much better after a lengthy bout with the intestinal flu that has run through the team, had one of his best games in a while. Edwards scored a team-high 23 points and started the final minutes off with a three-pointer. Then Towns went to work in the post, and scored on a hook shot, then hit two free throws that broke a 100-100 tie with a minute left. Edwards then hit two with 19.4 seconds left following a possession in which he got fouled at the rim.

"As long as the ball is in one of our hands," Edwards said of he and Towns. "It's whatever. We're happy with the results, so whatever shot we get, however it happens."

Despite Spencer Dinwiddie (30 points) carving them up at times in the fourth quarter, the Wolves got enough stops and hit enough free throws to ice the game as Edwards blocked one of Dinwiddie's potentially tying three-point attempts and Anderson altered another.

The Wolves (40-40) got a needed win for playoff positioning, and turned the page from an ugly loss that threatened to derail their season on Sunday. They also have now posted back to back 40-win seasons for the first time since 2003-04 and 2004-05, even if it took longer than they might have liked to get there.

"Listen, every win right now feels like two, every loss feels like three. It's just crazy," Finch said. "But we had a real tough and bad loss the other night, but we've been able to kind of forget about those things and move on and not have it snowball on us."