On Thursday night, the Minnesota Timberwolves could not have faced a better test to gauge where they stand in the league's totem pole as they faced the reigning champion Boston Celtics. But the 2024-25 season hasn't exactly gone according to plan for the Timberwolves, and this game was a microcosm of how they've fallen from last season. The Timberwolves fell just short of defeating the Celtics, taking a 118-115 defeat after getting a substandard performance from star man Anthony Edwards.
Edwards was far from being at his best on Thursday night; he finished with 15 points on an unsightly 5-16 shooting from the field. And with the game hanging in the balance, the Timberwolves star was quiet, scoring just six points in the second half while deferring to Julius Randle — not exactly something one would expect from someone of Edwards' caliber.
It got to the point where Shaquille O'Neal, from TNT's Inside the NBA crew, called out the Timberwolves star for an effort that's not befitting of someone who's been hyped up as an MVP candidate.
“A player of his caliber should never have nine points in a half. That just tells me that he's settling,” O'Neal said, via the official ClutchPoints account on X (formerly known as Twitter). “Listen, you can shoot, but you're not a shooter. You're too good to be settling. When you're a great player, you can not settle. You always have to be in attack mode. … Great players don't settle to become great.”
"A player of his caliber should never have 9 points in a half... You can not settle."
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) January 3, 2025
Shaq on Anthony Edwards 👀
(via @NBAonTNT)pic.twitter.com/2kmNlP8Cz5
Edwards has made a much more concerted effort to launch from beyond the arc this season, and there will always be jump-shooting variance, even for the greatest shooters in the association. The Timberwolves have to find a way to nudge him towards a more balanced shot diet moving forward.
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Anthony Edwards and the Timberwolves are simply hanging on
The Timberwolves have been one of the most disappointing teams in the league this season. After making it all the way to the Western Conference Finals last season, hovering around .500 (17-16) near the halfway point of the season was not where they envisioned themselves would be.
Trading away Karl-Anthony Towns is proving to be the wrong move for the Timberwolves; solid performance against the Celtics aside, Julius Randle's efforts have been inconsistent, and they lost a ton of spacing by downgrading from Towns to Randle. Perhaps this is why Anthony Edwards is launching more triples since the team's spacing has become much worse.
