Just a little over a week removed from knocking the defending NBA champions out of the postseason in stunning fashion on the road, the Minnesota Timberwolves now find themselves in a position that no team in NBA history has ever managed to successfully climb their way out of — down 0-3 in a seven game series.
Now in fairness to the Timberwolves, this isn't all on them. The 5th-seeded Dallas Mavericks, led by perennial MVP candidate Luka Doncic and 2016 NBA Champion Kyrie Irving, have played spectacularly all postseason-long, scoring upsets in the first two rounds of the NBA Playoffs over the Los Angeles Clippers and Oklahoma City Thunder. Luka and Kyrie have been the two best players on the floor through three games of their Western Conference Finals series against the Timberwolves, a recipe for an NBA Finals berth if there ever was one. And to make matters worse, Minnesota's two top scorers, Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns, have yet to find a rhythm in this series.
Karl-Anthony Towns' struggles have been particularly damning, if only because Anthony Edwards' defense and facilitation allow him to thrive in other ways, where scoring the ball prolifically and efficiently is what makes Towns such a dangerous player. But thus far, KAT is shooting an abysmal 27 percent from the field in the Western Conference Finals, hitting just 3-for-22 from three-point range.
After Game 3, a Timberwolves loss in which Towns went 0-for-8 from three-point range, an exasperated KAT couldn't figure out what the cause of this shooting slump is, noting that he apparently is putting up “1,500 shots a day.”
The Inside The NBA crew, as you'd expect, had a field day with this likely exaggerated claim.
Whether or not Karl-Anthony Towns is lying about how many shots he's getting up every day is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that he does something to turn things around, even if it can't necessarily save the Timberwolves season. It's been so bad over the course of this series that Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch said after Game 3, “It was hard to watch at times,” regarding Towns' shooting slump (h/t Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com).
The Greatest Big Man Shooter ever?
It was only two years and a half years ago when Karl-Anthony Towns made significant waves around the league by making the following boastful — but perhaps not totally unwarranted — claim to The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski:
“I’m the greatest big man shooter of all time. That’s a fact. You can see the stats. I ain’t got to play like no one else. Everyone trying to find themselves to be the second version of me when I’m the first version. I don’t got to be the second version of someone else. I’m already an original. I don’t have to be a duplicate of someone else.”
Now in this instance, the numbers do strengthen KAT's case. The seven-foot big-man is a career 40 percent shooter from three-point range on over 4 attempts per game, and even during a two-season stretch from 2019-20 to 2020-21, when Towns' attempts ballooned to nearly 7 per game, his efficiency didn't dip at all. But there's just no way around it… if Towns continues to shoot poorly in the biggest moments of his career — and thus far, in 30 career postseason games, Towns is shooting just 35 percent from deep — his claim as The Greatest Big Man Shooter ever is about as real as the Timberwolves' chances are of climbing out of an 0-3 hole.
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