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Barring an unforeseen and historic turnaround, the Minnesota Timberwolves' season will officially be coming to an end after 24 minutes of game time following a horrific first-half performance in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
The Timberwolves, expected to play with a sense of desperation now that their backs are against the wall, have instead rolled over, allowing a slow start to the game to snowball into something worse with each passing minute en route to a 65-32 halftime deficit.
A slow start to the game appears to be the undoing of the Timberwolves' season, as there aren't many teams that can recover from such a ghastly first-quarter performance against a team as resolute defensively as the Thunder.
Minnesota scored just nine points in the first quarter, and in so doing, they became just the first team since the 2010 Dallas Mavericks to score fewer than 10 points in the first quarter of an elimination game, as per Sportsnet Stats on X (formerly Twitter).
But that Mavericks team, at the very least, managed to hang around in the game despite their eight-point first quarter performance. They even took the lead at one point in the third quarter before the San Antonio Spurs pulled away. Dirk Nowitzki, the team's best player, even had a solid performance in the loss, tallying 33 points on 13-of-21 shooting from the field.
Meanwhile, Anthony Edwards is straight up not having a good time against the Thunder's elite perimeter defense. The Timberwolves star has been struggling all night long, scoring just nine points on 3-of-10 shooting while being a team-worst minus-28.
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This is not the kind of play that Minnesota needed if they were to stave off elimination, but the possibility of extending the series looks nothing but a pipe dream at this point.
Timberwolves get swallowed whole by the Thunder's elite defense
The Thunder have built their powerhouse identity on an elite defense that forces turnovers at a frenzied rate. They cover ground defensively like no other team in the NBA, and the Timberwolves, a team that relies on dribble penetration to create shots from beyond the arc, have played perfectly into OKC's hands and in quite the literal sense too.
In the first half of Game 5, the Timberwolves, rather embarrassingly, have turned the ball over more times than they have made field goals (14 vs. 12). It's hard to win against the Thunder when the team is that careless with the basketball, and now, the Timberwolves' championship hopes have gone up in smoke.
