Minnesota Timberwolves Get the Last Laugh Against Joker and the Denver Nuggets

DENVER — The Minnesota Timberwolves beat the charges.

They have been known as a franchise defined by mediocrity and failure. They had won two playoff series in franchise history before this season.

Karl-Anthony Towns was a star who never made the right plays.

Rudy Gobert was a notorious target of criticism from Utah to Minnesota. His trade to the Timberwolves was clowned nationally.

Anthony Edwards did not finish top five in MVP voting.

And in 24 minutes Sunday, the Timberwolves ended all those discussions.

The Minnesota Timberwolves reached the conference finals Sunday by storming back from 20 down on the road in the second half against the defending champion Denver Nuggets.

"A real showing of Timberwolves' basketball at it's finest," Towns said after the game.

The Wolves' celebration reverberated through the halls and through the wall behind where Nuggets coach Michael Malone had to give answers as to how his team gave up the largest halftime lead in a loss in Game 7 history. The players were jubilant, ecstatic. At the podium, Edwards and Towns laughed and joked about how the Wolves had been losing for 20 years so they've lost enough to learn the lessons they needed.

Minnesota to a man had praised Denver from the start of the year. Gobert talked about how he was inspired by how Denver plays. Edwards called them the best team in the league in a late-season matchup. But the Wolves time and again have proven they have a formula to disrupt and flummox the Nuggets.

There were signs this Denver team wasn't as good as the championship edition, but they were washed away by their record and clutch-time heroics.

But when it came down to it, this was the Wolves' moment. From Gobert's turnaround shot clock buzzer beater to Naz Reid's putback, the Wolves had the answers and big plays you need to win the series and be the better team.

Edwards said after the game that, "When Ru (Gobert) hit that turnaround, I knew we had it." Chris Finch joked it was a great after-timeout play call.

Sometimes, it's just your year. It's beginning to feel that way about the Wolves.

This was the bar the Wolves judged themselves against. They were crushed when they lost the edge late in the season against Denver for home-court advantage in a loss without Towns in this building.

Then they came in and beat the Nuggets with the vaunted altitude home court anyway.

Towns' performance needs particular praise. Towns has always been a player who wanted to be great, and so often went about it the right way. He's not selfish. He's not a stats hound. He tries to attack matchups, often too hard. He tries to defend, often winding up in foul trouble.

But when Denver elected to double and triple-team Edwards the entirety of the game as they did in Games 5, 6 and 7, Towns was the one who carried them with 23 points and 12 rebounds. He punished mismatches against switches with Denver's smaller guards and did so without picking up reckless charges. And late in the game, he sailed in for a putback dunk to put the game away.

Towns is a winning player.

Gobert was being flambéed by Twitter and Inside the NBA at halftime for his offensive struggles. But the Wolves were using Gobert to pick up fouls on the Nuggets and slow the game down. Gobert went 7-of-9 from the stripe and helped the Wolves get the game back into the pace they needed. His defense was crucial in the second half.

This series was about Edwards' emergence as a supernova superstar and a potential face of the league. But he struggled as 22-year-olds faced with quadruple teams are wont to do. Yet the Wolves picked him up and carried him with their defense, maybe the best defense in the last 20 years, and the role players so often maligned.

Minnesota built its success on challenging every single action — every pass, every cut, every dribble. They had more in the tank in the fourth quarter than Denver, which looked like it used all of its ammo in building the second-half lead only to find it could not sustain it.

The Timberwolves have been a perennial joke for the duration of their existence. It's fitting that finally, against a Joker, they got the last laugh.

All-Time Timberwolves Comeback Knocks Out Nuggets, Sends Minnesota to Western Conference FinalsRead now