After a short wait, the NBA playoffs officially began, and the seventh-place Timberwolves traveled on the road to challenge the second-place Grizzlies.
As the Biggest Dark Horse in the West this season, the Grizzlies have taken team basketball to the extreme this season, taking the second place in the West after core Morant missed a lot of time due to injury.
The Timberwolves took the last train of the playoffs to finally enter the playoffs, but the Timberwolves, led by three young cores, played well in the closing stages, and defeated the Clippers in the playoffs, which is a very tricky opponent.
As soon as the game began, the away Timberwolves rebounded, playing a perfect 5-0 start and establishing a double-digit lead in one go.
Fortunately, the Grizzlies called out a timeout in time, and the young Grizzlies regained their form in the second half of the first quarter after a brief adjustment, narrowing the point difference to 8 points at the end of the first quarter.
In the second quarter, the Grizzlies continued their form, leveling the point gap in one breath, after which the two teams fell into a fight, and the Timberwolves regained the lead in the chaotic battle, ending the half-time battle with a three-point advantage.
Both teams have shaken off the tension of the playoffs and played their best performances at both ends of the offensive and defensive ends, with the score always clenched, always within a round.
In such a glued battle, the Timberwolves helped the team end the third quarter with a five-point lead with Edwards and Towns' insoluble performances.
Entering the final quarter of the competition, the competition between the two teams is still very glue, the first 9 minutes of playing back and forth, until the final 3 minutes of the Grizzlies exposed the problem of lack of core offensive ability, and finally the Timberwolves pulled the point difference to double digits in one breath, and finally defeated the Grizzlies 130-117.
Throughout the game, the young Grizzlies exposed a lot of problems, on the one hand, the coaching staff was obviously ill-prepared, in the case of such a glue in the game, the whole game still used a 10-man rotation, of which the tenth person Williams effect was very bad, the whole game plus and minus as low as -14.
On the other hand, in the face of the Timberwolves' targeted defensive strategy, the Grizzlies did not respond well, and finally had to rely on Morant to kill the inside line to solve the problem.
It also exposed morant and the Grizzlies as a whole, the team lacked stable projection ability, only 7 of 27 of 3-pointers, and Morant was also outside the system.
Morant drove high and low in the game, shooting 8-of-18 from the field with 8-of-18 shots in the first five shots, and had 32 points, 4 rebounds and 8 assists.
The data seems to be good, but in fact, Morant's effect in the second half was very bad, relying entirely on 20 free throws in the whole game to accumulate good data.
The reason is also very simple, Morant has a projection shortcoming on the offensive end, coupled with the Grizzlies tactical strategy is limited, resulting in him only one way to create a killing path to choose from, the entire second half there are almost no sports game scores, personal plus-minus is the lowest team minus 16.
On the timberwolves side, Edwards is also playing in the first playoffs, but he has shown much better maturity than Morant because he has no offensive shortcomings and his shooting ability is completely trustworthy.
After the game, he played 40 minutes, shot 12-of-23, and efficiently bombed down 36 points, 2 rebounds, 6 assists, 1 steal and 2 blocks.
Edwards thus became the fifth player in history to cut at least 32 points and five assists in his playoff debut, alongside Doncic, Rose, Paul and Gary Brocau.
In addition to Edwards, in the case of third-big man Russell's full-court dud of only 2 of 11 shots, Downs and Beasley carried the banner and blasted down 29 points, 13 boards, 3 assists, 2 caps and 23 points, 5 boards and 2 assists, respectively.
Coupled with McDaniels 15 points, 7 boards and 3 blocks, Beverly 10 points, 6 boards and 6 assists, even though Russell only scored 10 points, 3 boards and 8 assists, the Timberwolves still completed the following gram and took a victory on the road.
In this way, the seventh-place Timberwolves completed a big upset, rewriting the series score to 1-0, which also made the match between the young teams in this round more suspenseful.