Mike Conley noted that he’s been looking good from 3-point range lately, but the shots just haven’t been falling. The veteran guard, who has been an elite shooter from deep for the Timberwolves this season, is 1-for-11 from beyond the arc over his last two games.
That doesn’t worry him. Conley is confident the tide will turn and he will start hitting shots at a high rate again. But reporters then asked him Friday if he was physically suffering from anything at the moment.
“There’s a lot of physics. It’s that time of year. Dealing with multiple things — everyone is,” Conley told reporters. “But it’s that time of year. We have a lot of games, we play a lot back to back, on the road here, so a lot of it might just be trying to get our legs back together, my legs together. I’m not too worried about it, but we’re just going to keep moving forward and keep going.
Indeed, Friday’s game in Cleveland marked the end of a stretch in which the Timberwolves played four straight sets in nine games. Three of those sets were at home, which helps, but it still represents a lot of wear and tear on the bodies of the Wolves, who face the Lakers in Los Angeles on Sunday as their current six-game road trip moves forward.
Veteran center Rudy Gobert said he has never experienced such a period in his NBA career.
“It’s unfortunate. But we have to fight, we have to take care of ourselves. Obviously we want to win every night,” Gobert said recently. “Going (to) the West Coast, we have a little more The space between games. NBA season, some times are tough, but we have to use these games to improve and take care of ourselves.
Wolves assistant Micah Nori, who replaced an ailing Chris Finch as head coach Friday in Cleveland, noted that Minnesota isn’t the only team having to endure a congested part of the schedule. But it comes at a bad time for the Wolves, who just lost Karl-Anthony Towns for the foreseeable future, were without Jordan McLaughin against Indiana and didn’t have Monte Morris in Cleveland.
“The guys are stacking up the minutes. I mean, you see Ant — 42 (minutes against Cleveland) after the game he had (against Indiana), and all these guys, in their 30s, I think that’s where you see maybe some shots a little short sometimes,” Nori told reporters.
Case in point: Naz Reid was 7 of 11 shooting from deep on Friday, but his teammates were a combined 1 of 19 from deep. Nori noted that Minnesota’s schedule gets lighter in terms of actual volume of games from here.
“We play every other day, and then we have three days before we go to Utah,” Nori said. “But it’s just kind of cumulative catching up. You don’t really have a lot of practice time, and then it’s flying, playing, back to back, and you really don’t have a lot of time to recover and refill your tank.
