The Los Angeles Lakers fell to the Minnesota Timberwolves in game one of their first round series against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Saturday. Timberwolves star forward Anthony Edwards, who had had 22 points, nine assists, and eight rebounds to flirt with a triple-double, wasn’t surprised at all by what he saw from his team.
“I got a great group of guys,” Edwards said after the game, per ESPN. “But it wasn’t tonight. I learned that in training camp. It just takes a minute for us to gel as a new team. It just took a minute for us to figure each other out, and I feel like now we just go.”
Minnesota head coach Chris Finch is managing his team’s expectations moving forward.
“It means Game 1,” he said. “We know it’s going to be a long series. We’re not under any assumption that it’s going to be this type of game in Game 2. It’ll be a completely different game. We got a lot left. A lot of meat on the bone out there. A lot of things. I know we can do better.”
Lakers forward LeBron James, who is in his 22nd season in the league, has seen it all before, and he’s far from worried after suffering an early series loss.
“This Minnesota team, they’re going to be physical,” James said. “That’s what they bring to the table. It took us one game … (to) understand that. They took homecourt advantage from us tonight, but we have to control the controllables, and if we do that, we’ll have a much better chance to win than we did tonight.”
“I think the first quarter, we played the way we play,” Lakers guard Luka Doncic, who scored 16 points in the first quarter, said. “I think we played physical. Everyone was locked in, and then we just kind of let go of the rope. So we’ve got to be way more physical.”
It’ll be interesting to see how Doncic and James respond in Game Two on Tuesday night.
