Minnesota Timberwolves coach Chris Finch is confident that his team will play better in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals on Friday than they did in the series opener.
"It's hard to imagine that we're going to play much worse," Finch told reporters Thursday.
A day after their 108-105 loss at home against the Dallas Mavericks, Finch and the Timberwolves went over the mistakes that they made. "We just played flat," he said. The game-plan execution was "not on point," the offensive decision-making was "not very good" and they "got beat by a lot of hustle plays, transition, offensive rebounds. Stuff like that just can't happen." There was "not a ton to be really super happy about," and he stressed that their approach needed to change going forward.
"It was a rough film session," Finch said. "And I told the guys, 'It's been a long time since I've been this disappointed in your effort and your performance and your attitude, your application, your attention to detail.' It just wasn't there. The Western Conference finals started; not sure if they got the memo. But they got it this afternoon."
The loss came three days after the Wolves eliminated the defending-champion Denver Nuggets in Game 7 of their second-round series. While this wasn't a blowout, Finch likened it to their 117-90 loss in Game 3 of that series, after they'd won the first two games in Denver.
"I said to our guys, 'We're 3-3 at home, and we have two kind of similar performances after coming off stints of success,'" Finch said."There's a lot of ways immaturity kind of rears its head, and this might be one of them. But they got our attention now, so there's no reason for us to be feeling ourselves."
The glass-half-full perspective: Given how many things went wrong, it's encouraging that Game 1 went down to the wire. Minnesota was terrible when Rudy Gobert was on the bench, it wasn't composed in crunch time, it was outscored 62-38 in the paint and it scored only 43 points in the second half. Finch said that the Wolves need to get downhill more often, even though the Mavericks "put five guys in the restricted [area], many of them in there illegally," adding that they need to "make the early play" when they're attacking and Dallas' help defenders are reaching for the ball.
Minnesota star Anthony Edwards had 19 points on 6-for-16 shooting in the loss. Finch said there was "a lot of indecision" on his part and he held the ball too long. ESPN's Dave McMenamin reported that Finch's message to the players during the film session was that they owe it to themselves to capitalize on this opportunity, citing a source that said that Finch was as fired up as he ever gets.
Echoing Edwards, who said Wednesday that Jaden McDaniels was "the only one that came ready to play tonight" and "everybody else let him down," Finch said that McDaniels "battled all night long" and "got through a thousand screens, many of those illegal too." The Wolves can't afford to go down 2-0 before the series shifts to Dallas, so expect the rest of the team to match McDaniels' energy on Friday.
