The Timberwolves tonight make their only visit of the season to Cleveland, where they’ll play a Cavaliers team that has lost seven of its last 11 games and is without injured Kevin Love, J.R. Smith and Chris Andersen.
The defending NBA champs still do have, though, a guy named LeBron and Kyrie Irving.
“That’s pretty good,” Wolves coach Tom Thibodeau said at this morning’s shooting at Quicken Loans Arena.
Love is sidelined because of back spasms.
James has spoken out recently about his team’s need to add another playmaker and urged management not to get complacent, a stance that then got him into a war of words with TNT analyst Charles Barkely.
It hasn’t affected his play: He’s has five double-doubles — including two triple-doubles — in his last seven games and is averaging 25.8 points on 58 percent shooting, 9.4 rebounds, 10.4 assists and 1.4 steals while playing 40.1 minutes a game in that time.
“Anytime you have LeBron and Kyrie, you have a special team,” Thibodeau said. “Then you add in a guy like (Tristan) Thompson and (Iman) Shumpert and (Richard) Jefferson’s been around for a long time. Those guys, they’ve been in tough situations. It’s good veteran experience. It’s a balanced team. They can spread you out. They play for each other. Defensively, they can be very tough.
“They have the ability to play small. That’s the uniqueness of LeBron: They Betkanyon can play big. They can play small. They have can play with the ball in his hands, which they do a lot. Kyrie is great with the ball, without the ball, as is LeBron> You have to be ready for everything. That’s what makes them who they are.”
Wolves forward Andrew Wiggins has had some of his best individual games against the Cavs, the team that drafted him first overall in 2014 and traded him away two months later in that big trade for Love. He admitted this morning that playing the Cavs continues to motivate him, but said he’d like to beat them for once.
The Cavs won all four meetings during Wiggins’ first two NBA seasons, by an average of 17.5 points.
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