That victory marked Minnesota’s first since 2018 in a game in which Towns made three or fewer shots. And it’s not like Towns played all that well before he was disqualified: He finished the night with just 11 points on 3-of-11 shooting as the Clippers hounded him into repeated mistakes. Minnesota was down 93-86 to the Clippers when Towns fouled out with 7:34 remaining in the fourth quarter the Wolves proceeded to end the game on a 23-11 run without Towns and claim a 5-point victory, along with the No. The quality of Minnesota’s non-Towns rotation players was hammered home in the play-in game. Minimum 750 regular-season minutes played. Players on the Minnesota Timberwolves by season with a positive overall regular-season RAPTOR rating (listed by their team rank in RAPTOR WAR) and the total WAR of players others than Karl-Anthony Towns Season Towns has a lot of company on the high-performing list 1 Not only that, but the 10 non-Towns Wolves who played at least 750 minutes (Anthony Edwards, D’Angelo Russell, Malik Beasley, Jarred Vanderbilt, Jaden McDaniels, Patrick Beverley, Naz Reid, Taurean Prince, Jaylen Nowell and Jordan McLaughlin) combined to produce 27.3 RAPTOR wins above replacement, the highest mark of Towns’s career.
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This season, though, he was joined by a whopping five teammates that finished with a positive RAPTOR rating.
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During that time, he has finished first or second on the team in our overall RAPTOR metric in every season. 1 overall pick out of the University of Kentucky. Towns has been in the league since 2015, when the Wolves made him the No. When searching for explanations as to how the Wolves so dramatically outperformed preseason expectations, it doesn’t take that long to land on the obvious one: For the first time in quite some time, they actually got strong performances out of players other than Karl-Anthony Towns, their All-NBA candidate center. Plus, the Wolves’ 46-36 record - which was good enough to land them in the play-in tournament, where they defeated the Los Angeles Clippers - actually fell two wins shy of the team’s Pythagorean expectation, which was the same as that of the Philadelphia 76ers.
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Minnesota finished the regular season with the league’s eighth-best offense and 13th-best defense, as well as its 10th-best net rating and 10th-best mark in ’s Simple Rating System (which adjusts point differential for strength of opponent). 7 seed in the Western Conference, with a 1-0 first-round lead over the Memphis Grizzlies. They had made the playoffs only once since the NBA expanded to 30 teams in the 2004-05 season, and the FiveThirtyEight forecast gave them just a 39 percent chance of making a repeat appearance. The Minnesota Timberwolves entered this season with a preseason over/under of only 35.5 wins, eighth-lowest in the NBA, after finishing the 2020-21 season at 23-49. Karl-Anthony Towns has gotten big-time help this season from D’Angelo Russell, left, and Anthony Edwards, right.