Timberwolves and Grizzlies Are Playing By Their Own Rules

Minnesota and Memphis are breaking all the conventional rules and making the game more fun by doing it.

The NBA regular season is a wholly different experience from the playoffs, with one often being closer to recess, while the other is more comparable to a seasoned, grad-level course.

In that sense, the Timberwolves and Grizzlies—both among the league’s youngest teams at just 24 years old on average—are the equivalent of baby geniuses sitting in a lecture hall, scribbling notes alongside college students twice their age.

They’re ahead of the curve, as evidenced by their Game 1 contest being the first time in NBA history that a pair of 22-year-olds scored 30 or more points in the same playoff game. The budding clubs played a high-scoring game at a blistering pace, things that go against the grain of what fans have come to expect from playoff basketball. It’s a shame that Game 2 of perhaps the most fascinating first-round matchup will be showcased on NBA TV, where fewer folks will see it.

Minnesota-Memphis is great because these two teams are so young that they don’t realize they’re breaking all the conventional rules and making the game more fun by doing it.

They don’t care how young they are. They don’t care what tempo at which they’re supposed to play. And Patrick Beverley and Dillon Brooks certainly don’t care about how you feel about their persistent trash talk and hard-nosed style from one play to the next.

Both teams have showcased the profile of a contender: Memphis being one by virtue of its No. 2 seed in the West and its ability to win even without star Ja Morant, while the Wolves—who tout plenty of their own star power with Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns—flirted with being a top-10 team on both sides of the ball for most of the season.

When it comes to breaking the conventional rules, Minnesota did that most in Game 1, beating the grit and grind originators at their own game and on their home floor. The Wolves generally outmuscled the grimy Grizzlies, who stood among the league leaders in hustle stats like deflections and loose balls recovered while also dominating the glass and taking care of the ball. As The Athletic’s Fred Katz laid out, Minnesota—one of the NBA’s worst defensive rebounding clubs—won the rebounding battle and managed to limit its live-ball turnovers to just three in Game 1 despite Memphis being the best squad at forcing those sorts of miscues.

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It’s not immediately clear what immediate fixes Grizzlies coach Taylor Jenkins will seek to make after the Game 1 defeat. But even though Memphis got outworked on the boards, don’t be surprised if we see Steven Adams for a shorter amount of time than his 24 minutes in the last contest. Game 1’s pace was a bit fast for him, and Edwards and Towns each had little trouble in finding comfortable shot attempts with him defending. The Wolves went 5-of-6 on jumpers with Adams in the mix in the first quarter alone, according to Synergy Sports.

But whether Adams is in the rotation plenty or not, rest assured: There should be plenty of shotmaking, loose-ball scrambles and mean mugging to go around either way. And it’s part of what will make this series so entertaining regardless of who ends up pulling it out.

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