If the Rockets had learned anything this season, it was how to lose.
They had lost in nearly every way imaginable. Blowouts. Close games. Comebacks that fell short. But never before had they collapsed the way they did on Friday night.
For all the failures piled up on top of one another, this one was the worst.
Playing the only team in the NBA with a record worse than their own, the Rockets led by as much as 19 and held a 16-point lead with 7:31 remaining. They never scored again.
The Timberwolves took a 107-101 win by default with the Rockets allowing little choice once Karl-Anthony Towns began to roll and the Rockets rolled over.
The Timberwolves scored the game’s final 22 points with Towns scoring 14 of his 29 points in the fourth quarter when the entire Rockets team managed just 10.
The Rockets’ final chances after the Timberwolves had tied the game with 2:51 left ended when John Wall missed his final four shots and dribbled the ball off his foot and Christian Wood missed a 3-pointer to beat the shot clock and a runner.
Until then, both were having strong games. Wall had a season-high 15 assists through three quarters. He did not get another. Wood scored 24 points through three quarters. He did not score in the fourth. Ben McLemore had made seven 3-pointers through three quarters. He did not make one in the fourth.
Towns had been struggling. He was 6 of 18 through three quarters. He took over in the fourth, but the Rockets blundered so badly that the Timberwolves had chance after chance, not needing to do much to take over the game.
For most of the first half, the Rockets seemed certain to finally have found a team they were sure to defeat.
They were either going to beat the Timberwolves, owners of the NBA’s worst record. Or they were going to beat themselves.
The Rockets, who had been the NBA’s worst shooting team for two months, had a great shooting half. With a little more than five minutes remaining in the first half, the Rockets had made 54.8 percent of their shots, the Timberwolves 39.6 percent. But all that added up to a two-point lead.
The Rockets had 11 turnovers before the Wolves committed any. The Wolves, averaging 13.1 second-chance points, had 17. By halftime, the Wolves had attempted 15 more shots, allowing them to miss far more than the Rockets and still keep pace.
Late in the half, however, the Rockets took care of the ball and boards and closed with a 9-0 run to a 63-54 halftime lead. McLemore made two more 3-pointers, giving him six on nine shots from deep. Wall had four assists in the final five minutes of the half, giving him 10. The Rockets made 6 of 11 shots to close the half and had gone from an eight-point deficit to a nine-point lead.
The Wolves, however, had gotten little from Towns in the second quarter, when he scored two points with four turnovers, and from rookie Anthony Edwards, who had five points in the half. They seemed likely to get going, if only because if the Rockets could become sharpshooters, there seemed a chance the Timberwolves would, too.
Instead, the Wolves stars continued to struggle, and the Rockets stopped giving them so much help as the lead grew to 19, the largest the Rockets have held since Feb. 4 in Memphis, the night Wood was hurt and the losing streak began.
The Rockets needed only to finish the final six minutes with almost any offense.
Instead, they collapsed. Towns dominated. Somehow, the Rockets took the most inexplicable of losses, somehow finding a way to lose they had not already checked off.
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March 27, 2021 at 09:40AM
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Rockets find new way to lose in collapse against Timberwolves - Houston Chronicle
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