Oklahoma City takes it to Timberwolves for Game 1 win

Oklahoma City For the first two rounds of these playoffs and really the six-plus weeks leading up to them Minnesota had consistently been the bigger faster stronger gang on the floor That was certainly not the affair on Tuesday evening in Oklahoma City The Thunder were more physical in every respect in Match of the Western Conference Finals taking it to Minnesota from the opening quarter en journey to a - win to take a - series lead Challenge is at p m on Thursday back in Oklahoma City Minnesota survived on -point shooting to keep its nose in front in the first half The Wolves jumped out to an - lead and led - late in the second quarter But its formula of outside shot-making exclusively was not as reliable as Oklahoma City s relentless defensive pressure and offensive attacking The Thunder imposed their will They prevented Minnesota from getting much outside of -point shots and on the other end lived in the paint Minnesota was unable to contain the ball That s a losing formula Honestly I thought we were making it really tough on ourselves Wolves guard Mike Conley stated The way that they pressure the ball the way that they can get into you physically we have to try to make the championship as simple as accomplishable and we weren t able to take advantage of it Shai Gilgeous-Alexander struggled from the field in the first half the presumptive MVP cranked it up in the second half scoring of his points over the final two frames His sidekick Jalen Williams scored points to go with five steals Chet Holmgren recovered from a rough first half to serve as an interior offensive force We got particular fouls early which I thought made us a bit softer than we needed to be defensively Timberwolves coach Chris Finch announced Our offense affected our defense and that can t happen Julius Randle was a force for Minnesota offensively He rained down triples in the first half and was aggressive getting to the bucket in the fourth to finish with points But no one joined him Anthony Edwards was a bystander in the second half and the Timberwolves bench players of Donte DiVincenzo Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Naz Reid played rhythm-less basketball looking out of sorts throughout the encounter There are a lot of good shots out there Finch noted We ve just got to clean things up a little bit The Timberwolves turned the ball over times which led to Oklahoma City points Minnesota hasn t looked that ineffective since Encounter of its last series in which it got beat by Golden State That championship also came off a lengthy layoff The Timberwolves recovered from that debacle just fine But the Warriors also had to play the remainder of that series sans its best participant Steph Curry That won t be the incident in these West Finals So Minnesota will need to find real answers What those are remains to be seen We didn t want to lose this one obviously But we came in here knowing this was going to be a long series Conley stated Nobody was going to come in here and sweep nobody Nobody is going to come in here and expect that we re going to take two of them on the road We know how good they are and how prepared they are so we ll be ready for Encounter Oklahoma City Thunder forward Chet Holmgren shoots in front of Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert and forward Jaden McDaniels during the first half of Match of an NBA basketball Western Conference Finals playoff series Tuesday May in Oklahoma City AP Photo Nate Billings