The Suns are ready for the Timberwolves.
On Saturday afternoon, Kevin Durant and the Phoenix Suns will begin their foray into the 2024 NBA postseason with Game 1 of their first round series vs the Timberwolves, in which they are favored despite being the lower seed. It was a bit of an up and down year for Phoenix, as Durant continued to put up mammoth stat lines but wasn’t able to find a ton of chemistry with co-stars Devin Booker and Bradley Beal; however, the Suns appeared to peak at the right time, winning seven of their last ten games against a gauntlet of tough opponents in order to secure their spot in the NBA postseason and avoid the Play-In tournament.
The Suns vs Timberwolves matchup certainly figures to be a stylistically intriguing matchup between two teams with opposing philosophies, and one person who is ready for that challenge is none other than Suns head coach Frank Vogel, who just completed his first regular season at the helm in the desert.
“Yeah, they’re ready,” said Vogel of his players, per Gerald Bourguet of PHNX Sports on X, the social media platform formerly referred to as Twitter. “They’ve been extremely attentive in all of our film sessions, which, with the week off, have been very thorough….we’ll be ready for whatever they throw at us.”
Meanwhile, Suns center Jusuf Nurkic echoed a similar sentiment.
“They have the length, you know.,” said Nurkic. “What’d they say? ‘They have a McDaniels.’ So you take whatever you wanna take from that, but we feel confident.”
An intriguing matchup
As previously mentioned, the Suns and the Timberwolves couldn’t really be any more different from a stylistic perspective. Yes, both teams launch a lot of threes (as does every other team in the modern NBA); however, the Suns’ entire offense is predicated around their perimeter attack, led of course by Durant, Bradley Beal, and Devin Booker.
Meanwhile, the Timberwolves certainly have one star perimeter player in the form of Anthony Edwards, but rely on a lot of their scoring on the interior, with Rudy Gobert and recently returned from injury Karl-Anthony Towns to do a lot of the heavy lifting whenever Edwards doesn’t have the ball.
Of course, the Timberwolves’ calling card is its defense, as the team employs numerous elite defenders, including the presumptive Defensive Player of the Year candidate in Gobert, that could potentially cause some problems for the Suns’ trio, as talented as they are.
However, the general consensus among pundits seems to be that the Suns’ combination of talent, shooting, and perhaps most importantly, playoff experience will be enough to lead them over a Timberwolves team led by a young player in Edwards who, for all his talent, has never had to deal with the expectations he will face in the upcoming playoffs.
In any case, Game 1 of the Suns vs Timberwolves series is slated to tip off at 3:30 PM ET from Minneapolis and will be carried by ESPN, before TNT takes over the coverage responsibilities for Game 2 on Tuesday evening, once again in Minnesota.
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