NBA Playoffs: After trailing 3-0 against, the Suns’ highly anticipated season is all but over.
In Game 3 of their first-round series, the Minnesota Timberwolves defeated the Phoenix Suns 126-109 on Friday, sending a potential superteam to the verge of elimination. Game 4 of the series is set for 6:30 p.m. MST in Phoenix on Sunday (ESPN). The Suns are one defeat away
from a first-round exit and an offseason full of awkward questions. No team in NBA history has ever recovered from a 3-0 series deficit.
After a close game for almost an hour and a half, the Timberwolves took a six-point advantage at the break and went on to extend it into the 20s in the third quarter. With 36 points on 12 of 23 shooting, nine rebounds, and five assists, Anthony Edwards once again looked like a rising star.
It was a classic Minnesota victory, with double-doubles from Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns and double-digit runs off the bench from Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Naz Reid. And now, regrettably, a classic Phoenix defeat. Only one player, Eric Gordon, scored in double figures, while Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal all recorded more than 20 points. Jusuf Nurkic and Royce O’Neale, the Suns’ lone starters, combined for three points on one of eight shooting after they were already without Grayson Allen.
The Timberwolves will face the winner of the Western Conference semifinals if they defeat the Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Lakers on Sunday. Additionally, the Nuggets are ahead 3-0 in that series. The Suns had one season loss, which is a 49-33 catastrophe.
The 35-year-old, who is without a doubt a first-ballot Hall of Famer, was among the NBA’s top five players for ten years. Prior to his and Klay Thompson’s injury in 2019, he made the Golden State Warriors an inevitable force. Durant welcomed Kyrie Irving and James Harden to town when he decided to depart the Warriors for the Brooklyn Nets. As a result, they had a team that occasionally looked like the best and came very close to making it to the Eastern Conference finals. Then everything came wrong, with injuries lowering a ceiling that was meant to be infinite and internal strife leading to Harden demanding a trade.
After losing to the Los Angeles Clippers in the playoffs last season, the Nets decided to blow it all up by trading Durant to the Suns. As one of the most adaptable players the NBA has ever seen, Durant is a near 7-foot guard who can guard the perimeter and an elite isolation scorer who can also torment teams with off-ball movement and catch-and-shoots. The Suns were supposed to become elite with Durant and Booker together, but they lost to the Denver Nuggets in the playoffs last season.
