Chris Finch doesn’t exactly remember what he said in the heat of the moment. NBA head coaches never immediately enter the huddle at the beginning of a timeout. And by the time Finch did get to the bench, tensions were quickly rising between two of his players, Rudy Gobert and Kyle Anderson.
“I would’ve probably said, ‘Calm down, calm down, let’s go, let’s focus on what we’ve got to do here,’ ” Finch told Paul Allen on KFXN-100.3 on Tuesday morning. “I think ultimately it caught us a little bit by surprise.”
As well as everyone else. It’s not a common sight to see a verbal altercation lead to one teammate striking another as Gobert did to Anderson during Minnesota’s win Sunday over New Orleans in the regular=season finale, which led to the team suspending the center for Tuesday’s play-in game in Los Angeles versus the Lakers.
But at the same time, the Timberwolves contend those incidents aren’t all that uncommon in professional sports. Finch noted a similar situation played out between Clippers reserves Bones Hyland and Mason Plumlee on Sunday. Golden State had a punch thrown by Draymond Green at teammate Jordan Poole during training camp.
“I’ve seen many a preseason practices in the NFL or in the NBA sometimes. These things happen in practice. Sometimes they happen in the locker room,” Finch said. “It’s unfortunate when they happen in the huddle, because your attention and your focus need to be on the opponent, not on each other at that point and time. But it’s a highly competitive business that we work in, and sometimes this stuff happens.”
This just happened to be caught on television during an important game.
“It never (usually) meets 25 million people. It just happened at a tough time,” Anderson told reporters Wednesday. “It is what it is. We moved on from that, we’re close now. We’ve always been close.”
Finch said Anderson and Gobert had moved past the situation by 10 p.m. Sunday.
“We’re grown men, we’re able to put it behind us. We both want to win and we spoke about it that night,” Anderson said. “Just seeing how everything is playing out (publicly), it’s kinda lame, honestly. We’re teammates at the end of the day. I don’t want it to be like a Kyle vs. Rudy thing. That’s never the case. I’ve always got my teammates’ back, and we moved on.”
Finch called Sunday “an unfortunate day” for the Timberwolves — and one they’ll learn from. But he added it was “a moment in time” and not an underlying issue within the team.
“We love Rudy. Guys understand how hard he plays, how much he cares, his value to winning,” Finch said. “It’s a highly competitive business that we work in, and sometimes this stuff happens. The thing is, it was really all about the right stuff. It was about getting each other to do the things that they didn’t think we were doing. And then we always preach to our guys that we need leadership, we need accountability, we need to call each other out.
“Obviously the messaging is key, and the reactions and the overreactions are what we need to be remindful of. It’s over, it’s not an issue on our team.”
