Naz Reid has been playing through a shoulder issue for three months, and the timing could hardly be worse for the Minnesota Timberwolves. They are meeting the Denver Nuggets for the third time in the postseason in four years, and the 26-year-old forward’s shot has not looked the same since the injury first flared on Jan. 17.
Reid left a game early against the San Antonio Spurs on Jan. 17 with a shoulder injury, and the problem kept surfacing after that. He appeared in 34 games after that night and shot.433/.320/.667, a clear drop from the.475/.390/.783 he put up in 42 games before the injury. In March, he made just 21.8 percent of his 3-point attempts, a sharp dip for a player Minnesota has leaned on as one of its more important figures.
The shoulder issue seemed to worsen in mid-March against the Oklahoma City Thunder, when Reid landed hard by the stanchion after Isaiah Hartenstein came down on him. That sequence mattered because it came after weeks of signs that the injury had not fully settled, and it left Minnesota with a front-line contributor still trying to find his rhythm as the games got bigger.
That matters now because Denver led the NBA in regular-season offensive rating at 122.5, which puts extra pressure on every Minnesota possession. The Timberwolves are trying to pull off a first-round upset attempt, and Reid’s accuracy has been noticeably different since the shoulder started bothering him. If he can look more like the player he was before Jan. 17, Minnesota’s chances shift. If not, the Nuggets’ firepower gives them a margin the Timberwolves can ill afford to hand over.
The question is not whether Reid has been hurt; it is whether he can shake enough of it by the start of the series to matter against a Denver team that has already shown how dangerous it can be when the pace speeds up and the shots start falling.
