DENVER — Anthony Edwards has seen the bulk of opponents’ defensive attention all season. Traps, double-teams, heavy gap help. You name it, he’s seen it.

But none of it compares to what the Denver Nuggets threw at him Tuesday night in Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals.

“This was crazy. Today was crazy, for sure,” Edwards said after the game. “Yeah, today was wild.”

The Nuggets sent aggressive double teams at Edwards seemingly every trip down the floor, almost instantly after he would catch the ball.

“They wasn’t leaving me until I got off the ball,” Edwards said.

That’s normal for a dominant post player. It’s highly unusual treatment for a wing player holding the ball on the perimeter.

The Nuggets were effectively willing to cover the Timberwolves’ other four players with three defenders for a few seconds while they scrambled around the court. It was an extreme response to Game 4, when Edwards scored 44 points with relative ease to carry the Timberwolves’ offense, marking the second time he scored 40-plus points in the series.

“We knew we had to do something different with Anthony Edwards. This guy is just a one-man wrecking crew, and I thought KCP, CB, Aaron did a great job,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “But we trapped him, we double-teamed him, flew around behind it. And that takes a lot of effort, and our guys committed to it.”

And that defense did minimize Edwards’ offensive dominance that the Timberwolves relied so heavily on through the first four games of the series. He finished with just 18 points on 5-for-15 shooting. But he did also had nine assists and, to his credit, committed to the pass.

“I thought for the most part Anthony did a good job of moving the ball and staying patient moving the ball,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said.

“Just trying to hit the open man,” Edwards said. “Just trying to find the next play or the swing-swing and play out of that.”

The problem was, when he did so, his teammates couldn’t capitalize. The players on the receiving ends of the passes weren’t decisive. So ensuing passes were too slow or smart decisions with the ball simply weren’t made.

“Maybe we were a little late in moving it out of that. When we did get good looks — and we had some naked ones — they didn’t go in,” Finch said. “Like with Jaden and Nickeil in particular, we need those guys to connect (on their shots).”

The Nuggets are counting on those guys not knocking down shots. And, for the most part, they’ve obliged. The Nuggets did not pay for committing an inordinate amount of defensive resources to stopping Edwards. Quite the contrary. They won because of it.

So it’s a good bet they will deploy a similar tactic in Game 6 on Thursday in Minneapolis. And the Timberwolves need to have better answers for it. Perhaps that will include Edwards, who didn’t seem to have his full tank of juice on Tuesday, playing with more force and making something happen off the bounce. He split a few double teams Tuesday and got to the free throw line because of it. Anytime he can manage that, Minnesota is better off for it.

But attacking multiple defenders is generally not good offensive process. The reality is if the Nuggets are going to dare other players to beat them, those guys have to step up and do the job.

“I think just keep the ball moving, keep the ball flowing. Just try to run our actions. And that alleviates some of the pressure on Ant, and that makes the defense move,” center Rudy Gobert said. “I think our guys are able to make the right play. Nickeil, Jaden, I mean, all these guys are able to make the right play. We just got to find ways to get into the flow of the offense and not get too stagnant.”

Because stagnancy makes it quite easy for Denver to double when Edwards has the ball and recover as soon as he gets off of it. And, if the Timberwolves can’t create advantages off of the double teams, the offense is doomed.

“(The Nuggets are) doing a great job. Obviously they got a great coaching staff over there with Malone. We got to just do a better job of making it easier for (Edwards),” Karl-Anthony Towns said. “We got one of the best screeners in the game with Rudy. There’s a lot of different ways we can attack and make it easier and alleviate the pressure.”

Edwards’ teammates have to do something to aid his efforts. On Tuesday, Edwards was asked to initiate 90 percent of the team’s offense. He also was tasked with defending Nuggets guard Jamal Murray, which he succeeded in doing, all while playing 44 minutes — just two days after logging 45 minutes in Game 4.

It’s a lot, not that the 22-year-old can’t handle it.

“It’s fun, man,” Edwards said. “I’m getting in the best shape of my life.”

But a little help might be nice, and beneficial for the Timberwolves’ team success.

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DENVER — The Timberwolves may have been doomed for Game 5 on Tuesday 45 minutes before it even started. That’s when the team officially ruled out veteran starting point guard Mike Conley for the night due to Achilles soreness.

The Timberwolves are a deep team with multiple quality options backing up the starters at numerous positions — except point guard.

That’s not a knock on Jordan McLaughlin or Monte Morris. But even at 36 years old, Conley is one of the NBA’s premier floor generals. He can direct traffic and get Minnesota into its necessary actions while also generating quality shots for himself and others with the ball in his hands.

He is the requisite secondary playmaker the Timberwolves need in the lineup alongside Anthony Edwards. He is also a 44 percent shooter from deep this season, giving the Timberwolves the outside shooting they desperately need to achieve proper spacing.

And, perhaps most importantly, when things get dicey, Conley is Minnesota’s steadying hand. That much was evident in Tuesday’s Game 5 loss in Denver.

“His shooting ability, him attacking Jokic,” Edwards said, talking about what they missed after the game. “He was definitely missed a lot tonight.”

The offense simply never found its footing in defeat. There was no one to orchestrate easy touches for Edwards as the Nuggets did everything in their power to get the ball out of the all-star guard’s hands. There was no one to make the Nuggets pay for committing so many resources to Edwards, either with his ability to play off the catch or run a second-side pick-and-roll with center Rudy Gobert.

Conley had six or more assists in each of the first four games of this Western Conference semifinal series. He had 15 points and nine assists in Game 4, when he injured his Achilles on a jumper with 25 seconds to play/ That followed up his 14-point, 10-assist showing in Game 1.

“When the ball comes to him, he attacks the closeout, gets into the heart of the defense and makes the next play,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “He gives Ant a breather from having the ball in his hands the whole time. Ant can play in space off of him, too. They’ve been a great combination all year.”

The Timberwolves managed to go 3-3 during the regular season in the six games Conley did not play.

But two of those wins came against cellar dwellers in Washington and a severely depleted Toronto. And two of the losses were against San Antonio and Charlotte.

To compete consistently at a high level, the Timberwolves need their point guard. There’s an argument to be made that Conley is the team’s second-least replaceable player behind Edwards.

Which is why it was so unfortunate for the Timberwolves that Conley was unable to play in Game 5. It’s the second straight time an injury has sidelined Conley in the midst of a playoff run with a true championship contender. A hamstring injury robbed him of the majority of Utah’s conference semifinal series against the Clippers in 2001. Conley returned in Game 6 of that series, but played at significantly less than 100 percent as the Jazz were eliminated from the playoffs.

The worst-case scenario for the Timberwolves is that a similar situation plays out Thursday. Finch said the team is are “hopeful” Conley can play in Game 6 — the Timberwolves’ first elimination game of the playoffs.

“That was one of the reasons to be cautious with him right here, didn’t feel like he could go. But maybe in a couple of more days, he could go,” Finch said. “Nickeil (Alexander-Walker) did a great job of filling in there in the starting role. It would have been great to have Mike out there and Nickeil off the bench, but we didn’t have that.”

And it’s at least a realistic possibility they won’t have it again with their season on the line Thursday. If that’s the case, the Timberwolves will simply have to find a way to survive without their floor general, a task that has proven awfully difficult to achieve this season.

“Leader of our team. Has the most experience. Been in these situations more than all of us. It hurts,” Timberwolves forward Karl-Anthony Towns said. “But we’ve always had a next-man-up mentality in this team, and even when I got hurt or people missed games, Ant missed games, we’ve always had a next-man-up mentality and we’ve been great at being ready for the opportunity.

“Keill (Alexander-Walker) has been amazing all year. He’s more than ready for the opportunity. Did a great job of defending and hitting shots, executing our offense. We all together have to execute better, and that doesn’t fall anywhere on Keil. As a team, we win as a team, lose as a team. Doesn’t matter about the stats. It’s about putting one in the left (win) column. We haven’t done that in the last three games. We got to find a way in Game 6 to do that.”

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By MIKE STOBBE (AP Medical Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — The number of U.S. fatal overdoses fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday.

Agency officials noted the data is provisional and could change after more analysis, but that they still expect a drop when the final counts are in. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national drug death epidemic began more than three decades ago.

Experts reacted cautiously. One described the decline as relatively small, and said it should be thought more as part of a leveling off than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths shot up in the years that followed.

“Any decline is encouraging,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. “But I think it’s certainly premature to celebrate or to draw any large-scale conclusions about where we may be headed long-term with this crisis.”

It’s also too soon to know what spurred the decline, Marshall and other experts said. Explanations could include shifts in the drug supply, expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many that now there are basically fewer people to kill.

CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Deb Houry called the dip “heartening news” and praised efforts to reduce the tally, but she noted “there are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering numbers.”

About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, including both American citizens and non-citizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.

The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.

“These children need support,” and are at a higher risk of mental health and drug use disorders themselves, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped lead the study. “It’s not just a loss of a person. It’s also the implications that loss has for the family left behind.”

Prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, but they were supplanted years ago by heroin and more recently by illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat intense pain from ailments like cancer but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.

For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it’s being smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills.

A study published last week found that law enforcement seizures of pills containing fentanyl are rising dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.

It’s possible that the seizures indicate that the overall supply of fentanyl-laced pills is growing fast, not necessarily that police are whittling down the illicit drug supply, said one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco.

He noted that the decline in overdoses was not uniform. All but two of the states in the eastern half of the U.S. saw declines, but most western states saw increases. Alaska, Washington, and Oregon each saw 27% increases.

The reason? Many eastern states have been dealing with fentanyl for about a decade, while it’s reached western states more recently, Ciccarone said.

Nevertheless, some researchers say there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s possible that smoking fentanyl is not as lethal as injecting it, but scientists are still exploring that question.

Meanwhile, more money is becoming available to treat addiction and prevent overdoses, through government funding and also through legal settlements with drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies, Ciccarone noted.

“My hope is 2023 is the beginning of a turning point,” he said.

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AP medical writer Carla K. Johnson contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.