Kyle Anderson is Minnesota’s lone truly key free agent this offseason, and it’s tough to find a scenario in which the Timberwolves bring him back.

The Wolves are already set to soar into the luxury tax given the extensions for Karl-Anthony Towns, Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards all kick into the team’s salary cap table.

Minnesota could still re-sign Anderson, but it would further hamstring the team financially and continue to push up the luxury tax bill that ownership — whoever that is at the time — will have to pay.

None of this has crossed Anderson’s mind to date.

“No, I don’t think about that stuff until after the season,” he said Thursday morning ahead of Game 6. “I hate thinking about that stuff.”

But it will weigh on the minds of Minnesota, surely. Anderson has had a few tough stretches of play this season. The experiment of having him play alongside multiple other bigs — whether that’s Naz Reid, Rudy Gobert or Karl-Anthony Towns — hasn’t always gone well.

Anderson’s best stretches in his two years with Minnesota have come with Towns injured, both for much of last season and then during the month this season Towns missed with a meniscus tear in March.

Whenever Anderson has played his more natural position of power forward, he’s shined. But those opportunities are injury-dependent and this season have been few and far between.

Still, it may be tough for Timberwolves coach Chris Finch to part with the 30-year-old. He has the ultimate faith in the high-IQ utility player. That trust has been earned.

“He was our most important player last year in many ways. He saved our season, he did anything we asked him to do, so we know he had it in him,” Finch said near the end of the regular season when Anderson played well in Towns’ absence. “He’s played mostly at the three this year, which has been an adjustment for many reasons. He’s a basketball player, so he can play all over the floor. I think the rhythm of the game for him was slightly different at times. That certainly had something to do with it. But I think since the trade deadline, breathe a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going anywhere and thankfully he hadn’t, never had any plans to, but it seemingly at that point in time, it’s been better and better for him.”

CONLEY, TOWNS GUT IT OUT

Mike Conley missed just one game with a calf strain, returning for Thursday’s Game 6. Calf strains generally require longer absences to allow them to fully heal, but Conley is a competitor who doesn’t want a season to end with him on the sideline.

While playing for Utah in 2021, he missed the first five games of the Western Conference semifinals in 2021 with a hamstring injury when the Jazz were taking on the Clippers. With Utah down 3-2, Conley returned for Game 6. Unfortunately, he wasn’t himself, struggled from the floor and Utah lost.

Karl-Anthony Towns played through a knee injury suffered in the second quarter of Game 5 and was visibly hobbling off the court following the contest. Towns still looked affected by the injury Thursday morning but was emphatic about his availability.

“I’m playing tonight. That’s all that matters,” Towns said. “I’ll take care of (the injury) later.”

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Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmakers say they won’t let speeches about fast food or Republican threats to kill a bonding deal derail their efforts to advance a bill that would plot a path for abortion rights in Minnesota’s Constitution.

After House Republicans delayed votes in two floor sessions with lengthy speeches that sometimes veered into seemingly unrelated topics, House Speaker Melissa Hortman shut down an eight-hour debate at midnight Wednesday so the chamber could vote on a paid leave bill. The move prompted loud protests from Republicans, who said it violated norms of the chamber.

On Thursday, Hortman said she and her DFL colleagues will continue to entertain some debate on bills in the final days of the session, but won’t hesitate to stop “deleterious” speeches and questions from Republicans.

“At a certain point, it’s very obvious when Republicans are filibustering. I mean, I don’t know how many of you tuned in on Monday, but there was a lot of conversation about cheeseburgers and also hamburgers, maybe French fries,” she said. “That’s not what the voters of the state of Minnesota engage in an election to do.”

The fast food comments were tied to a seven-hour debate on a bill to force businesses to disclose hidden last-minute charges that ultimately got bipartisan support in the House when the vote happened at midnight on Monday.

ERA amendment

A version of the Equal Rights Amendment that would put the right to an abortion and protections for LGBTQ people in the state Constitution has been delayed — and not yet scheduled — after extended debate on other bills. If passed by the House and Senate, the question would be put to voters in the 2026 election.

There are just three more days for the House and Senate to vote before the end of the 2024 session, and even as each chamber works late hours, the odds are dimming for bills to legalize sports betting, borrow money for roads and bridges, and even on a minimum wage deal to keep rideshare services Uber and Lyft from making good on their threats to leave Minnesota.

Hortman said cutting off debate was a sort of “nuclear option” for Democrats, as there are technically no time limits for debate in the Minnesota House, but called the move warranted as Republicans were “lying on the tracks.”

Minority Leader Rep. Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, called the shutdown of debate Wednesday “shameful” and disputed DFL claims that her party is deliberately delaying votes in the final week of the session. She added the majority has had two years to get its work done, and can’t place blame on Republicans for expecting full debate on bills.

“It is not the responsibility of the minority to pass the majority’s bills,” she told reporters Tuesday. “It is the responsibility of the minority to make sure that the voices of our constituents are heard and represented.”

Republicans earlier this week rolled out a list of demands to DFLers tied to the passage of a roughly $900 million dollar infrastructure bill, including dropping a gun control proposal and a version of the Equal Rights Amendment that includes abortion as a right.

Obstacles to an infrastructure bill

Despite being in the minority in both the House and Senate, borrowing money for infrastructure, which traditionally happens in even-numbered years, requires a three-fifths majority in both chambers in order to pass.

That’s one of the few leverage points available to Republicans — though it doesn’t just inconvenience DFLers. If Republicans kill a bonding bill it means they won’t be able to deliver local projects in their districts either.

GOP lawmakers also are pushing to remove gun control language from a bill increasing criminal penalties for people who buy guns for others who are ineligible to do so, such as felons.

While both parties support increasing penalties for what’s known as straw purchasing, Republicans oppose DFLers inclusion of language banning binary triggers, a modification that allows a semi-automatic weapon to fire both when the trigger is pulled and released — greatly increasing its rate of fire.

Republicans used their leverage with bonding to get $300 million in aid for struggling nursing homes last year, but the tactic didn’t get much else from Democrats.

Hortman told reporters the House DFL is willing to give more funding to emergency medical services, a Republican request, but won’t allow threats on bonding to make them budge on the ERA, the binary trigger ban, or anything else.

Even if the House passes the ERA with abortion rights, the version already passed by the Senate version does not include that language, so the two versions would have to be reconciled.

The last day to vote on bills is Sunday.

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After being shut out in the first two games of its Professional Women’s Hockey League semifinal playoff series in Toronto, the sad refrain of “You can’t win if you can’t score” was being tossed around Xcel Energy Center prior to Game 3.

Two wins —and two shutouts —later, Minnesota’s spirits and its chances of pulling off the series upset have been lifted by the fact that you can’t lose if you don’t give up a goal.

Goaltender Maddie Rooney, whose postseason goals-against average stands at 0.29, has emerged as the face of the turnaround that has set up a deciding Game 5 Friday night in Toronto. But Rooney is the first one to acknowledge that she’s gotten a lot of help.

Team defense and timely goal scoring has been Minnesota’s successful combination, and if it can pull it off one more time, a meeting with Boston in the PWHL championship series will be the reward.

The home team has won each of the four games in the series, with Toronto goaltender Kristen Campbell earning shutouts in the first two games. But Minnesota is buoyed by the fact that it played well enough to win in Game 2, which was scoreless until the final two minutes.

“Once we got into that Game 2, we had the discussion that we had to be comfortable winning 1-0,” Minnesota coach Ken Klee said. “Because we have good goaltending, they play the right way and we play the right way.

“It’s going to be tight. That’s the way playoff hockey is.”

Home-ice advantage could prove to be the X factor, but along with Rooney’s heroics, Minnesota can call on an offense that looks to be a bit more dangerous than Toronto’s at this point.

While Minnesota’s top line of Taylor Heise, Grace Zumwinkle and Abby Boreen didn’t produce any points in Game 4, it was responsible for 11 of Minnesota’s 29 shots on goal — a number of them quality scoring chances.

“I thought their line was outstanding,” Klee said. “I thought it was Taylor Heise’s best game — by far — that she’s had in the playoffs. Zum was good, and Abby Boreen is that energy ball for us. She’s mixing things up and helping her linemates.”

But there remains the fact that Toronto has yet to surrender a goal at home in the series.

“Campbell’s played well,” Klee said. “She’s been one of the top goalies in the league all year. Her confidence is high. It’s going to take a shot rebound or a screen to beat her. For us, we need shot volume, when it’s there — we don’t want to shoot into blocks. They sacrifice a lot, they block a lot of shots. They’re a winning team for a reason, they do a lot of little things well. We’ve just got to stay with it.”

Toronto will be without leading scorer Natalie Spooner for the second straight game after a knee injury in Game 3 ended her season.

“There’s no replacing Natalie Spooner,” Klee said. “She’s got 21 goals, she’s outstanding. But they’re a resilient team. They know if they play their system they will give themselves a chance to win. We expect another tight battle.”

Toronto coach Troy Ryan said his team talked about the need to find a way to score “dirty” goals, which would describe Butorac’s ability to pounce on a loose puck in the Toronto crease for the game winner on Wednesday.

“In playoffs you probably work a little bit more to get those greasy kind of goals,” Ryan said. “There were a few opportunities (in Game 4) I think we could have buried a shoulder and widened out our stance and drove the puck.”

Toronto has been one of the most physical teams in the league all season, and this series has provided more of the same. With the Coca-Cola Center likely to be sold out, the home team figures to get the house rocking, as well.

“Our start is going to be really important,” Toronto forward Renata Fast said. “We need to be really on our toes at the start of the game. As soon as we were playing with that attack mentally (in Game 4) and we were getting pucks below their goal line, we were getting chances and hemming them in.”

Minnesota soon will find out if it has enough tenacity and grit come all the way back from an 0-2 hole.

“We’re confident in how we’re playing right now,” Butorac said. “Game 2 was a good showpiece of how we can play on the road. I think (it’s) just taking the momentum from these last two games and bringing it up there, and just giving it all we can.”