Minnesota looked slow, didn’t have any flow on offense and made far too many dumbfounding mistakes in its season-opening, 97-94 loss Wednesday in Toronto.

Sound familiar?

That was the recipe that got Minnesota run off the floor in a number of early-season contests a year ago. And the formula was equally as futile in Game 1 this fall in Canada.

Toronto made all the hustle plays, while consistently sprinting past Minnesota’s big-ball lineups, turning the Timberwolves’ mistakes into 38 fast-break points.

The good thing for Minnesota was there were positives to the fact it towered over the Raptors on the interior. The Wolves outrebounded Toronto 62-47, at least for one night correcting a major bugaboo from a year ago. The Timberwolves shot 22 free throws to Toronto’s 16.

But 20 of those attempts from the charity stripe came in the first half. Over the final two quarters, Minnesota’s offensive got especially stagnant.

The rhythm, flow and ball movement that were trademarks in the preseason and reasons for optimism that the Wolves were only going to build upon the successes realized in the spring all disappeared when the lights turned on for real.

“It’s always your fear. When the season starts for real, the ball gets sticky,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch told reporters. “We didn’t trust the movement that we showed all preseason. … We were never really able to establish any sort of rhythm with our inability to move for the sake of movement.”

After a hot start to the night that helped keep the offense afloat early, Anthony Edwards reverted to old habits of isolation. He, like everyone else, took a number of difficult shots throughout the contest.

Edwards finished with 26 points and 14 rebounds, but it took 27 shots to reach that scoring output. Rudy Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns also notched double-doubles, but no one had a particularly good night.

Shot selection was the primary factor in Minnesota’s woeful shooting performance. The Wolves shot 34% from the field and 26% from deep.

“A lot of tough shots,” Finch said. “It looked like everyone was trying to get themselves going and hoping that some tough shot goes in.”

Toronto shot just 40% from the field, and that included going 14 for 22 on the fast break.

“It was a winnable one, for sure. It was an ugly game,” Finch said. “Defensively, I thought we fought for the most part and did a lot of the things we set out to do, but decision-making on offense was the story of the game.”

Those fast-break opportunities were created through Minnesota’s bad shots, its 14 turnovers and also the Raptors’ major advantage in foot speed.

Nights like Wednesday do little to quell concerns about whether a two-center lineup in the NBA can be effective on an night-to-night basis. Minnesota still hasn’t won in Toronto since 2004 — a 19-game losing streak north of the border.

“First game,” Finch said. “We’ll have to settle into the rhythm that we know we played with all of preseason.”

CAIRO — Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Wael Dahdouh, was helping broadcast live images of the territory’s night sky when he received the devastating news: His wife, son and daughter had all been killed on Wednesday.

Moments later, the Qatari-based satellite channel switched to footage of Dahdouh entering al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza before giving way to grief as he peered over the body of his dead son.

“They take revenge on us in our children?” he said, kneeling over his son’s bloodied body, still wearing his protective press vest from that day’s work.

Dahdouh’s grandson also was declared dead two hours later, the network reported.

The video was sure to reverberate across the Arab world, where the 53-year-old journalist is well-known as the face of Palestinians during many wars. He is revered in his native Gaza for telling people’s stories of suffering and hardship to the outside world.

According to Al Jazeera, Dahdouh’s family members were killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit Nuseirat Refugee Camp, located in an area of Gaza where the military had encouraged people to go to stay safe. It said a number of other relatives were still missing, and it remained unclear how many others were killed.

Dahdouh’s family were among the more than 1 million Gaza residents displaced by the war, now in its 19th day, and were staying in a house in Nuseirat when the strike hit, the network said.

The Israeli strikes have killed more than 6,500 Palestinians, Gaza’s Health Ministry says. The Associated Press could not independently verify the death toll.

The fighting has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel — mostly civilians slain during the initial Hamas attack, according to the Israeli government.

Late Wednesday, Al Jazeera replayed the moment Dahdouh was informed about the deaths. In an audio recording he is heard picking up a phone and telling a frantic caller multiple times: “Who are you with?”

Earlier, Dahdouh was on air, covering the aftermath of a separate strike that had killed at least 26 people, according to local officials. Throughout the war, Dahdouh has remained in Gaza City, despite Israeli calls for residents to head south ahead of an expected ground offensive.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled to Nuseirat and other locations in central and southern Gaza, believing them to be safer. But Israeli strikes have continued to pound these areas, which are suffering dire shortages of water, medicine and fuel under an Israeli siege.

“This is the safe area which the occupation army talked about, the moral army,” said Dahdouh with bitter sarcasm to a fellow Al Jazeera reporter at the al-Aqsa hospital.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said Dahdouh’s family “home was targeted” in an “indiscriminate assault by the Israeli occupation.”

The Israeli army had no immediate comment. It says it strikes only Hamas military targets, but the Palestinians say thousands of civilians have died. Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.

Israel has threatened to shut down Al Jazeera over its coverage of the war. Al Jazeera is a Qatari state-owned media network and is deeply critical of Israel, particularly its treatment of Palestinians.

Over the last week, the gas-rich nation of Qatar has emerged as a key intermediary over the fate of more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas militants during their Oct. 7 assault. Qatar has hosted Hamas’ political office in its capital of Doha for over a decade. The capital, Doha, is home to Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader, and also Khaled Mashaal, Haniyeh’s predecessor.

Four of the hostages have been released, a mother and daughter on Friday and two more on Monday. In an interview with Sky News this week, Mashaal said all Israeli hostages could be released if Israel stopped its aerial bombardment of Gaza.

He’s served in leadership as vice chair of the Republican Conference, but with just four House terms under his belt, Rep. Mike Johnson remains little-known within Washington.

One thing is clear, however. Johnson is a social conservative’s social conservative — the most culturally conservative lawmaker to ascend to the speakership in decades, if not longer.

He has a faith-driven outlook toward governance and longstanding ties to the evangelical activist group Family Research Council, which could one day prove discomfiting to members from swing districts or of a more secular orientation.

His first brush with national prominence came in April 2015, when Johnson, then a Louisiana state legislator, proposed a bill called the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act that would have prevented “adverse treatment by the State of any person or entity on the basis of the views they may hold with regard to marriage.” Critics called it legalized discrimination against married gay couples, and the bill failed, but the media attention got him on the radar of the influential FRC and its president, fellow Louisiana native Tony Perkins.

Perkins, who hosts a national radio show called Washington Watch, began tapping Johnson to guest host. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, appeared to be a natural — by December 2015, local Shreveport, La. ABC affiliate KTBS said he “may have a budding second career on the airwaves.”

The FRC and Perkins are political lightning rods among non-evangelicals — some of Perkins’ stances, like his argument that natural disasters are divine punishments for homosexuality, don’t sit well with broad swaths of the electorate. But Johnson’s political and religious beliefs dovetail with Perkins’ views. In a 2004 op-ed, Johnson argued that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural … society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle.”

When he ran for Congress in 2016, Johnson placed his faith at the center of his campaign, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message, “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a life-long conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”

His connection with Perkins — and his interest in evangelical radio as a political tool — continued after he was elected to the House in 2016. As a first-term lawmaker, Johnson announced his bid to lead the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that currently counts 156, on Washington Watch with Perkins. He won the election.

“It’s never been more important for conservatives to stand up and give voice — to be winsome witnesses — to [conservative] principles,” Johnson told Perkins in 2018 during his announcement.

Johnson has been a guest on Washington Watch at other times in recent years as well.

In the midst of the 15 ballots that it took to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaker in January, Johnson recounted on an FRC show that he got on his knees on the House floor and prayed with a group of members, “repent[ing] to the Lord for our individual transgressions and those collectively as a legislative body.”

Johnson used the skills he sharpened on talk radio and in televised FRC interviews to start a weekly podcast in 2022 with his wife, called “Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.”

During the first episode in March 2022, entitled “Can America be Saved?” Johnson says that “we’ll review current events through the lens of eternal truth,” and noted that in each podcast they intended to incorporate a themed scripture because “the word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth.” Guests have included Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson.

On occasion, Kelly Johnson will tee up her husband for an answer. “Why are we the freest, most powerful, most successful, most benevolent nation in the history of the world, and why does every other nation on the planet look to us for leadership and even expect it of us?” she asks in one episode. Her husband responds explaining that America is the only country in the world founded upon a creed, or a “religious statement of faith.”

The podcast’s bent is similar to what’s on evangelical Christian radio, with a slightly more political angle. While Johnson’s deep faith may be a distinguishing feature — especially compared to past GOP speakers — he is fairly ideologically representative of the Republican House majority. His DW-nominate score, a system which tracks and maps the ideology of Congress based on their voting record, puts Johnson at more conservative than 63 percent of House Republicans.

But Johnson has a strict insistence on his conservative evangelical values — he’s posted on X (formerly Twitter), “[In Louisiana], perform an abortion and get imprisoned at hard labor for 1-10 yrs & fined $10K-$100K” and argued that if abortion hadn’t been legal for decades, there would be more “able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this [on social security, Medicare and Medicaid]”. Those stances won’t endear him to the Democrats with whom he’ll now have to negotiate, nor will his vigorous attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

After three weeks of chaos and uncertainty, Republicans were able to compromise on Johnson. Now, the question is whether he can keep them together while also negotiating with Democrats. It’s a high wire act that will make it harder for Johnson to carve out time to hop on the mic and record his podcast, but given that listeners haven’t gotten a new episode since Oct. 8, we’re at least due to hear his broadcasted thoughts on how he got here soon enough.

NEW YORK — Joe Mazzulla admitted before Wednesday’s season opener that the Celtics didn’t have an identity last season. The circumstances of the beginning of that training camp simply didn’t give them enough time. But with enough preparation going into this season, Mazzulla emphasized the importance of setting one.

“Humility. Mindset. Toughness. Passion. Togetherness. Just be nasty,” Mazzulla said. “So we’ll see if that happens.”

The first test came Wednesday. In control for most of their opener, the Celtics suddenly let go of the rope. They were unraveling. The Knicks and their rabid Madison Square Garden crowd smelled blood. But they never tasted it.

The expectation is that these Celtics, with their superior top-end talent, should breeze to at least the conference finals, if not win the whole thing. But Wednesday revealed they’re unsurprisingly not close to a finished product. On Wednesday, they relied on that newly formed identity to tough out an ugly but gritty 108-104 victory over the Knicks.

Jayson Tatum scored 34 points and Kristaps Porzingis poured in 30 points in his Celtics debut, powering them on both ends and leading them to the finish line of this heart-pounding win. The C’s trailed for the first time in the fourth quarter but proved resilient late with defense and toughness to scratch their way to a season-opening victory.

More to come…