Timberwolves defender Kyle Anderson was constantly looking over both shoulders as Golden State was set to inbound the ball with 10 seconds left in Sunday’s game at Target Center, seemingly waiting for something specific.

Trailing by three points, the Warriors needed a triple. And Anderson was guarding Klay Thompson at the top of the floor. It’s no surprise Golden State would look the way of Thompson, one of the NBA’s all-time great sharpshooters. But Anderson was prepared for Steph Curry’s screen and Thompson’s flare out toward the opposite extended elbow. Anderson was on Thompson like glue as the veteran guard caught the ball and fired up a 3-point shot, which clanked off the rim, effectively sealing the Timberwolves’ victory.

Anderson is a heady player, but how was he so prepared for the Warriors’ in-bound play? In the timeout just moments prior, Timberwolves assistant coach Micah Nori showed the team the play the Warriors were likely to run.

“Micah, they didn’t even go to the coaches’ huddle. Micah came to our huddle and was like, ‘This what they’re gonna run. Be ready for this,’ ” Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards said. “And they came out and ran the exact play. Micah is a genius. That was the first time he ever did that.”

Chalk it up as another stroke of genius for Minnesota’s coaching staff, which repeatedly has flexed its collective muscles over the past couple weeks.

The Wolves have yet to break stride after losing star player Karl-Anthony Towns to injury. They’re 6-3 since the big man went down with a torn meniscus, with two of those losses coming in the first three games without him.

Minnesota was also without fellow big men Naz Reid and Rudy Gobert for multiple games in this recent stretch. And yet it rarely seems to matter who the Wolves have at their disposal. They always find a way to make it work.

Defensively, the adept coaching has been on display all season. Sure, the Timberwolves’ No. 1 defensive rating is largely a product of Minnesota being armed with Gobert and a host of elite perimeter defenders. But on a game-by-game basis, the Wolves’ defensive game plans often exceed whatever their opponents put together.

“Especially with the way we’re built, every day we have to think about how we’re going to approach this with matchups and coverages and stuff like that. Our staff does an amazing job of really coming to the meeting in the morning being super creative when they need to be, but also not straying too far away from our foundation, which is also important. But yeah, there’s a lot that goes into it,” Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch said in January. “A lot of teams kinda roll out the same defense every night, but we’re not built that way, so we gotta really kinda pick out certain points of emphasis that we’re focusing on.”

Much of what the Timberwolves do well defensively — with assistant coach Elston Turner heading that end of the floor — is centered on Gobert. But when Gobert was out for games against Utah and Denver, Minnesota found other ways to get stops, mimicking the fly-around brand of basketball that made the team successful during the 2021-22 season.

On the other end, the Wolves have done more than survive on offense without Towns — they’ve thrived. Minnesota’s 3-point volume is up, and the ball movement has increased. The team’s offensive rating, a concern for much of the season, has ticked up as a result.

“I think it’s a byproduct of the way we’ve had to play since KAT’s been out,” veteran point guard Mike Conley said.

The Timberwolves are rotating between Kyle Anderson and Naz Reid at the power forward spot, using their differing strengths depending on the lineups. When Gobert is off the floor, Minnesota is running a five-out offense that opens the lane for anyone aiming to attack. Even when Gobert is in the game and not involved in direct screen-and-roll action, he often is working from an extended dunker spot position that helps keep the floor spread.

“I don’t think I’ve called a post-up play for a while. We’re playing a little bit faster in transition. I think we have multiple handlers out there to be able to initiate and the ball is kind of flowing through everyone’s hands a little bit earlier through that,” Finch said. “But we played this way a lot last year. So we’re pretty comfortable with it.”

The Timberwolves are executing screen and rolls where Kyle Anderson or even Anthony Edwards is the screener at the top of the floor. A key possession in the Golden State victory came with a minute to play, when Edwards set a screen at the top of the floor, rolled, caught the ball at the elbow and dumped a pass down to Gobert, who made a pair of free throws to extend Minnesota’s lead to five.

Edwards as the screener is the type of ingenuity the Wolves’ coaching staff has displayed to compensate for the lack of Towns. The outside-the-box thinking has continued to rotations, where the Wolves have trotted out a three-point-guard lineup featuring Conley, Monte Morris and Jordan McLaughlin that shined as all three floor generals played seamlessly off one another. Conley noted that’s not a look he has experienced often.

“But sometimes on certain nights, it’s what’s working for us, and we’ve got three really good ones, and every one of them knows how to play and find each other,” Conley said. “We play off of each other very well, and hopefully we get more opportunities.”

If it continues to work, they will. Because as Finch and Co. have shown, they’ll do whatever is necessary to maximize Minnesota’s chances of success with whoever is available on that given night.

“Like everybody, we have things we’re lacking,” Finch said. “But the collective is better than all the individual parts, and that’s what any team should be.”

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Stephen Battaglio | Los Angeles Times (TNS)

In the late 1990s, NBC ran a promotional campaign with the slogan, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you,” aimed at boosting summer reruns of such hits as “Mad About You” and “Frasier.”

Updated for 2024, the line would be, “If you haven’t streamed it, it’s new to you.”

Original series created to drive new subscribers to streaming platforms are showing up more frequently on linear broadcast and cable TV networks. Media companies are looking to expose the programs to broader audiences and fill out their lineups to help pay the freight as they battle to keep pace with Netflix.

This summer, CBS will be running the first season of the Taylor Sheridan crime drama “Tulsa King” starring Sylvester Stallone — a show that was made for streamer Paramount+. You can binge rival Peacock’s new reality series “The McBee Dynasty,” but if you want to kick it old school, individual episodes air weekly on parent company NBCUniversal’s USA Network.

From left, Jesse McBee, Steve McBee, Steven McBee Jr., Cole McBee, James “Jimmy” McBee in an episode of “The McBee Dynasty: Real American Cowboys.” The Peacock streaming original series is also getting a run on USA Network. (Emerson Miller/Peacock/TNS)

In January, ABC aired the first season of the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building,” It performed well enough for the network to plan on airing another season at some point in the future.

The trend runs counter to the perception that viewers looking for non-sports entertainment programming have abandoned linear TV.

It may be true that many younger consumers who have grown up with streaming don’t even own a TV set, which they see as a gadget to bombard their parents and grandparents with pharmaceutical drug commercials all day. But for media companies, linear TV, while on the decline with shrinking ratings and cord-cutting, has turned into a marketing tool that expands public awareness of their streaming shows.

Meanwhile, the streaming businesses owned by legacy media companies such as NBCUniversal parent Comcast Corp., Paramount Global and Disney are all under pressure from Wall Street to generate profits. Turning to linear networks is a means of generating more revenue to help monetize their investments in streaming.

“These companies are hemorrhaging money [on streaming],” said Doug Herzog, a veteran cable and broadcast executive. “None of it is working great. That’s the issue. They are trying things out because that’s what they should be doing.”

Paramount Global Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra summed up the approach at an investor conference where he said his company aims to get “the most we possibly can out of every single dollar that we invest in content.”

Executives say viewers can expect to see more original programs created exclusively for streaming services pop up on broadcast and cable channels.

That’s because the broadcast networks have the ability to reach more than 95% of the homes in the U.S. While cord-cutting has reduced the number of homes getting pay TV, major cable networks are connected to about 70 million homes, still more than most subscriber-based streaming services. Peacock, for example, has about 30 million paying subscribers.

Streaming shows can become hits and cultural touchstones, but it’s harder for them to reach the kind of critical mass that big network TV series such as “Friends” once achieved. That’s why the legacy companies are finding that shows already exposed on streaming can pass as original programming on linear TV.

“It’s something we will continue to do because what you see in a fragmented marketplace — as popular as these shows are — there are still people who have not seen them,” said Craig Erwich, who as president of the Disney Television Group oversees ABC and Hulu. “Putting them in different places and telling people they are there is always additive. It’s never cannibalistic.”

With a cast that includes Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building” is a show with the kind of broad appeal linear TV networks still seek, requiring just a few edits of foul language.

Disney found that half of the viewers who watched “Only Murders” on ABC were not signed up to Hulu, which has almost 50 million subscribers. After the series aired on the broadcast network, viewers wanted more. The hours of viewing for the first two seasons of the program rose by 40% on its original streaming home.

“It was new to a lot of people,” Erwich noted. “It surprises me because the show is so wildly popular in both consumption and critical acclaim that you start to think that everybody who wants to see this has seen it. But it’s a big country and there are many different types of people who want to watch TV in many different types of ways.”

NBCUniversal similarly saw viewers flock to Peacock to watch the second season of the medical anthology drama “Dr. Death,” after episodes from Season 1 aired on NBC. Viewing of the show on Peacock rose 58%.

“Only Murders” came in handy for ABC, as last year’s strikes by Hollywood screenwriters and actors had shut down production for months and cut off the pipeline of fresh programming. But the network was looking for a way to deploy the show well before the labor stoppages became a factor, executives said.

Streaming shows are likely to show up on the networks during the summer months, when repeats can no longer draw a sizable crowd. Rather than investing in original series for a smaller available audience, CBS can turn to a streaming show with a high-profile star such as “Tulsa King,” which features Stallone as a crime boss.

Last week, NBCUniversal’s Peacock unveiled a new serialized reality show, “The McBee Dynasty,” which tells the story of a family ranch and the four brothers vying to take over the business from their patriarch. The entire series is available to stream on Peacock while individual episodes air Monday nights after “WWE Raw” on USA Network.

Funneling the nearly 2 million WWE fans per week into the Peacock series uses one of the most time-honored stunts in the TV playbook.

The notion of a TV schedule where viewers are compelled to make an appointment to watch shows has almost become an anachronism in the age of streaming video on demand. But pulling an audience from one time period to the next remains the most efficient way to drive millions of viewers into sampling a new program, especially following live events or reality competition shows that are best enjoyed by watching in real time.

“The concept of a show-to-show audience flow is real,” said Frances Berwick, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment. “There is still a tremendous amount of value in it.”

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NBCUniversal has been aggressive in using its linear channels to boost Peacock shows. “Bupkis,” the comedy series with Pete Davidson, has gotten several runs after “Saturday Night Live,” the show that made him a star. Episodes of Kevin Hart’s Peacock talk show “Hart to Heart,” have show up on the celebrity-focused cable network E!

Bravo aired the first season of the Peacock reality competition “Traitors” ahead of the streaming debut of its second batch. It was an easy fit, Berwick noted, as several of the players on the program come from the Bravo slate of reality shows such as “Below Deck.”

“We’ll do it where it makes sense and we have the right content,” Berwick said.

Most streaming shows making it to linear TV are staying under the same corporate umbrella. But it may be only a matter of time before networks regularly provide a second window for original shows created for platforms that they do not own. It’s already happening.

Fox recently cut a deal with Amazon’s Prime Video to get a broadcast run of the game show “The 1% Club” a week after episodes make their streaming debut. The CW is currently airing the Canadian sitcom “Children Ruin Everything,” which was created for the Roku Channel.

Similar deals and experiments are probably ahead in the effort to get programs in front of enough viewers to build them into profitable assets.

“We’re going to see a lot of creativity,” Berwick said. “Good content is good content.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Mary Ann Anderson | Tribune News Service

AUGUSTA, Ga.—Ever since Bobby Jones organized the first Masters at Augusta National in 1934, the international tournament has become the holy grail of every golfer hankering to play on its hallowed links or at least snag a coveted ticket to walk the 18-hole course alongside the greats of the sport: Woods, Mickelson, Scheffler, McIlroy and Fowler.

Georgia’s gift to the golfing universe is the Masters, and the Masters certainly helped put Augusta on the map. Well, that and perhaps a few famous folks from this city of 202,000, including the great rhythm and blues master and Godfather of Soul James Brown, singer and songwriter Amy Grant, Metropolitan Opera soprano Jessye Norman, actor Laurence Fishburne, wrestling star Hulk Hogan, and Danielle Brooks, the Oscar nominee for her performance in the movie remake of “The Color Purple.”

With Masters week approaching — it takes place April 8-14 — it’s good to know there’s more to Augusta than golf and a celebrity or two.

Among the fun facts about the Garden City, as Augusta is known because of its profusion of private gardens and dazzling spring flowers, is that it was named after Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales, a title now held by Prince William. The princess was the mother of King George III, and James Oglethorpe, who established Georgia in 1736, attempted to win royal favor with the crown, so he named the former trading post after her.

The skyline of downtown Augusta reflects in the Savannah River, the dividing line with North Augusta, South Carolina. Augusta was founded in 1736 and named for Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales. (Destination Augusta/TNS)

Augusta was also the second capital of Georgia, sharing that honor with Savannah, Louisville, Milledgeville and Atlanta, the now permanent home of state government. The Medical College of Georgia, the state’s first medical school, is in the Garden City, and although it has changed names several times over the past few years, it is now and will always be affectionately known to Georgians simply as MCG.

While it may not be politically correct to write of such things, at least 10 Confederate generals, including Maj. Gen. Joe Wheeler and Lt. Gen. James Augustus Longstreet, were either born, once lived in or are interred in Augusta. To top that, two of the three Georgians who signed the Declaration of Independence, George Walton and Lyman Hall, are buried downtown on Greene Street. The third, Button Gwinnett, is buried in Savannah.

A statue in downtown Augusta honors Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia and named Augusta after Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg and wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales. (Mary Ann Anderson/TNS)

Quick hits: The Augusta Chronicle, first published in 1785, is not only the oldest newspaper in Georgia, but also in the South. Actress Jayne Mansfield lived in Augusta, as her husband Lt. Paul Mansfield, was stationed at Camp Gordon, later to become Fort Gordon. North Augusta is not in Georgia but over the Savannah River in South Carolina. And golfer Larry Mize is the only Augustan to ever win the Masters.

The Georgia-born Ty Cobb, the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, kickstarted his professional career in 1904, playing for the Augusta Tourists of the South Atlantic League. While he played for Detroit in 1905, he maintained his home in Augusta until 1932. His first wife, Charlotte “Charlie” Lombard was from Augusta, and four of their five children were born here.

Other high-flying tidbits about the city add to its singular character, including that brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright created one of the first commercial flight schools near what is now Daniel Field, one of Augusta’s two airports and where most golfers park their jets while they’re playing Amen Corner at Augusta National. Peter Carnes, who launched the first hot-air balloon flight in America in 1784 in Philadelphia, lived in and flew hot-air balloons in Augusta.

That’s enough trivia to whet your appetite to visit Augusta, either during the Masters or any time of the year. But once you get here, you need to know where to eat and stay as you uncover more minutiae of the marvelous city.

Eats and drinks, Augusta-style

Augusta is all about food, and its restaurants offer everything Southern from grits and gravy to pecan pie to soul food shacks to fine dining. Try Finch and Fifth for brunch, lunch, dinner and happy hour for fabulous charcuterie and Georgia specialties such as boiled peanuts, Vidalia onion dip or shrimp and grits. For unique dishes of fried pickled okra (you read that correctly), smoked chopped brisket or chili garlic shrimp, then reservations-required Noble Jones, known locally as NoJo, should be on your radar screen.

Frog Hollow Tavern, touted as a “modern restaurant meets bar,” is downtown on Broad Street and is the place to try regionally grown ingredients that make up dishes that include buttermilk-fried quail or braised Berkshire pork shoulder with collards and mac-and-cheese. Laziza Mediterranean Grill offers an international menu of Mediterranean-inspired goodies of gyros, kebabs and yummy baklava.

For dining and libations with a view, try Edgar’s Above Broad, a snazzy rooftop restaurant in downtown for breakfast, lunch or dinner, for Southern palate showstoppers of deviled eggs, pimento cheese dip, blue crab dip and pulled pork nachos.

Beck’s on King’s Way in the heart of Augusta is known for its seafood, including oysters raw and baked with ingredients of jalapeno, Parmesan and Asiago cheeses, and herb butter. You can also get Scottish salmon, blackened grouper or a shrimp burger, all with the perfect side of pimento-cheese hush puppies.

Both Augustans and visitors enjoy the sumptuous breakfasts at the Brunch House of Augusta, from biscuits and gravy to full platters. Augusta is known for its restaurants featuring Southern food. (Destination Augusta/TNS)

That first meal of the day is important, so try starting it out at Brunch House of Augusta for biscuits smothered in pork or turkey sausage gravy, chicken and waffles, or the Garden City breakfast bowl with an omelet over stone-ground grits. Lunch at Brunch House is salads, burger and pasta, but French toast stuffed with Dutch apples, strawberries or blueberries is also on the menu.

Stays, Augusta-style

Old is the new cool in Augusta, and you have a choice of historic hotels and inns to lay your head at night. The original setting of the iconic Partridge Inn Augusta, managed by Curio Collection by Hilton, is an 1836 home that has been carefully restored and remains intact inside the inn. For the past 100 years or so, it’s been a hotel that has seen the likes of presidents, luminaries of every sort and, of course, Masters golfers. Set high atop the gently sloping, verdant hills of the Summerville neighborhood, the hotel also houses the 8595 Restaurant and Bar with its Southern cuisine and that is known for its “Best of Augusta” lavish brunch on Sundays.

The Partridge Inn is one of Augusta’s most historic buildings. Serving as a hotel for more than a hundred years, it was first built in 1836 as a private home. (Destination Augusta/TNS)

The Olde Town Inn, in Georgia’s oldest neighborhood of Olde Town, has only five rooms, each one decorated in period furnishings and each with a full bath and fireplace. Brimming with charm and character, the inn was built in 1896. One of Augusta’s best kept secrets is that the Fox’s Lair, a cozy underground bar, is downstairs in the basement and features live music.

Another small bed-and-breakfast is the Queen Anne Inn, a Victorian-style home built in 1894. With its wide porch, balconies and soaring chimney and turret, it’s a quiet place to step back in time and unwind. The downtown inn is close to restaurants, museums and attractions, so park the car and put on your walking shoes.

If a historic inn isn’t quite for you, nearly every chain hotel is located either in or near Augusta, among them the Augusta Marriott, the Hyatt House Downtown Augusta and Crowne Plaza North Augusta.

Now that you’re armed with a basic blueprint of Augusta’s history, legend and lore, and whether you’re moseying on down, over or up to Augusta to either play or just watch the Masters, know that April is a wonderful time of the year to visit, as the city practically glows with billions of azalea, dogwood and magnolia blossoms as Georgia spectacularly welcomes spring. Much like the Masters, nature is another of Georgia’s gifts to the universe and is best experienced firsthand.

Downtown Augusta is always busy and bustling. The city of about 202,000 is Georgia’s second-oldest city and once served as the state capital. (Destination Augusta/TNS)

If you go

Plan your trip to Augusta by visiting Augusta Convention and Visitors Bureau at www.visitaugusta.com or calling (706) 724-4067.

Visit the Masters Tournament at www.masters.com.

Augusta Regional Airport is served by two major carriers, Delta Air Lines (www.delta.com or (800) 221-1212), with flights to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and American Airlines (www.aa.com or (800) 433-7300), with flights to Charlotte, Washington-Reagan and Dallas Fort-Worth.

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©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.