BOSTON – The Boston Celtics came out of the cold Friday night at TD Garden and warmed up enough to win their fifth consecutive game and their 32nd already this season, 91-84 over the Timberwolves.
The Wolves hadn't lost consecutive games since before Thanksgiving, when they lost in back-to-back nights to Detroit at home one night and at Charlotte the next night.
On Friday, they followed Wednesday's 98-97 loss at Brooklyn by allowing the Celtics a second-quarter comeback from seven points behind.
"Nobody wants to lose, especially not two in a row, let alone three or four in a row," the Wolves' Jimmy Butler said. "But you come in here and that's a really really really good team on their floor. You have to play damn near perfect basketball in order to get a win against that team, on the road, in here. And I don't think we did that. They were phenomenal on both ends of the floor."
Friday's game went on after the NHL's Bruins game Thursday night at TD Garden was canceled after a Eastern seaboard snowstorm dumped more than a foot of snow over parts of the area and caused coastal flooding.
Trailing by seven points midway through the second quarter, the Celtics flipped that deficit into an 85-73 lead with less than seven lead minutes left in the game.
The Celtics' comeback countered Wolves center Karl-Anthony Towns' fourth career 20-20 game. He delivered a double-double well before halftime and finished with 25 points and 23 rebounds.
Those 23 rebounds are a career high by one on a night when the Wolves couldn't keep Boston off the offensive backboards. Seventeen of the Celtics' 39 rebounds came on offense.
"I think we've made some good strides defensively," coach Tom Thibodeau said. "We just didn't finish our defense the way we would have liked. You can't give a team like that two and three cracks at it in the fourth quarter. We did that."
The Wolves made just two of their first 11 shots, the Celtics one of their first seven in a sluggish first quarter. A notable exception was Towns, who began the game 5-for-8 from the field, 4-for-4 from the free throw line and he reached his league-leading 32nd double-double with four minutes remaining before halftime.
The Wolves trailed 41-38 at halftime and led by as many as seven points midway through the third quarter, after point guard Tyus Jones picked up his third foul of the night to end the first half and another early in the third quarter. He went to the bench after playing just 69 seconds to start the third quarter and was replaced by veteran Aaron Brooks.
The Wolves led 55-48 with 4:53 left in the third without Jones, but the Celtics finished the quarter with an 18-7 run, including nine of the quarter's final 11 points, and began the fourth up 66-62.
The Celtics arrived Friday for the first of two meetings between the teams this season with the Eastern Conference's best 31-10 record and a four-game winning streak that included Wednesday's home victory over rival Cleveland.
The Celtics won that one 102-88 after guard Terry Rozier scored 20 points off the bench and LeBron James had a modest 19-point, six-assist night. That kept the Celtics 2.5 games ahead of second-place Toronto and padded their lead over the third-place Cavs to 4.5 games.