Wolves lose 34-pt lead, clip Hawks

ATLANTA – Andrew Wiggins was hoping he wouldn’t lose his shooting touch as the Atlanta Hawks kept pushing to wipe out a huge deficit.

“I was feeling it,” he said. “My shot was falling. My teammates kept encouraging me, giving me the ball.”

Wiggins tied a career high with 33 points, Karl-Anthony Towns added 17 and the Minnesota Timberwolves blew a 34-point lead before snapping the Hawks’ seven-game winning streak with a 117-107 victory on Monday night.

Atlanta never led until Paul Millsap’s runner with 3:26 remaining made it 107-106, but Wiggins scored the next seven points to prevent one of the biggest collapses in NBA history.

“Any team down is going to come back fighting,” Wiggins said. “We knew that.”

Minnesota led 72-42 at halftime. The largest halftime deficit overcome to win was 34 points by Utah against Denver on Nov. 27, 1996, according to research by STATS dating to the 1951-52 season.

In Oakland, Stephen Curry struggled with his shots but Golden State barely missed a beat while extending its unbeaten streak, beating Detroit, 109-95, to remain the league’s only undefeated team at 8-0.

With Curry suffering through his worst offensive night of the season, the Warriors got a big boost from their bench to pick up the slack, much like they did last season when they captured their first NBA title in 40 years.

Andre Iguodala and Leandro Barbosa combined for 23 points off the bench and the Warriors used a big run early in the fourth quarter to pull away and beat the Pistons.

“Our second unit is, we feel, the best in the NBA,” Warriors interim coach Luke Walton said. “We’ve got veterans on that unit that know how to win. When they give us that type of performance it just makes us that much more dangerous.”

Curry, who finished with 22 points, missed five of his first seven shots and finished 7 of 18 from the floor while being held under 30 points for only the third time this season. The reigning MVP also had five assists and five rebounds.

It hardly mattered, even though Detroit kept things close.

The Warriors led by as much as 17 but had trouble shaking the pesky Pistons. Detroit, which rallied from 13 points down in the fourth quarter to beat Portland a night earlier, cut the gap to 80-76 heading into the final 12 minutes.

The Los Angeles Clippers, meanwhile, outlasted the Memphis Grizzlies, 94-92, to get back on track.

In other results, Indiana trampled Orlando, 94-84; Chicago clobbered Philadelphia, 111-88; Denver thwarted Portland, 108-104; and San Antonio crushed Sacramento, 106-88.

Back in Atlanta, Jeff Teague finished with 24 points and Millsap had 22 for the Hawks.

The Timberwolves avoided what would have been the franchise’s biggest blown lead in a loss. They led by 29 before falling to Dallas on Dec. 30, 2008.

“We kept coming in the huddle and saying that we’re going to win this game,” Towns said. “We had all the confidence in the world that we would get it together.”

It marked the first time in Wiggins’ two-year career that he’s had consecutive 30-point games. His 3-pointer early in the third made it 81-47.

Minnesota took its first 20-point lead midway through the second and went up 30 on Zach LaVine’s 3-pointer in the last minute of the period.

Atlanta was outrebounded 22-11 and had no offensive boards in the first half.

“I think to fight back from that kind of deficit shows the resiliency and character of the group,” Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer said. “(There were) a lot of positives from how that group fought.”