"The last time the Timberwolves played the two-time defending NBA champion Lakers, they remained a team searching for its identity and the player it could rely upon with the game in doubt.

That was an entire 10 days ago in Los Angeles.

The teams meet again Friday night at Target Center. This time, the Wolves arrive now better understanding they are a team defined as much by Michael Beasley's rediscovered swagger as Kevin Love's old-school fundamentals.

Love has been everywhere on national radio talk shows, podcasts, you name it since he delivered 23 points and 24 rebounds in Los Angeles and that historic 31-31 game against New York three days later.

Beasley is the guy in whose hands Wolves coach Kurt Rambis now places both the basketball and his trust when it matters most, such as Wednesday's game against the Clippers, which was decided on Beasley's winning shot with 2.3 seconds left.

He has averaged 32.6 points a game -- the most prolific five-game stretch in team history next only to Kevin Garnett's 34.4 average in 2000 -- since he and Jonny Flynn ordered room service at a Sacramento hotel nine days ago.

"We were talking about AAU ball, high school, about how it used to be," Beasley said. "It was a long conversation and then there was an awkward moment for like three seconds and he just came out and said, 'Man, you got to be that Mike Beasley that I remember growing up.' "

That Mike Beasley was the consensus No. 1 prospect in a 2007 high-school recruiting class that included such names as Derrick Rose, Blake Griffin, Eric Gordon, O.J. Mayo and two guys named Flynn and Love.

This Mike Beasley his Timberwolves teammates saw in the season's opening weeks was a former No. 2 overall pick in the 2008 draft whom the Heat only two years later traded away for a pair of second-round picks.

Somewhere in these past 10 days, this Mike Beasley has found that one, and both guys attribute the coming together to that pregame meal with Flynn."