I wanna dance with the Timberwolves. I wanna feel the heat with the Timberwolves.
The New York Knicks didn’t want to dance with the Timberwolves. The entire league is sick to death of feeling their heat, too. It’s suffocating. It’s scorching. It’s wearing opponents down and draining them of every last electrolyte in their listless remains. A night like this one is becoming the norm. A night where they butchered one of the league’s hottest teams and then picked the rotting flesh from their carcass. That’s becoming the norm.
First seed in the Western Conference. Still. And every inch of it is deserved.
The game ends 117-100. It wasn’t always pretty. Games against Tom Thibodeau and his company of creatures never are. The Timberwolves thrive in the muck, though. They exist in the trough. Wading through swampy nights is this team’s personality. Things are going to go wrong in every game — a gaggle of lopsided officials weren’t nearly as concerning as Jaden McDaniels’ early ankle injury — but that’s just another swamp to wade through.
And so it was. The two teams traded jabs for the entirety of the first half, with New York’s ravenous offensive rebounding and Minnesota’s usual bouts of sloppiness offensively keeping the visitors close. However, because the Wolves are a defensive assassin consistently brandishing their sharp blades, they only ever need a burst of efficiency on offense to pull away.
By the end of the third period, Minnesota’s two-point halftime lead had ballooned to 18. They mingled that all-encompassing defensive mastery with turnover-free, fast-paced, exulting offense and wrenched the game away from a Knicks team who looked every bit like a team on their last night of a long road trip.
And that was that. The game teetered minorly a couple of times as New York tried to stage a comeback, but it never felt threatening enough to panic about. They didn’t want to dance with the Timberwolves. They didn’t want to feel the heat with the Timberwolves.
Mike Conley: 7/10
He continues to look a little weary with his usual youthful floaters which is bringing down his overall efficiency as a scorer, but he still does so much good out there that it drowns the bad out. It grabs the bad by the back of the skull and forces the fucker to the ocean floor.
And it sets an example. When his less experienced teammates see Conley making the extra pass, it mutates and infects their own game. When they see all 36 years of him chasing over screens defensively or working to make the right rotation, they want to do it too. When they see the way he dovetails with Rudy Gobert, they start spying the big man and picking him out when he’s open.
At the end of the day, that’s what he’s here for. Throw in his usual handful of crispy corner triples at timely moments and you have the Mike Conley experience. Even when he isn’t at his very best, that experience is still one worth bathing in.
Finished with 11 points (55.7% TS) and 5 assists in 28 minutes — +35.0 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 8/10
The 48-minute bonanzas are still missing. He’s still seeking out the kind of earth-shattering, bone-jarring, dizziness-inducing heights he’s shown himself capable of. So, we’ll just have to settle for this. It almost feels ungrateful to deem it as settling, because this is still something we’d have murdered for in the past.
He struggled to find a rhythm early — those pick-and-roll traps continued and he’s having a hard time finding ways to splinter them — but he laid down plenty of good tape in that first half despite scoring just four points. He made extra passes and he made defense-fracturing ones, too. He competed defensively. He wasn’t omnipresent but he was a paragon of playing the right way.
When you sacrifice to the basketball gods like that, they reward you. They shower you in their celestial stardust. Thibs shifted the defense away from hounding him and he smashed the game to fucking smithereens in the third quarter. He started the period by getting to his mid-range moneymaker, then moved inward and hammered the paint with drives, finishes, and free throws. All the while acting as a vital cog in the defensive machine.
When things tightened up a tad in the final period, he bamboozled the defense with a nifty lay, knocked down a ridiculous pull-up trey, and then stole an inbound and dunked New York into a shallow grave.
If this is settling then I want to settle forever.
Finished with 23 points (50.5% TS), 10 rebounds, 5 assists and 2 steals in 39 minutes — +13.9 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 8/10
Contrary to what he was serving up at the beginning of the season, this felt like a middling evening. As was the case with Edwards, settling for a night like this almost feels greedy. Such is the impact. Such is the talent. Such is the growth. Such is life with this Timberwolves squad.
He was still a constant outlet offensively. He made a pair of triples, finished some befuddlingly tough looks around the rim, and continued his stretch of smart playmaking. It wasn’t as loud as it has been of late, but it was there and while it’s there the Wolves are a tough offense to stop.
More important was his defense. It feels foreign repeating that night after night but it remains true and it’s worth celebrating every single fucking time. Not only did he get a hand in every cookie jar and come away with a tasty treat consistently, he rotated perfectly when tasked with being the low-man and guarded the ball well when New York put him in actions.
Sure, his mental demons started whispering their satanic sweet nothings in his ear in the fourth quarter, but the game was done and the referees had him in their crosshairs. If there was ever a time to let the dwelling beast loose, that was the time.
He was still excellent. We’ll settle for excellent.
Finished with 20 points (76.5% TS), 5 rebounds, 4 assists, 3 steals and 2 blocks in 36 minutes — +21.7 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 9/10
The game turned when he put his foot on its throat. He has the ability to do that and it’s becoming way more frequent that he just goes out there and does it.
A lot of the fun things happened before the game had turned, the running lob finishes and the thunderous dunks, but the third period was when all of his impactful idiosyncrasies started to unravel the Knicks. He dominated the defensive end in that fateful quarter. In every precise way. The rotations, the rim-deterrence, the blocked shots, the fear that he injected into every would-be scorer.
Offensively, he was the vacuum. A big beret-wearing fucking vacuum, sucking up offensive rebounds and spitting out second-chance points. He still can’t shoot free throws, especially in the fourth quarter of games, but he did his work when the night was in the balance and he was the biggest reason his team won.
Finished with 16 points (79.4% TS), 7 rebounds and 2 blocks in 26 minutes — +29.1 net rating.
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