Home court is a fortress. It always should be. It needs to be. Opponents have looked at Target Center like it was a hunting ground in the past, licking their lips at the thought of an easy kill and a quick dinner. Now it’s a fortress. The walls are thick. The archers line the ramparts. Spearmen dwell on the battlements awaiting the next intruder. You can try to enter, you can try to invade, you can pretend like this is still a place to corner your prey, but you’ll be pushed back and struck down.
That’s what home court should be. Finally, that’s what home court is.
The game ends 112-99. Welcome to Target Center. It doesn’t matter if Joel Embiid is sitting out, it doesn’t matter if the Philadelphia 76ers are on the wrong end of a back-to-back. All Minnesota needs to do is keep mangling whatever is placed in front of them. The standings don’t have asterisks next to them, they only care about what the final scoreboard says. Minnesota keeps being on the right side of the scoreboard and that’s all anybody should be concerned about.
This one vacillated through outcomes and emotions for a little while, but it always felt like the good guys were going to leave how good guys should. Chiseled jaw and unscathed. Minnesota pounced the shorthanded Sixers early, bounding in transition and stifling Philly’s offense to find themselves 19 points ahead within the first frame. It was all action. Like John Wick if he played for the best basketball team on the fucking planet.
Then, as tends to be the case in this league, the Sixers adjusted. They strangled the life out of the game. As if it were a soccer match, they parked the bus and forced Minnesota to slink through their web. Quickly, they had whittled that lead down to three and the sphincter-tightening Wolves seemed to reappear.
This isn’t that same team, though. It’s a mantra that needs to be chanted from the rooftops. The past traumas shouldn’t infect our minds. This squad will cleanse us. They keep showing us every night that they will cleanse us.
So, when the demons threatened to cackle, the Wolves silenced the devilish howls as quickly as the sounds could escape them. They executed their halfcourt actions out of the halftime break and supplemented it with a brand of defense that will never get tiresome. They’re an angry swarm of bees, closing out on shooters, building a blockade at the rim, and demanding that only the spectacular will pierce their armor.
The Sixers didn’t have the spectacular. Not without their fearless flopper. They wilted under Minnesota’s thousand-yard stare. They were enchanted by Minnesota’s snarling musk. They were eliminated by the same Target Center curse that each combatant has fallen to before them.
Mike Conley: 8/10
He was supposed to be the weak link defensively. Old legs, they said. Lost a step. Isn’t what he used to be. Fuck that, he’s still a menace. He isn’t just escaping Father Time’s clutch, he’s actively beating the shit out him.
With well over a thousand games in the league ping-ponging around his scholarly mind, he’s well and truly a defensive contributor. He reads the game with such perfection. He thinks the game with such precision. The Timberwolves are the most fearsome defense around and he’s their most underappreciated fang.
They don’t need him to be a scorer, so he spends his nights doing as he did in this one. He chases shooters off screens, he closes out with an enriching amount of technique, and when he is asked to guard the ball he does it with aplomb.
Of course he can still knock down triples. He fucking buries them given half a sniff. Of course he can still run the offense. It’s at its tranquil best when he is behind the wheel. But in this game, his defense stood out. Again.
Finished with 5 points (50% TS), 8 assists and 3 steals in 23 minutes — +15.7 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 10/10
For much of this night, the Timberwolves went as he went. Luckily he went straight to the fucking moon and the whole crew fit in his spacesuit. When his devastating best is mingling with Minnesota’s defense, this team is as stout as they come.
His first period was electric. It’s paramount to begin should-win games like this on the front foot and he was the one who put them there. He had 11 next to his name in the blink of an eye and they were coming in a wonderful assortment of ways; catch-and-shoot triples, burrowing drives, free throws and mid-range sauces.
So it was no surprise that things derailed when he went to the bench for the beginning of the second quarter. And even less surprising when he reentered the game and punched the Sixers in the throat again. Not just with his scoring, but with his defense. He draped himself over ball-handlers, he shoved his way through screens, and he forced his team to follow him.
Another boomlet in the third meant he didn’t even need to score in the final period. Let the rest of the pack eat. He’s the alpha. He’s the one who tears the carcass apart first. Nom nom nom.
Finished with 31 points (65.2% TS), 6 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 steals in 36 minutes — +25.3 net rating.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 10/10
It’d be easy to mistake Tyrese Maxey for a garden variety guard if this was your first time watching him. He’s not. He’s an explosive bucket-getter who has the capability to rip any game away from any opponent and he’s been doing so consistently all season long.
Until he rumbled with our wiry hellhound. You could almost see the drool cascading from his mouth at the thought of facing such an in-form scoring freak. Now, it’s 16 points on 19 shots and a big fat fucking goose egg in the scoring column for the entire fourth frame. That’s what he does.
I’m currently enamored by Alexander-Walker. He spends all night picking up full court, chasing around the best scorer on the floor, poking at the ball and slipping through screens. And yet, on the rare instance that he makes a defensive mistake, he admonishes himself like a madman. At one point, he was smacking his head for losing his man. Psycho shit. The exact type of shit every team needs.
It’s worth mentioning how well he is moonlighting as a backup point guard in the minutes that Mike Conley sits, too.
It’s not his natural role and, at times, that much is obvious. He may not be a tried and true point guard, but he is an organizer. The team maneuver through fantastic sets when he is controlling them because he is constantly pointing and barking and moving his chess pieces around. He’s not an intrinsically gifted playmaker, but he has an innate understanding of the right play.
I’m just enamored with him.
Finished with 7 points (58.3% TS), 6 rebounds and 4 assists in 33 minutes — +39.0 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 9/10
Really really really important in the second quarter. That was when the whips starting cracking at their loudest. If Minnesota were going to slip on this banana skin and snap all of the bones they’d worked so hard to strengthen, it was going to be during that second quarter.
The team as a whole made just seven shots in that quarter. Towns made three of them to go along with three free throw makes. Philadelphia chose a particularly cohesive zone defense as an attempt to superglue Minnesota’s halfcourt offense and it mostly worked, but Towns kept getting into the middle of it, making the right decision, and scrounging out buckets.
It’s not like he was bad in the rest of his minutes. He’s on a heater right now and even his middling games are turning out to be fantastic. He kept making shots, kept finishing through contact, and kept playing under control. He continued playing the part of the event-creator defensively, despite being a step slower than he has been of late. Again, it wasn’t his best, but it was more than enough.
In many ways he’s the linchpin for this whole thing. Right now, he’s holding it all together masterfully.
Finished with 23 points (54.2% TS), 11 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 steals and 2 blocks in 36 minutes — +23.2 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 10/10
We all need to send this man a fucking care package for Thanksgiving. We tore shreds off him. And he deserved it. We wanted to throttle those who moved heaven and earth to procure him. They might have deserved it back then, too. We raged into the void and we screamed into the abyss. And all of it felt justified.
Now all of it seems trivial. He’s fucking unreal. This league is tilted so heavily toward high-scoring bonanzas and Rudy Gobert just stands in the middle of Minnesota’s paint laughing at it all. The Indiana Pacers scored 157 points in regulation a few nights back. Hahahaha. Fuck that we have Rudy Gobert. He’s fucking massive and you can’t score against him.
This game was probably his best offensively all season, too. He finished at the cup in a bunch of different ways — which is rare — and his touch pass to Kyle Anderson was a level of spice that is often unseen in his bland offensive game.
He commanded both ends. Merci beaucoup.
Finished with 13 points (73.2% TS), 11 rebounds, 3 assists and 3 blocks in 31 minutes — +5.3 net rating.
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