Player Ratings: Game 15 | Sacramento Kings
Wolves lose on the home court for the first time this season.
Sometimes it all goes wrong and there’s nothing a team can do to stop it. Sometimes, it all goes wrong and the team on the wrong end of the horror-show contributes to their own downfall. This night felt like a little bit of both.
Lady Luck whirled her mace and crippled the Minnesota Timberwolves every time she had a chance, but the Wolves were the architects of their own demise every time they could be, too. Nights like this happen. They’re a foregone conclusion. Even then, they still feel like evil tendrils creeping into the vision of the joy that this season has given us so far.
The game ends 124-111. The first home loss of the season and it kind of felt like it would be the case from the opening tip. The Sacramento Kings play a frenetic brand of basketball, they exist for the chaos, but they’re calm in the eye of the storm when it rages around them. Minnesota loves control. They love the filth. They want to drown their opponents in the murky waters of defense. Something was always going to give and it was Minnesota’s defense that shattered first.
It was the movement and the long-range shooting that started the rot for the Wolves. The Kings were cannoning off screens, hammering their handoff actions, and making every single thing that they launched in that first half. It was the first time all season that Minnesota looked too big and cumbersome to cope. At one point, the lead was above 20 in the first half and it felt like a blowout was brewing.
One thing that needs to be said about this Wolves team is they are devoid of panic. They fought back with a viper-strike run to bring Target Center to life and make this one a worthwhile watch, but they could never land that last hammer-blow. At one point, the lead dwindled to just two points, but whenever they needed to make the right play, they launched a bad shot, turned it over, or felt the keen sting of a poorly officiated game (on both ends).
In the second half, Sacramento inverted their scheme and sucked the pace out of the game. They destroyed Minnesota’s defense with shrewd and meandering halfcourt sets and smashed them apart on the offensive glass. This was a mesmerizing game of chess and Sacramento had the counter for every move Minnesota made. The Wolves never stopped clawing at Sacramento’s heels, but it wasn’t nearly threatening enough.
Sometimes it all goes wrong.
Mike Conley: 5/10
It’s always easy to feel the control being lost from Minnesota’s offense when he isn’t at his best. He regulates things. He’s the regulator. So, when he is a little wayward or just fading into the background too often, it’s an anvil plonking on top of the offense. In that first half, especially, it was hard to escape that.
That shakiness extended to the defensive end, too. He’s been so fantastic on that end, but Sacramento’s cocaine offense had him looking like his legs were fucking painted on far too often. Whether it was at the point of attack or as a chaser, he couldn’t stay with his man despite his sage know-how of where to be and when to be there. The speed was awe-inducing and he was left in its wake.
He did settle into somewhat of a groove in the second half, but he was never a difference-maker on either side of the ball. He looked every part the old man in this one, which is a rarity.
Finished with 6 points (50% TS), 3 rebounds and 9 assists in 30 minutes — -16.4 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 8/10
He slid wildly through the spectrum in this one. It’s hard to pinpoint a rating for him because he was at his marvelous best for a lot of his minutes but he also had some brutal stretches when the game was still hanging in the balance. They’re not close at any point without his fantastical displays of basketball brilliance, though, and only a fool would deny how special he was for large swathes of the night.
The good was really good. The good was fucking insane. He was a pit bull with the ball in his hands in that first half, digging his way to the rim over and over again while finishing through contact and getting to the line for a career-high 18 free throw attempts. He tried to dunk the whole fucking building into dust at least three different times, too. It was an electric display of pace and power and want-to.
The bad was painful, however. After his success as a driver in the first half, he settled for too many long-looks in the third period as Minnesota’s offense stalled out and Sacramento built their lead back up. He’s a home run hitter, and sometimes those swings don’t connect, but he seemed to have Sacramento’s defense figured out and it was a puzzling deviation to start shooting jumper after jumper.
A strange night. Overall, it was a good night. In many ways it was a great night. But it had strange elements that kept it from being a perfect one.
Finished with 35 points (60.5% TS), 7 rebounds, 5 assists, 2 steals and 2 blocks in 40 minutes — +4.6 net rating.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 4/10
He’d been on a tear as a two-way menace of late, but DeAaron Fox promptly shut that shit down. The Kings were on a string offensively and it was Alexander-Walker’s man who was tugging on the marionettes. This game was screaming for Jaden McDaniels’ length, ability to eat up space, and offensive punch. Wailing for it. Alexander-Walker just didn’t provide any of it.
Fox is fast. Like a fucking blur. Dizzyingly quick. In most matchups, it’s NAW’s speed that gives him the edge, but he looked like he was jogging in treacle trying to stop Sacramento’s roadrunner. When he couldn’t make his open looks on offense, Chris Finch decided to give his minutes to Troy Brown Jr. for the final period.
He will need to be better, especially with a slew of tough matchups on the horizon and no sign of McDaniels’ return.
Finished with 6 points (58.3% TS), 2 assists and 2 steals in 22 minutes — -23.4 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 8/10
He kind of mirrored Edwards’ spotty impact, albeit in very different ways.
He was crucial in the second-frame comeback, bursting through Sacramento’s porous defense for strong finishes at the rim while mixing in a 3-pointer here and there. They couldn’t really guard him all night. Sabonis is soft as butter in the fucking microwave, Harrison Barnes is too small, and Trey Lyles couldn’t guard my grandma.
However, Towns’ longstanding foibles were evident in this one, too. While Barnes couldn’t guard him, Towns obliged on the other end; he got scorched by the roving four-man for much of the night. The Kings made a point of making Towns chase shooters and he looked slow-footed and ungainly trying to maneuver around screens on the run. He’s been such a rock defensively all season, but this was a bad matchup for him and it looked really ugly at times.
He also needs to shoot more triples. Just shoot the fucking things. Nobody will care if they miss. Just shoot the fucking things. If you’re open, launch that bitch. He made four of his five attempts and still turned down at least five open looks.
It’s not the reason they lost, but this one could have been a lot more interesting had he decided to pull the trigger more often. This Wolves team doesn’t shoot enough from deep, they can’t have Towns adding to that problem.
Like Edwards, his good outweighed his bad, but he could have squeezed more juice from his evening.
Finished with 27 points (78.5% TS), 11 rebounds and 4 assists in 38 minutes — -7.0 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 6/10
He kind of lingered in the periphery of the night. Always there but never really entering the foreground. For someone who has lived at the center of everything wonderful about the Wolves this season, a slippage back to relative ineffectiveness was jarring.
Unusually so, he was poor defensively. When Sacramento tried to test him at the rim he was his normal, enormous, menacing self; he blocked shots, he altered them, and he scared the Kings into not shooting them. However, when he was asked to tilt away from his comfort zone (something he’s done so well this season), he was awful. I hope he likes the look of Fox’s jumper. I hope he enjoys his form. Because he watched the bastard unfold over and over again as he sat in deep drop coverage unable to get a sufficient contest up.
When the shots did miss, he wasn’t rebounding outside of his area and he was a factor in Sacramento burying the Wolves on the offensive glass. It’s usually his offensive game that brings down his overall efficacy, but he actually played a fairly clean game on that end. The areas where he generally butters his bread became moldy and stale in this one.
Finished with 12 points (67.6% TS), 11 rebounds and 2 blocks in 36 minutes — +5.6 net rating.
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