Player Ratings: Game 17 | Oklahoma City Thunder
Wolves win a barnburner in a one against two matchup.
Things are always going to go awry. This league is too tough, it’s too talented, it’s too loaded with innovation to have anything the easy way for long. Things are always going to go awry. It’s about swallowing up that adversity, embracing it, harnessing it, and using it as fuel and metamorphosizing it into something worth reveling in. Things are always going to go awry, but how a team responds to it reveals what their strands of collective DNA are made up of.
The game ends 106-103. This Minnesota Timberwolves team might just have all of it. All of the joy and all of the heart and all of that intangible wonder that makes for special viewing. There’s a scent of something sumptuously aromatic in the air right now. The tang of something this downtrodden franchise has only wistfully dreamt of. It’s too early to put a finger on exactly what it is, but there’s no denying how it feels. It’s a warm hug, an embrace we’ve been craving.
Missing Jaden McDaniels was already going to be a weak spot in their armor. A night of puzzling decisions from a doltish officiating crew left them fighting a war without their burnished weaponry. When Anthony Edwards thudded to the floor and couldn’t return, they were battling their mail-clad and sword-wielding enemies with nothing but their resolve to defend them.
Somehow, it was enough. It’s fair to say this wasn’t the quintessential 48-minute performance, but things are always going to go awry. Always.
The Oklahoma City Thunder jumped Minnesota early on and kept holding them off for the entire first half, carving up Minnesota’s vaunted defense and showing their own defensive chops on the other end of the floor. The Thunder possess a gaggle of two-way weapons and they twisted Minnesota up throughout the entire half.
Then, as it often has this season, the latch slipped into place and Minnesota’s defense locked it down. They mixed some zone into their defensive diet, which junked up OKC’s humming offense, and they were a beat quicker on their rotations and a whole lot tougher with their bodywork and their rim protection. That allowed their sluggish offense to quicken and flourish, it brought the Target Center crowd into it, and it shifted momentum back their way.
Then it was a dogfight. The Timberwolves fucking love a dogfight. They want every moment of every game to be a dogfight. As soon as the game devolved into that grind-it-out nature, the high ground had been taken from OKC. The back-and-forth final frame ended with a flurry of clutch buckets from the Wolves and a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander heave clanking off the side of the cylinder as time expired.
Things are always going to go awry. Great teams overcome it.
Mike Conley: 7/10
Had a bizarre evening. On the surface, he missed a fuckload of shots, that includes looks he’d usually make while OKC were humming early and important ones that swirled around the circle and popped out in the closing minutes. He’s an ultra-efficient scorer by nature, so it was odd to see him so icy cold from the field.
But Mike Conley doesn’t operate only on the surface. His game worms its way into the arteries of everything they touch. He’s one of the few point guards around these days who can suffer such a poor shooting night and still walk away with the team’s highest plus/minus (+17).
Because he loves the old school point guard shit. It runs through his veins. He sets the table expertly all night, but particularly in the shorthanded fourth quarter when the team was craving offensive stability. He also defends. Like a little bulldog. Bite bite. Always making the right decision, acting as the tip of the spear in the zone, and consistently being in the right spots.
A bizarre evening, but a good enough one in spite of the shooting woes.
Finished with 9 points (32.1% TS) and 8 assists in 37 minutes — +21.8 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 8/10
A nasty fall and a worrying exit is the headline of his night and for good reason. Chris Finch called it a hip contusion and that’s probably the best case scenario when he drops from the sky and wallops onto his side. He might need a few nights to recuperate, but it does seem, for now, that he’s avoided any serious damage. You can exhale your bated breath now.
He deserves some legitimate plaudits for how this win transpired, however. His team were zombified slop in the first half and he took a jackhammer to their senses to open the third term. Like a jolt of fucking lightning sent down from Thor himself. He starts torpedoing to the rim, forcing the defense back, and then he uses that to exploit them from long-range.
For that sliver of time, he was the offense. He was the jolt. A quickfire injection of life into the evening. He ignited the crowd and pumped belief into the psyche of his team. So, even when he crashed out of proceedings, his squad was in the right mind state to finish what he started.
Let’s hope we see him again soon.
Finished with 21 points (56.3% TS) and 5 rebounds in 34 minutes — -3.3 net rating.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 4/10
Had a tough night. The memories of his barnstorming breakout in last season’s play-in tourney mauling of the Thunder are still fresh enough in the memory to know what he can do to his cousin Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, but the tables were turned for the majority of this game.
Instead of locking Gilgeous-Alexander up again, he was pissing in the wind for much of the night. He didn’t make a whole heap of defensive mistakes, but he was still puppy chow for the versatile scoring star. Whether he contested SGA’s shots or not, they were mostly going in. He never gave up, though, never surrendered. He gave a much better account of himself in the second half and helped douse the inferno that threatened to engulf the entire Wolves team.
Unfortunately, he remains a streaky proposition offensively. It felt like all of his six 3-point misses were wide-open and missing those shots can quickly become burdensome to the offense. He’s not a threat from inside the arc and he didn’t have his playmaking kicks on, either.
He needs to be more consistent offensively, but it’s nice to have a defensive samurai on the floor, even when it’s his own family stomping on his team’s throat.
Finished with 3 points (21.4% TS) and 2 rebounds in 26 minutes — -7.0 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 3/10
He’s always liable to drop a stinker in a game that is encircled with hype and implications. It’s an unfortunate truth. This game, albeit early in the season, classifies as an important one and in such games he’s often reminiscent of a kid on sugar high, zooming the fuck around without any wherewithal or notion for what he’s doing.
From the opening tip, you could feel the tentacles of his big-game foibles wrapping around the night. He was wildly driving into traffic, turning the ball over in silly fashion, and even the rare open looks were quickly turning into bricks. As if to thrust insult on top of injury, he was a slow-footed mess on defense for that entire first-half cataclysm.
To his credit, he composed himself enough to make a pair of clutch free throws as time wound down, but he finished the night with another blotch on his resumé in games like this. Eight shots (without Edwards for a long stint), six turnovers, four fouls, and a heavy helping of complaining. That’s a story we’re all too accustomed to.
Finished with 13 points (56.3% TS), 10 rebounds and 3 assists in 32 minutes — +15.8 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 10/10
It’s like someone stuck a firecracker up his ass and lit the fucking fuse. Chet Holmgren is lathered in hype right now, and for good reason, but you don’t get to come into Gobert’s house and rifle through his belongings. Welcome to the league, young fella, this is the best defender on the planet you’re standing next to.
Make no mistake, that’s not hyperbole. He’s like a fucking roving tank. An all-encompassing defensive jackal. He was energetic and bruising in the first half, but his second half performance was the kind of shit that wins you big shiny things at season’s end. He stood in the middle of Minnesota’s defense and just demanded a win.
He rotated everywhere, shutting down driving lanes and then recovering back to the rim where he forced Oklahoma City to beat him. They didn’t. They couldn’t. Nobody can.
On the other end, he finished lobs and bunnies at the rim, he babied OKC’s slender lineup on the glass, he made big free throws when they tried to steal a possession from the hack-a-Rudy ploy, and he made them feel him on every screen.
This was exceptional. We’re saying that a lot about him this season.
Finished with 17 points (67.2% TS), 16 rebounds and 4 blocks in 36 minutes — -2.7 net rating.
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