Sometimes, you just need a little bit of Culture to get you over the line. You know the one. The hard-working, best conditioned, most professional, unselfish, toughest, meanest, nastiest Heat Wolves Culture. It doesn’t have that same cachet, but it’s quickly developing the same sort of suffocating synergy. It’s not just a catchy slogan, it’s a way of life. It’s a pocket of air worth breathing. It’s the allegory of the season.
The game ends 112-108. Something about this one felt a little different from the rest of them. Nothing easy ever sprouts from Miami’s own hardwood, especially when they’re fully healthy again. The Timberwolves have racked up wins in every different way possible thus far, but they hadn’t checked off an able-bodied semi-contender on the road. Consider the box checked. Consider the box smashed to fucking pieces.
Minnesota stumbled out of the gate — as has seemingly become the norm — and tricked us all into believing they would faceplant while the Heat strolled to the finish line. Maybe worse than any of their other slow starts of late, this one felt like a bridge too far. Miami was percolating in all areas offensively, and the Wolves were spoon-feeding their efficacy with swathes of careless turnovers and missed bunnies around the rim.
The Timberwolves don’t play possum, though. They play demonic underworld hellion. When they peel themselves from the canvas, they do so with fangs bared and hackles raised. They don’t fight back to in faux desperation to given the appearance of restoring some damaged pride, they fight back to rip the game away and stuff in their pocket.
Their vaunted defense found itself in the second half. Their rotations were sharp as a katana and they worked as one string pulling in one direction. They stopped handing easy points to Miami via their own offense, and all of a sudden the game was on Minnesota’s nasty, grimy, culture-laden terms.
When games devolve into defense-first games that require the offensive stardom to rise to the top, Minnesota wins. That’s just how it is now. The tides of the basketball landscape have shifted. The equilibrium of the league is no longer steady. There’s a new culture-setter in town. Welcome to the New Wolves Order.
Mike Conley: 10/10
Imagine having balls as big as he does. Imagine walking around with those big fucking Vegas spheres dangling from you. Carpet burn everywhere. Lower back aching like a motherfucker. It takes a special kind of basketball genius to carry them around.
Even when he is having a quiet night and the cookie just isn’t quite crumbling his way, you know he is going to do something that only someone with boulders between the legs can do. Just as momentum is teetering on a knife’s edge, he walks into two triples, calm as you like, and hurls it all into Minnesota’s favor.
He keeps doing it. Keeps making big shots. Keeps having his say in massive wins. Never let him retire.
Finished with 12 points (120% TS) and 6 assists in 33 minutes — +5.9 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 10/10
If Jimmy Butler throwing his toys out of the stroller and pre-planning post-practice interviews eventually led our way to him, then every second of it was a blessing in disguise. Hang each and every one of those third-stringers names in the rafters. Immortalize the scrubs. They mean more than they could ever know.
Because he’s the fucking duck’s nuts, you know. The cat’s fucking whiskers. Like Conley, it didn’t always go his way in this one — he had two distinct stretches of poor shot selection in the first and third frame — but he’s got this undefinable magnetism that sucks the bad away and leaves only the fragrant aromas of godliness.
It often felt like winning time was never going to come, but when it was thrust upon the Wolves he was there to welcome it. He scores 10 points within the final five minutes of the game; a couple of breakaway buckets, a scything cut for a hammer, a falling middy coming off a pindown, and the game-sealing turnaround fadeaway that channeled the pantheon of legends that came before him.
Thank you, third-stringers. Thank you, Jimmy, you big fucking baby.
Finished with 32 points (59.8% TS), 8 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals and 2 blocks in 40 minutes — +7.5 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 8/10
He’s not quite there yet. Not all the way back to the spidery defensive phenom that wraps his tarantula arms around scorers and suffocates them out of existence. You could see it in the first quarter when Tyler Herro was having his way with him.
He also remains a foul-magnet. Not a little one, like one of those big magnet fuckers in a fusion reactor or some shit. He gets them when he isn’t doing anything wrong, but he also gets them from doing dumb shit.
And yet, in between the rustiness and the whistles, the skeleton of his otherworldly impact was beginning to peek through again. His second half was what we’ve been missing for most of this season. The same Herro that scorched him in the first 24 couldn’t escape his clutches in the second iteration. He shimmied through every screen, contested every shot, and closed down every half-space — at least until he fouled out.
Tack a few important buckets next to his name in the opening period and you get something beginning to resemble his usual impact. This is the floor. The ceiling is to die for.
Finished with 10 points (50% TS), 5 rebounds, 2 assists and 3 blocks in 30 minutes — +1.6 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 9/10
This night epitomized his metamorphosis from maligned star to puzzle-piece perfection. The box score no longer determines the reverberations he echoes through a game. There is nothing in that pesky stat sheet to signify a night littered with winning plays and timely brilliance, but the stat sheet is for fucking nerds and he’s no longer a nerd.
He lives in the minutia now. The stuff that sails beyond any box score. The ability to slide his feet with Miami’s wings when his team decided to put the clamps on. The controlled screen-setting. The willingness to work within the offense’s flow with majesty.
Then, when the time comes, he stamps his name on the stat sheet. He babies Butler for a mid-range jumper late in the game, and then monsters him for an offensive board before rainbowing a feathery dime up to Rudy Gobert to keep Minnesota in the late-lead.
He’s become accustomed to living in the mud. Scraping the dirty bits from the game and weaving himself into them. While he still has all of his generational talent and frequently wields it, it’s those things that are helping his team win games night after night.
Finished with 18 points (58.7% TS), 8 rebounds and 2 assists in 32 minutes — +0.4 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 9/10
Honestly, for a large portion of the evening he fucking stunk. While his teammates were certainly radiating those stink lines alongside him in the first half, he was one of the worst perpetrators. When he wasn’t a step slow defensively, he was struggling to catch the ball or finish his dinner around the rim.
And, while he was certainly rising slowly in the third period, it was the fourth quarter where he kicked the door down and battered the hapless Heat. When the Timberwolves pull off clutch-time heroics, he’s almost invariably at the center of the defense just shoveling fistfuls of excellence into his maw. This game was no different. Add it to the back catalog.
Bam Adebayo is a good player, by the way. He might even qualify to be considered a great one. He was food when it mattered. Tiny morsels of escargot. Croissant crumbs. Miami inexplicably tried to funnel their offense through him in the final period and Gobert ate him up and belched out Heat Culture. Blocks, neverminds, rotations, the whole shebang.
The best defender in the world. Don’t you fucking forget it.
Finished with 9 points (46.1% TS), 16 rebounds, 2 assists, 2 steals and 2 blocks in 35 minutes — +9.5 net rating.
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