The Minnesota Timberwolves are a toxic cloud, in the best way possible. A poisonous fog, seeping into the psyche of every team they face. They suffocate them, clog up their airways, asphyxiate them, wear them down and choke them out. The league has mutated into pace, space and offensive electricity over the better part of the last decade, but the Timberwolves are devolving the whole thing. Fuck all of this free-flowing crap. This team is a toxic cloud, come to exterminate every meek opponent in their path.
The game ends 110-98. It’s becoming commonplace to see those scant point totals next to Minnesota’s opponent. Toxic cloud and whatnot. They had no business winning this game with such relative ease. Without Karl-Anthony Towns’ offensive buoyancy and on the road against a pesky Sacramento Kings team that waxed them a month ago, this could have been an easy loss to swallow. They could have mailed it in but they never mail it in.
So, rather than letting this slip by with a shrug at their circumstances, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work, and from the first minute, it was obvious who was in charge. Minnesota’s defense was at its strangulating best; their interior blockades amalgamating with their wide-winged perimeter defenders to stifle Sacramento’s usually glittering scoring. With their own offensive game, Minnesota dealt with Sacramento’s gimmicky blitzing defense, picking the eyes out of it with patience and smart decisions.
In many ways, it was their most complete performance of the season. They spread that toxic cloud on defense, stamping another piece of evidence onto their identity as a team, and they were smooth and composed offensively for enormous stretches of the night.
They did feel the sting in Sacramento’s tail in the fourth quarter — the Kings started raining the 3-pointers they’d missed all night and Minnesota went cold for a few nervous minutes — but outside of the first bucket of the game, this was a wire-to-wire win. It never felt truly precarious. It only felt like most nights are starting to feel like. Cloudy, foggy, asphyxiating joy. A brand of basketball that encapsulates the modern fan and appeases the traditionalist.
Mike Conley: 9/10
It’s sometimes hard to separate the tangible from the intangible when it comes to him. Truly it’s impossible to decode his brilliance without them both.
It’s easy to see the way he showers in 3-point shots like droplets of holy water falling from the heavens. We’re beginning to fathom how important his empty corner pick-and-roll possessions are alongside Rudy Gobert and the shots and passes that stem from them are eye-catchingly wonderous. We see the tangible and we cherish the tangible.
The intangible is just as important. It might be more important. The ability to array the offense and settle them down when things are skewing into stupidity. The way he scuttles around screens and sticks on shooters like glue on the defensive end. Perhaps, maybe more intangible than anything, the way everything just feels right when he’s on the floor. Like a warm fucking hug, washing your troubles away.
Another night where all of it was felt. All of him. Every franchise-altering bit.
Finished with 12 points (57.5% TS), 7 rebounds, 9 assists and 2 steals in 30 minutes — +41.7 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 9/10
The context that needs to be woven into this performance is that Sacramento sold out their entire defense to thwart him. They pushed hard blitzes at him every time he tried to dance atop the key. They cut off their nose to spite their face and he still ended up crushing their cheekbones and shattering their jaw.
So, while there were still some hair-graying moments muddying parts of his night, they were only dark streaks on an otherwise rainbow of a night. The overzealous turnovers and some questionable 3-point tries weren’t what the team needed, but we need not worry about them.
Focus on all of the game-winning masterpieces he paints throughout the entire game. The jackhammer drives through Sacramento’s spongy defense, the slinging passes to shooters after he had escaped the blitzing defense, or the spoon-feeds to Rudy Gobert on the roll. The two transition flourishes that slammed the final nails into Sacramento’s coffin might be the pick of the bunch.
This wasn’t even his most flawless of nights, and yet he crammed production into the box score and left his fingerprints smeared across everything good for his team.
Finished with 34 points (58.2% TS), 5 rebounds and 10 assists in 39 minutes — +8.6 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 10/10
It feels like all season we’ve kind of been awaiting this moment. Injuries have clung to his ankle and moored him to relative inconsistency for most of this campaign thus far, and the rest has been spent shaking off the rust those injuries caked on him. He was always going to find health and from at some point, and this was the perfect night to do so. It’s the season of giving, after all, and he gave us a masterclass in two-way basketball.
If they’re going to hide a slow-footed, pasty, incompetent defender like Kevin Huerter on him, he’s going to devour buckets. Teams still haven’t figured that out and they continued to get burned by their ignorance. In the end, Huerter had to take a seat on the bench with 15 minutes of utter shit next to his name and McDaniels found himself a rhythm as a shooter, driver, and feathery finisher in his sweet spots around the rim.
Even with all of that offensive juice in mind, it was nothing compared to what he was able to do defensively. It’s been that end that has been spottier than usual this season, but this was him returning to his awe-inspiring zenith. He was navigating screens and nixing Sacramento’s patented dribble handoff actions with spidery ease all night, mixing in some long-limbed poke-aways throughout it all as well, but it was his fourth quarter defense that stole the show and the breath of an entire fan base.
Not many players — especially at 6-foot-11 — can turn De’Aaron Fox into a catatonic zombie during winning time. He did. Not many can slip through a Domantas Sabonis screen and swat a Fox pull-up middy. He did. Not many can fuck a whole team of swarming scorers up on his own. He did.
This, more than any other night we’ve seen so far this season, was him at his best, and fucking hell was it something to behold.
Finished with 20 points (59.2% TS), 5 rebounds and 4 steals in 41 minutes — +14.2 net rating.
Kyle Anderson: 9/10
Needed him. Without Karl-Anthony Towns, they needed Kyle Anderson to be bristling with positive impact in the way we saw last season so often and not the fluctuating fuckery that we’ve become accustomed to seeing so far this time around.
He delivered. Not by all of a sudden remembering to shoot again, but by flexing his brain and providing value in his own unique way. The Kings still treated him as if he were Casper the unintimidating ghost, so he crowbarred their naïveté into their very own death knell.
When he caught the ball in hectares of space, he ran it down their throat. Sometimes, he was finishing with gangly layups or robotic push shots. At others, he was drawing them toward him and making plays for shooters or roll-men. At all times, he was providing the value we always get from him on the defensive side of things.
Albeit in a vastly different way, he was able to make the chasm left by Towns’ absence feel almost insignificant. That’s a feat worth celebrating. An unexpected present under the tree.
Finished with 10 points (50.6% TS), 5 rebounds and 5 assists in 29 minutes — +16.7 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 10/10
Rugged dominance. He doesn’t throw his weight around wildly or look like a teen wolf or commit a thousand unpunished fouls like Sabonis does. He dominates properly. Sabonis emanates his hubristic feelings when he shoves off and finishes around the rim, but when it comes to doing the dirty work on the other end, he faceplants possession after possession. An offensive bull and a defensive squib.
Gobert doesn’t take possessions off. All night he’s everywhere, all the time, on both ends. An offensive wrecking ball and a defensive kingpin. If the Timberwolves are a toxic cloud, he’s the first inhalation, the one that eats at the opposition’s insides and rots away their flesh.
He had every playtype simmering in this game; pick-and-roll finishes, lob dunks, putback points, rim-protection stops, post defense, rotational excellence. The whole fucking lot. Whenever the Wolves needed something to happen, he made it happen. That’s what he’s become for them this season, a big French fucking lighthouse, ready to guide them to shore through the choppiest seas.
In a season littered with peaks, this might have been his pièce de résistance.
Finished with 21 points (75.6% TS), 17 rebounds and 2 blocks in 39 minutes — +35.1 net rating.
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