Sometimes all of the things that we’re used to cherishing turn to ashes. Ashes only come after the fire, though, and this usually reliable Minnesota Timberwolves team conspired to burn this game to the ground on all fronts. These nights happen in this league, and the Oklahoma City Thunder certainly aren’t opposed to pouring fuel onto fires, but winning has become a normality — contrasting to the luxury we’ve become accustomed to — so every misstep feels like a teeth-shattering faceplant. Every misstep burns.
The game ends 129-106. The embers crackled from the first minute of the night and they only grew to be an inferno that engulfed the Timberwolves as it wore on. When Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is percolating and the defense facing him is lost on all levels, the flames start to feel really fucking hot. When Gilgeous-Alexander’s teammates are feeling it from long-range (and that same defense is leisurely at best on their contests) it becomes an uncontainable combustion.
So, while the Timberwolves flourished their own offensive wand for large swathes of the night, they weren’t able to stay hot enough for long enough to offset Oklahoma City’s sweltering shooting and their own frigid defense. The Wolves hung around for the majority of the first three quarters, never truly seizing momentum but consistently threatening, but they let go of the rope in the final period and ended up being ran out of the building.
As it has been for this entire stretch of difficult games, a goldfish memory has to be the mentality. There are more big nights ahead, more fires to douse, and more chances to right these wrongs.
Mike Conley: 9/10
Labeling him the most fragrant flower in a withering bouquet is probably doing him a disservice. He was really fucking good, so it was more of a bright-hued flower in a field of poisonous nettles.
Up until the Thunder finally cracked the game open and waltzed away with it, Conley was the one winching them back whenever they began pulling away. Whenever things started to feel desperate, Conley shimmied his way into a 3-point shot and injected some hope back into his team’s psyche. He kept blossoming in the bunch while the rest of the Wolves drooped under Oklahoma City’s scorching sun.
The Thunder defense was extra-keyed in on Conley’s empty corner incursions with Rudy Gobert, making those usually money sets a notable absentee within Minnesota’s offense, but Conley thrived with his shooting, his pilfering defense, and his ability to slither to the rim for self-profit or drive-and-kick dimes.
He’s always there. Always reliable. Even when the fire burns around him.
Finished with 17 points (85% TS), 2 rebounds, 4 assists and 2 steals in 25 minutes — -19.2 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 6/10
He’s almost transcended the box score at this point. He’s going to stuff that fucker up every night and that’s just the plane he lives on now. So, for him and the team he is commanding, his impact lies in the minutiae. That’s why he can have these nights where he posts the kind of numbers that win you awards while still making his fan base twitch with annoyance.
He wasn’t the main problem, let’s get that clear. Far from it, really. His incessant paint raids helped prop up Minnesota’s offense and helped get easy points at the charity stripe to circumvent OKC’s snarling defense. It’s important to acknowledge how important rim pressure is and how he’s one of the league’s premier torpedoes.
Still, there was plenty of criticisms that he invited upon himself in this game. Plenty of things that separated the box score from the eye test.
He was sporadic at best and downright bad at worst as a playmaker, choosing too often to forage into a swarm of bodies rather than getting off the ball quickly and getting the Thunder defense into rotation. He, along with almost all of his teammates, wasn’t alert or aggressive enough defensively. And his ball-handling was shaky all night; those live-ball turnovers are sledgehammers to the fucking chin of the team against a pacey Thunder squad.
It’s truly a blessing to have someone who can be an offensive pillar every night, one whose style has proven to generate wins in all situations. Imagine that during all of those lean years. However, these nights aren’t the ones that we envision with him. This was a lot of sizzle and not enough steak.
Finished with 25 points (57.6% TS), 7 rebounds and 6 assists in 34 minutes — -18.3 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 3/10
Fuck having to check Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Fuck that. Not only is he a wriggling, squirming, slinking scorer with a bag deeper than the fucking Grand Canyon, he’s a master manipulator of defenders and referees. McDaniels was chasing wild geese all night, pissing in the wind, squeezing blood from a turnip. He wasn’t making overt mistakes at the point of attack — he rarely does — but shadowing a sizzling scorer like SGA is a thankless job and even non-mistakes get punished with impunity.
That was his night defensively. Again, fuck that. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to counterbalance his struggles with some offensive punch. It was more a meek swat. He couldn’t get any of his patented gawky floaters to fall, he missed all three triples he attempted, and he had a couple of sloppy turnovers.
He’d been on a mini-tear of late, so it wasn’t fun to see him crash back down to the cold hard earth. You don’t get to be a smidgen slow in mind and body against the Thunder, especially in their own shire, and he found out the hard way.
Finished with 8 points (36.8% TS) in 27 minutes — -24.1 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 1/10
If you’re out there then you need to be out there. It was the case for Anthony Edwards and Jaden McDaniels during their spasmodic returns from injury and it’s the same for Towns. As soon as his name was inked onto the team sheet, there’s no excuse for the effort he put forth in this one.
If this game was a fire that enveloped the Wolves, then he was there holding the fucking match. There were plenty of culprits, but none of them so blatant as he. When he wasn’t refusing to rotate or contest shots defensively, he was turning down easy ball-movement opportunities in favor of barreling drives into Hades’ lair and no-hope passes that lead to those pesky aforementioned live-ball turnovers. As the icepick into the heart of his evening, he only attempted two 3-pointers and missed them both.
When he was on the floor, it truly felt like the Wolves couldn’t win. He knifed every ounce of momentum they had throughout the night with his head-scratching decisions and his defensive unwillingness. That’s a departure from what we’ve seen thus far this season, so he deserves some leniency going forward, but this can’t become a post-injury trend for him.
Finished with 16 points (63.3% TS) and 6 rebounds in 29 minutes — -15.6 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 3/10
While his big man partner seemed to actively wreak havoc on Minnesota’s chances to win, Gobert was more of a pedestrian who watched on from afar as the inferno claimed them. He’s been such an unmissable force thus far this season — his last tango with Chet Holmgren being one of the crowning jewels in his wonderful campaign — so it’s jarring when he has a night where he’s bordering on translucent.
It was both ends, too, which is even more surprising. He has games like this one on offense occasionally; the ball doesn’t always find him in rhythm and he isn’t able to shatter the opponent with his ability to suck down offensive rebounds and turn them into recycled points, but you always expect him to be loud defensively.
This was radio fucking silence.
There were no rim-protection booms — he finished without a blocked shot for just the fourth time all season — and he wasn’t able to do his thing as an all-encompassing rotation defender. When Oklahoma City dragged him out to the perimeter, he was blown-by or slow on the shot contest, and when they scuttled to the rim he was a beat slow to get his tree branch arms up.
The Timberwolves so often go as he goes. He’s the engine that keeps them trucking along. That was the case in this one.
Finished with 10 points (52.5% TS) and 5 rebounds in 29 minutes — -23.0 net rating.
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