Player Ratings: Game 32 | New York Knicks
Wolves falter on New Year's Day.
It’s a fine line. A minuscule tightrope. The Minnesota Timberwolves have been treading it with dexterous guile for most of this season, but it doesn’t take much for them to be knocked off balance. They have their style and they win with their style, but occasionally a team is going to pick that style apart or the Wolves themselves find their blades duller than usual. When that happens, they tumble off that tightrope. They plummet. They feel the hard ground rushing up to meet them in a way that just hasn’t happened very often this season. It’s a fine line.
The game ends 112-106. A game of fragments. At no point was anything ever fluid. The Wolves oscillated from exciting to awful and back half a dozen times, finishing the night with the result they deserved. It’s not easy to go into Madison Square Garden and strangle out the New York Knicks in the way Minnesota has done to so many teams this season. That much was clear for most of the evening.
So, even with an electric first frame on both ends of the floor, Minnesota couldn’t maintain the rage. They weren’t able to continue negating their offensive droughts with their defensive excellence. It’s a fine line, after all.
For the entirety of the second quarter and most of the third, New York bludgeoned Minnesota with a heavy diet of shot-making, smart cutting, and physical defense. The Timberwolves obliged by handing possession over, continuing their mind-boggling turnover spree and watching New York turn them into easy points at the other end time and time again.
The Knicks outscored the Wolves by 21 points in that second quarter, that’s a lot of fucking points, man. They flip a nine-point first-frame deficit into a 12-point halftime lead and from then on out Minnesota was scrabbling uphill. Even when the avalanche stopped, they just couldn’t claw their way up to the summit.
A late-game flurry of their season-long identity injected some fear into the Garden and some hope into the Wolves, but Julius Randle’s bucket-getting pulled the Knicks out of a potential collapse and the Wolves plunged from their tightrope. Losses like this do happen; there’s no need to kill headlice with a hand grenade. Conversely, however, these games can’t be overlooked as simple aberrations.
It’s somewhere in the puzzling middle.
Mike Conley: 2/10
Neutralized. He’s such a driving force for this team; the concealed weapon that eliminates targets when they least suspect it. He’s not the rifle that Anthony Edwards is or the machete that Karl-Anthony Towns can be, he’s the stiletto stashed up Minnesota’s sleeve. When he can’t be brandished or his blade is blunted, the Wolves just feel a whole lot less sinister.
The blame for his abatement can be doled out in different ways. Of course, he’s sharing some of it. He wasn’t aggressive enough during New York’s long stretches of dominance and he couldn’t find a way to imprint his cerebral defensive tendencies onto the night. He was a shadow in the corner of a dark night.
The rest of it goes to the Knicks’ defense. It’s becoming a theme that teams are focusing in on Conley more often, trying to disarm the hidden blade before it can be buried in their jugular. New York gave him no room to tango with Rudy Gobert in their patented pick-and-roll game, forced him off the 3-point line, and rendered him pretty fucking useless.
It’s a cold day in the depths of hell when Mike Conley feels useless. Brrr.
Finished with 5 points (38.8% TS), 2 rebounds and 5 assists in 29 minutes — -17.2 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 8/10
He’s becoming increasingly hard to decipher and increasingly hard to rate.
On one hand, he’s fucking imperious. A mix of talons and fangs and horns and antlers. Sharp and deadly and rampaging through the league. He’s now an every-night scoring bomb at the end of its fuse, ready to explode and splatter his opponent’s limbs to all corners of the hardwood. He has a mix of OG Anunoby, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo for company in this one and, on the whole, they finish limbless and helpless.
On the other hand, he still feels a step below his colossal best. There are still rough edges surrounding his game that prick at the nerves and leave a wound on the night. He failed to make a field goal in the second-quarter demolition, the untimely turnovers continued to bob up — his dragged pivot foot and brainless pass into traffic to halt Minnesota’s fourth-quarter run stand out like dog’s balls — and his shot selection and playmaking vision still leave a smidge to be desired.
He was probably the best Wolf on the court during this one, that’s how high his highs are, but it still doesn’t feel like he’s his best self.
Finished with 35 points (68.9% TS), 4 rebounds, 2 assists and 2 blocks in 38 minutes — +2.6 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 3/10
The criticism that’s been leveled at him of late — surely exacerbated after this one — has been far too harsh and far too narrow-minded. He doesn’t live in a space most players are comfortable in. He hardly gets a chance to wield his weapons offensively and he is asked to shadow the league’s most devastating scorers, most of whom are at least six inches shorter than him.
He drags himself through hot coals for the betterment of the team, and the blisters that come from the burns that leaves (fouls, attitude and frustration to be precise) need to be eradicated as he grows up, blisters fucking suck and he gets them more than anybody. Pile that on top of a number of injuries and lay-offs and you get a player still seeking his own rhythm.
So, we can acknowledge a poor showing without dumping babies out with bathwater. This was absolutely one of those. He still kept the combustible Jalen Brunson to 5-of-23 shooting and had a number of spidery defensive exhibitions on the perimeter and at the rim. Even his fucking stinkers have moments of defensive magnificence weaved into them.
But make no mistake, this was a fucking stinker by his standards. He got beaten on backdoor cuts too often, called his own number offensively at inopportune times, and couldn’t find his radar from anywhere on the floor.
An inconsistent night in an inconsistent season. And still nothing to hover over the panic button about.
Finished with 8 points (41% TS) in 34 minutes — -10.5 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 7/10
To his credit, he climbed out of the grave. Sure, he dug that fucker and hurled himself in there for the fourth straight game, but at least he was able to climb out of it this time and find himself back on solid ground. We know he’s liable to build himself a catacomb and wither in it when things are going awry, so watching him resurface and contribute heavily after another on-court meltdown was very encouraging.
He almost spun the whole thing around, too. After he shelved his shot selection issues and his sulking squabbles with another shitty officiating crew, he was able to get into his shit and, unsurprisingly, his team started to percolate.
When he ripped down a rebound, scuttled up the court, pulled the dribble behind his back, and plucked the chords on a wing triple, it actually felt for a second that the Wolves might pull off the impossible. And, while they couldn’t do it in the end, it felt like a lesson. They can’t win consistently if he is living in his tormented world of pouting and pressing.
He is the skeleton key that opens all the doors. Fuck that, he’s the foot that kicks the bastards down. They need him booted up and ready to wallop.
Finished with 29 points (70.3% TS), 6 rebounds and 3 assists in 32 minutes — +9.6 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 3/10
Got a taste of his own medicine and it looked like it was putrefying on his tastebuds. He’s usually the one doing the shot-blocking and diving out of dribble handoff actions, but in this one it was Isaiah Hartenstein playing the role of Rudy Gobert, with Gobert himself playing the role of the poor fucker being monstered in the paint.
It started on the offensive end for the Frenchman. His aforementioned pick-and-roll game with Conley was torn to shreds by New York’s defense. The lobs weren’t connecting and the pocket passes weren’t leading to anything but the odd trip to the charity stripe. Then, it spread to his defense. He was a far cry from his menacing self as a rim-protector, he wasn’t shuttling around cutting off driving lanes, and he couldn’t stop the backdoor cutters from applying pressure to Minnesota’s defensive shell.
This season has been different to all the rest of them because of him. When he slips back into the ineffective husk of his best self, the team tends to follow.
Finished with 10 points (47% TS) and 15 rebounds in 38 minutes — -12.9 net rating.
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