Sometimes you’re the bug, sometimes you’re the windshield. The Minnesota Timberwolves have a tendency to be both. They can smash a team apart and they can smash themselves apart. They’re the frustrater and the frustrating. The hammer and the anvil. The sword and the flesh. For most of the season, they’ve been able to overcome their increasingly obvious foibles and lean into their suffocating strengths, but those demons still simmer under the surface and it’s hard to watch when they rear their ugly heads.
The game ends 102-97. The definition of insanity and whatnot. There’s no shame in losing to the Oklahoma City Thunder. They’re well-coached, star-studded, and getting used to winning with every one they collect. Still, the Wolves feel like they’re testing the limits of insanity far too often. Their strengths allow them to win the ones that should be won, but the insanity in their veins opens them up to the late-game collapses that have plagued them for so long and are starting to plague them again.
It’s important to remember the way the Wolves muscled their way past a slow start and dropped a sledgehammer on the Western Conference’s most complete team. They strangled Oklahoma City’s offense with their length and their ability to clog up driving lanes and fan out to shooters and then managed to cobble together enough offense on the back of it to put them self in pole position.
All of that is tarnished by the general offensive scheme and execution far too often, though. It’s a complete mess and seemingly getting worse under an inept offensive coach and a bunch of players prone to devolving into slapdash carelessness. With the way they turn the ball over, stumble through structureless possessions, and generally struggle to score the ball whatsoever, it makes their record (and their defense!) even more impressive.
The defense won’t always be there to wrench them out of the fire, though. The Wolves were excellent defensively all night long, but it wasn’t enough and it won’t be enough against the league’s elites on a consistent basis. The Wolves score just 14 points in the fourth quarter, blow what was a 12-point lead, make just three field goals while the ball over eight times in the final frame, and do it all without a semblance of structure or accountability from player and coach.
The nightmare concludes with three missed free throws from Anthony Edwards to tie the game with 3.7 seconds left. A fitting finish for a wasted opportunity.
Mike Conley: 1/10
It’s almost hard to fathom how bad he was. His baseline is always so high that even on his off nights (that are quietly becoming a little more frequent of late) he’s still able to inject some sort of his special sauce into proceedings. There was none of that. No sauce. Just a big dry fucking nothing burger. If he was anything more than that, they probably win that.
It’s another piece of evidence that even the league’s most reliable contributors have off-nights. This was as off as a night could be. He missed open look after open look, turned the ball over way more than we’re used to seeing, and struggled to defend the brutish wings and shifty guards Oklahoma City put in front of him.
He puts a bow on his neatly-wrapped box of shit with wide-open brick in the closing moments — a shot he’s feasted upon all season long.
Hard to fathom, indeed.
Finished with 3 points (13.6% TS), 3 rebounds, 4 assists and 3 turnovers in 29 minutes — -38.6 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 3/10
So often he’s been the swashbuckling solution as well as the head-scratching problem. In this one, however, he didn’t have the team-carrying moments of magic to balance out the defects in his game.
There were no self-creation jump-shooting clinics, only burrowing drives into OKC’s packed paint. When he wasn’t able to consistently finish those looks (he did have a sprinkling of filthiness at the rim) he slipped back into his turnover-prone ways. Sure, the coaching isn’t putting him in positions to maximize his offensive talent, but he’s still grappling legitimate decision-making gremlins and they chewed away at the heart of this game.
The three missed free throws (one intentional) at the end of the game will stand out as the dagger that he plunged into his team’s frail chest, but they were simply a paradigm of his entire night. He needs to be better if they’re going to win big games consistently. They all do.
Finished with 19 points (66% TS), 5 rebounds, 5 assists and 5 turnovers in 38 minutes — -21.5 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 8/10
It’s always going to be tough walking into the path of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He’s not only one of the league’s premier floppers and foul-baiters, he’s exceptionally talented and a master of making tough shots look exceedingly easy.
Nothing changed from the script with McDaniels in front of him. He flopped, he flailed, he baited, he made tough looks, and he generally didn’t give two shades of shit whether it was McDaniels or Edwards or any of Minnesota’s defenders in front of him.
What McDaniels can (and did) do is contribute at the other end. After months of searching for consistency from long-range, he seems to have found his stroke lately. He’s confident, he’s knocking them down, and he’s using that gravity as a shooter to attack closeouts and finish at the rim with his oily funk.
As usual, fouls knocked some of the cream from his cake and he did tail off as the game wore on, but among Minnesota’s ghastly starting unit he was probably the pick of the bunch.
Finished with 15 points (65.6% TS), 2 rebounds and 2 turnovers in 27 minutes — -18.8 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 3/10
Whenever a big game rolls around, it’s a toss of a coin for KAT. We’ve seen him dominate those types of games, but just as often we’ve seen him shit the bed and roll around in the pungent sheets.
This wasn’t one of his worst bed-shittings, but the smell was evident and it’s another night in the growing catalog of stinkers.
Everything just seemed harder when he was out there. His defense has fallen off a cliff lately and OKC attacked him relentlessly, ending in fouls or missed rotations or a combination of the two. For a team who butters its bread defensively, he’s becoming increasingly tough to carry on that end.
Offensively, it was more sludge. His post-ups 20 feet from the hoop murder ball movement and sharp offense. He did make a corner triple (!) but then refused to go back there for the rest of the game. He holds the ball too long, turns it over too much, and wrecks Minnesota’s already questionable spacing with his unwillingness to shoot 3-pointers or consistently act as a floor-stretcher. He gets some much-needed trips to the free throw line with his style of play, but when he doesn’t it’s too easy to defend.
Like Edwards, they’ll need more from him. Unlike Edwards, he has a long résumé of not delivering in these massive games.
Finished with 19 points (66% TS), 11 rebounds, 2 assists and 3 turnovers in 36 minutes — -27.2 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 4/10
Personified the night, in a way.
Pretty good defensively — below his monolithic standards but good enough to win against a lot of teams — and completely ineffectual offensively. Maybe they snatch an undeserved win if he is closer to his zenith on defense, but they certainly run away with it if he’s put in better positions to score or if he makes the most of the few chances he did have.
He will never be the reason why the offense is humming, but when it is he will often be the guy finishing the fuck out of everything. He is the perfect vehicle to take smart offense to the finish line, but he’s often a cumbersome impediment when Finch’s free-flowing mess is at its worst.
He makes up for some of his poor night with another monstrous rebounding performance, but it wasn’t enough for him to feel anything more than a big French pile of nothingness.
Finished with 7 points (36.8% TS), 18 rebounds, 2 assists and 2 turnovers in 33 minutes — -9.3 net rating.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Howls and Growls to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.