This one was fraught. Even before the game, it was fraught. The Sacramento Kings are the type of team that the Minnesota Timberwolves won’t want to face come playoff time; they’re fast and they’re well-drilled and they’re built to blast a big team into smithereens. They ooze fraught against Minnesota’s hulking lineup construction.
When the game began, the fraught of it all only intensified. Adversity hit the Wolves wherever possible, a ton of bricks, wave after wave of it, some of it self-created and some of it uncontrollable. In the end, a team that has shown resilience all season wasn’t able to stop themselves from being crushed under the fraught.
The game ends 124-120. For the neutral observer, it was a barnburner. The two teams swayed back and forth; they exchanged runs, exchanged bumps, exchanged bruises and exchanged momentum. It was the kind of violent chess match that makes basketball the best game in the world. Unfortunately, we look at these things through a Timberwolves lens, and that painted a rather different picture.
Ultimately, the Wolves got what they deserved. They danced with fraught too often and too carelessly. They teased fraught, poked fraught, mocked fraught, and eventually got all that fraught has to offer and fraught serves up revenge in the coldest of ways. Of course, Anthony Edwards leaving mid-game for personal reasons made life more difficult, but there was a vast ocean of issues that drowned them in this one.
Atop the gruesome list was their defensive output. That’s how Minnesota usually butter their bread and this game was full of stale and dry appetizers. All night long their perimeter stoppers and off-ball chasers were stuck on the hip of their direct opponent, leading to easy rim attacks or uncontested jumpers for the Kings’ scoring-tilted roster. When they did manage to wrangle a stop, they were massacred on the offensive glass and consistently beaten to loose balls.
Above all else, it was Malik Monk that sunk the Wolves. Sometimes you can do little else but shrug the shoulders, tip your Stetson, and appreciate a player who went scorched earth. There were absolutely some defensive mistakes that buoyed Monk in his pursuits, but he often made the hard look simple and ripped this game away from Minnesota over the final three periods.
So, this isn’t a moral victory. This wasn’t a good loss. There are no good losses anymore. No moral victories. It’s a loss that should sting in every way a loss can. However, with their unwillingness to do the dirty work mingling with some absences and a diabolic refereeing crew, they should almost count themselves lucky to have taken this one into overtime and all the way to the wire.
Fraught.
Mike Conley: 5/10
Had a pendulum kind of night.
Swing, he slices through the lane for a saucy layup at the rim. Swing, he gets blown by on the perimeter by one of Sacramento’s shifty guards. Swing, he nails a pull-up three. Swing, he misses an open look and a free throw in clutch time. Swing, swing, fucking swing.
In the end, it’s hard to say he was more good than bad. He just swung and swung and swung. By his standards, however, this was a disappointing evening. It was defensive mishaps and untimely turnovers that moonlighted as the dagger into Minnesota’s jugular and he was a massive culprit for both. The things he’s famous for not doing ended up becoming his ruin.
They need more from him in these games.
Finished with 14 points (65.8% TS), 3 rebounds, 8 assists, 2 steals and 3 turnovers in 36 minutes — -32.9 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 4/10
Incomplete.
He left at halftime for personal reasons — coming off the back of a topsy-turvy first half — so it’s hard to really frame his night as anything else but incomplete. Maybe he wills them to a win? Maybe his presence opens up the stodginess that pulsated through the night? Maybe they were destined to stumble with or without him?
All questions that will remain unanswered and therefore he ends the night with an incomplete emblazoned next to his game.
Finished with 11 points (40.3% TS), 2 rebounds and 2 assists in 19 minutes — -8.1 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 10/10
The Wolves were lucky this game wasn’t an embarrassing blowout loss. That’s a fact. And the only reason it wasn’t is because this skinny fucking demigod continually dragged them out of the fires they kept starting and then extinguished them with his free hand.
He wasn’t at his very best defensively — although he was the best of a bad perimeter defending bunch — but without his offensive punch the Wolves would have been a smudge of unidentifiable goo smeared across the canvas.
It seemed like every time they needed something he provided it. When they were getting battered early on, he bobbed up with cleaving cuts through the middle of the defense for easy points at the rim. When they needed to build upon their own momentum, he was there pushing them along with his ability to glide into the paint and finish over those short little limbs of Domantas Sabonis. When Sacramento needed to be stopped, he was there splashing a triple and jerking momentum back in Minnesota’s favor.
Let the apologies be as loud as the disrespect. Let it be louder. Scream them from the fucking rooftops.
Finished with 26 points (101.9% TS) and 7 rebounds in 45 minutes — -12.1 net rating.
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