The summit steepens.
The Minnesota Timberwolves have crawled awkwardly up this season’s slippery slope, seemingly getting close to a place to plant their flag a dozen times, but every time falling into a crumbling heap at the bottom of the mountain. It hasn’t mattered whether it was shaky ground or the footholds were firm and enormous, they continuously find a way to tumble off a ledge. This, among all the other cataclysmic falls, was their stupidest stumble yet.
The game ends 107-105. Even for this team with this track record and mired in this topsy-turvy campaign, this seemed beyond the realms of possibility. The Portland Trail Blazers were less than a corpse of the still-mediocre squad they trotted out to open the season, they were the dried and disintegrating bones of a capable basketball team. If given a light prod, they would crumble into a powdery dust. The unfathomably overconfident Wolves couldn’t find the strength for that prod, though, they could barely muster a single morsel of anything as their season plunged into a new and darker abyss.
It just felt fraught from the first minute. Fraught like the rest of the games against teams who are begging to be beaten. Fraught like the state of the Western Conference playoff race. Fraught like this whole fucking gut punch of a season.
The Wolves just didn’t bring it hard enough and didn’t bring it long enough. After a sleepy start befitting of a matinee tip-off, they found a double-digit lead in the backend of the second quarter and throughout pockets of the third period. They were but fleeting moments, however, mirages of a team who knows what it takes to put bad teams to bed, mere hallucinations of a roster with enough respect for their opponents to not play with them like unwanted food.
In the end, in an entirely predictable fashion, Minnesota’s live-ball turnovers, Swiss cheese defense in both transition and the halfcourt, and maddening paucity of killer instinct allowed the skeletal Blazers to sledgehammer an enormous nail into this season’s coffin.
Mike Conley: 3/10
Not the worst banana in the bunch, but he was the ripest. This game needed a ripe head. It needed some wisdom and some sage leadership. It needed a fucking adult to step in and put the kids in their place.
Conley made a couple of long-range jumpers to stop the first quarter from becoming even more of a horror show than it already was, but after that he was the same gormless sludge as his teammates; woeful in transition defense, unable to puncture Portland’s zone, and willfully abject as a playmaker.
Finished with 11 points (53.9% TS), 4 rebounds and 6 assists in 35 minutes — -8.4 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 8/10
The effort chasm between him and the rest of his lifeless teammates was astoundingly stark. He wasn’t perfect — his shot selection had strains of its usual dubiousness and he was certainly among the gang of transition defense wanderers — but he played like he wanted to win and wanted to dominate and that can’t be said for the majority of his cohorts.
As they stood like they were stapled to the hardwood, Edwards routinely took it upon himself to pour gas into their empty tanks with bulleting drives and kamikaze rim-attacks. He shot the ball a whopping 30 times, but those other fuckers seemed like they would rather be anywhere else than on that court making a play so it all felt necessary.
This Edwards, with an uptick in his usual defensive stoutness, needs to stay.
Finished with 37 points (57.5% TS), 5 rebounds and 6 assists in 38 minutes — -1.3 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 8/10
Perhaps unsurprisingly and certainly worryingly, the other player who’s barely old enough to legally shotgun a beer was the one out there doing things that equate to winning. Strangely enough, through all the toxic sludge that dripped from the maw of this game, this was one of the better defensive nights a single player can have. It’ll drift away with the winds of time because of the result, but it was another notch in his All-Defense baldric.
He was hellacious at the point of attack; consistently drifting around screens and funneling Portland’s ball-handlers into flimsy rim-protection. He was the only one giving a single shit in transition defense. And he consistently found ways to stifle shots at the rim or prowl like a hungry panther in passing lanes.
It was a so-so night offensively, but his give-a-shit meter was firmly in the green and, unfortunately, that’s the bar for this night.
Finished with 10 points (71.4% TS), 3 rebounds, 2 steals and 4 blocks in 36 minutes — -8.2 net rating.
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