Player Ratings: Game 82 | New Orleans Pelicans
Player Ratings: Game 82 | New Orleans Pelicans
Minnesota overcome their dysfunction to secure the eight seed.
This Minnesota Timberwolves team is both the gift that keeps on giving and the curse than keeps on cursing. Even for a franchise long-mired in dysfunction, chaos and barely spasmodic success, this felt like new ground being broken. Somehow, they one-upped Jaden McDaniels fracturing his hand while punching a wall when Rudy Gobert attempted to do the same but with Kyle Anderson standing in for the wall.
For all the curses this team has cast this season and the two inescapable ones in this game, this team always has a gift to give as well. If you squint hard enough through the murky fog of dysfunction, the silhouette of the season’s biggest win and gutsiest performance is there. Make no mistake, that was an exceptionally big win shrouded in exceptionally poor circumstances.
The game ends 113-108. It’s almost easy to forget that. The Minnesota Timberwolves, strangely constructed and poorly managed as they might be, will end the regular season as the eighth seed and venture into a play-in tournament that will feature at least two postseason outings. It’s not where they expected to be and, if things played out less tumultuously, where they should have been. But it’s postseason basketball and that’s important for the organization from top to bottom.
It took every ounce of battle and scrap to get to that position. Every single crumb of fight that this team had, both literally and figuratively. The Wolves limped out of the gates, experienced their barrage of self-inflicted anarchy, went down by double-digits on four separate occasions, finally took the lead early in the fourth quarter and then managed to hold off a Pelicans team who had everything to fight for in the closing minutes.
The gift that keeps on giving and the curse that keeps on cursing. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.
Mike Conley: 9/10
Trying to figure out whether he was left alone on Adult Island or if the other adults that inhabited it just resorted Lord Of The Flies type savagery and he was the last one with the conch in hand. So, rather than letting the island sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, he stepped up and did the things adults are supposed to do.
His unusually spotty 3-point shot was a blemish on his afternoon and he never really found a consistent rhythm as a shot-maker from inside the arc — he did draw fouls and convert free throws, though — but he found ways to get stay involved all game while still making plenty of time to get his teammates theirs.
He’s perfectly unselfish. Not to a fault. Just perfectly balanced. Nothing encapsulates that ethos more than pickpocketing CJ ‘Can’t Run In The West’ McCollum and scooping the ball to Anthony Edwards so he can end that little fucking dweeb’s hopes of the eighth seed. Edwards gets the deserved plaudits for what felt like the biggest play of the game, but Conley was in the rafters pulling all the strings. As he always is.
Finished with 17 points (60.4% TS), 2 rebounds and 7 assists in 34 minutes — +7.8 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 10/10
He’s a superstar. A fully-fledged superstar. Fuck the standard definitions and the player rankings lists, he’s a superstar and you can feel it as sure as you can feel emotions and desires and the wind and the sun. You know it’s there without having to research or overthink it. Edwards had a supersized helping of turnovers, he missed six free throws and shot under 40 percent from the field. Still, his superstar aura pulsated stronger than it ever has. It covered the arena and smothered the life out of a Pelicans team who were gifted every opportunity to win this one.
That’s how you know. That’s how you know he’s the foundation upon which special things can be crafted. In a game where everything that could go awry went unfathomably awry, he dangled a rope of moments for the fan base to cling onto and ride into the sunset on.
The third-quarter awakening where he dropped 13 blistering points and tag-teamed with Karl-Anthony Towns to drag the Wolves back into the game. The shadowy demon defense he wielded on the insanely-hot Brandon Ingram after Jaden McDaniels went down. The contorting putback layup from the clouds. The clutch block. The clutch finish. The clutch free throws to help erase the memory of all the missed ones. The balls to do these things possession after possession when the season was hanging in the balance.
It was a superstar’s game without the superstar’s box score, all of it in the final and most important regular season game. That’s all.
Finished with 26 points (48.7% TS), 13 rebounds, 4 assists, 4 steals and 4 blocks in 39 minutes — -3.4 net rating.
Jaden McDaniels: 0/10
Just dumb. A once-a-career brain fart that will live long in the memory of even the strongest-willed fans. No point dwelling on it, no point overanalyzing it, no point walloping the dead horse. He made a dumb mistake and it ended his season. Nothing more to be said.
Finished with 1 punch in 9 minutes — -1.1 net rating.
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