Player Ratings: Play-In Game Two | Oklahoma City Thunder
Player Ratings: Play-In Game Two | Oklahoma City Thunder
Wolves advance to the playoffs.
Don’t let the sour taste left from a season full of bile take away from the sweetness that is another playoff berth. The Minnesota Timberwolves have been stuck to the shoe of the league for decades, the ugly duckling, the bruised pear. They deserved to fester like an untreated gash at the bottom of the league’s ladder for all those years and we all know their bar is stationed lower than many other teams, but that doesn’t mean another invitation to the postseason party isn’t one worth coveting.
The game ends 120-95. The kind of demolishing that any team would lust after heading into the playoffs. Make no mistake about that. The Timberwolves had their advantages in experience and size, but the Oklahoma City Thunder have been dispelling their inbuilt impediments all season long. This is a team that doesn’t roll over willingly, they need to be pushed and pushed hard. It’s a geyser of youth that is liable to uncork at any time. Calling them scrappy feels undermining, the Thunder are a team who have the pieces to beat anybody.
So, when the Wolves waltzed into an elimination battle against that more-than-scrappy Thunder squad and battered them into oblivion, it should be deemed as nothing short of a smash-hit success. That doesn’t absolve their disappointing standings position or the string of woeful losses that held their heads under the season’s floodwater, but they avoided the real disaster and they avoided it with a flourishing style that fans have longed for.
Perhaps it was a morsel shy of true vindication, but when the Timberwolves ducked every punch Oklahoma City threw their way and countered with their jumbo-sized haymakers, it felt pretty fucking close. The two bigs were a purring success individually and as a pairing, dwarfing the Thunder’s mosquito fleet and allowing the Wolves to build their entire game off of that size advantage.
From that foundation, nothing but excellence blossomed. The Timberwolves were staunchly effective defending the rim and still made time to fan out to shooters and stop Oklahoma City from finding joy from any one quadrant of the floor. Offensively, they flipped that mantra and lived in the paint while making over 40 percent of their long-range attempts. They did everything they needed to do. A grownup performance. A take care of business performance. A playoff-worthy performance.
Mike Conley: 9/10
Everybody is concerned with the silverback and the bear in the frontcourt and the uncoiling viper on the wing, but it’s the owl at point guard who continues to peck the fucking eyes out of opponents each and every night. This was nothing less than what we’ve come to expect from Minnesota’s miniature metronome, a night laced in cool dad energy.
The thing that stood out is the purposefulness of every single thing he did. He only attempted six shots, but they were all good looks and all when the Wolves’ offense needed a pressure release. No wasted possessions, every pass shifted the gears of the offense — be it to a posted big or an aggressive backcourt companion — even if it didn’t lead to an assist in the box score. Each decision was made with the split-second care and attentiveness that comes only from an instinctive ability to stay calm in frenetic situations.
Above all else, though, he added another feather to his flamboyant defensive cap. Josh Giddey has seven inches of height on Conley and the tender touch of youth on his side, yet he was rendered completely and utterly fucking useless. When Giddey was working with the ball in his hands, Conley shifted with him laterally and dug into his personal space to force the Aussie’s janky handle into extinction. Off the ball, Conley continued to fly around screens to stop potential jumpers while still tagging rollers and digging down to help out his teammates.
The burly predators will get the headlines, but the owl continues to ravage.
Finished with 14 points (90.2% TS), 3 rebounds, 3 assists and 3 steals in 30 minutes — +34.2 net rating.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 10/10
Cometh the moment, cometh the man. It certainly wasn’t the man we’d have suspected it being six months or a week or even a fucking day before the game kicked off, but this is a funny old game and he was the beneficiary of this season’s carousel of craziness this time around.
To be fair, this wasn’t an unseen boomlet of defensive brilliance. He’s been a menacing point-of-attack vagrant every time he’s touched the hardwood in Timberwolves colors. This was just that skillset blooming under the microscope of expanded minutes and a budding superstar opponent. Bloom, it did. Like a fucking rose from the Garden of Basketball Eden.
The Thunder had their backs against the wall from the get-go, but they were soggy toast once Alexander-Walker wrangled up his cousin and buried him under an avalanche of pressure. Whenever Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tried to worm his way to the rim with his herky-jerky style, his cousin was there, herking and jerking. Whenever he tried to get into his mid-range bag, his cousin was there, eating up space and contesting in his grill. All of it done without a single foul call against one of the league’s foremost whistle-grifters.
Alexander-Walker’s offensive contribution was simply dressing on his delicious defensive salad, but that doesn’t make it any less tasty. A few treys, some funky finishes around the rim, and a willingness to move the ball crisply when his shot wasn’t there. All around, in the biggest game of the season, under the pressure of his first starting gig with the Wolves and with the weight of a playoff berth bearing down on him, he produced a genuine masterclass.
Finished with 12 points (60% TS), 4 rebounds, 6 assists, 3 steals and 2 blocks in 37 minutes — +22.0 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 8/10
Just continued to find ways to bounce back. It’s clear that he’s still not in that game-breaking rhythm we’ve seen him in so many times before, his uppercut doesn’t have the same bite as it has for much of the season, but he just kept grinding out small wins. He never tried to take over at the expense of the game plan, choosing instead to just do the little things until they started to feel like really fucking big things.
Whether it was defending his multitude of matchups with a passionate verve, rebounding like a demon sent from the depths of the Dennis Rodman Underworld, or consistently making plays for his teammates when Oklahoma City were trapping him on the perimeter. It was all there. All of those little big things. All of the things that are needed under the surface to win a game with such ease.
And, of course, he still had enough moments to supplement those effort plays with some legitimate shiny substance. He worked into his scoring game reasonably slowly with a variety of rim-attacks and floaters and then jackhammered the finals nails into the night’s coffin with a trio of catch-and-shoot triples. That’s who he is at heart, the otherworldly scoring freak, but the hustling heroics might be even more important in this one.
Finished with 19 points (50% TS), 10 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 steals in 39 minutes — +9.8 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 10/10
There were no ifs ands or buts about this big-game performance. Nothing to demerit or mark down or diminish. This was flat-out wall-to-wall domination from the tip. Theoretically, the Thunder had nobody to match him up with and, in practice, it felt even more lopsided. They tried both of the Williams’, they tried Lu Dort, they even experimented with legitimate guards to try and pester Towns, and he took them all to the fucking cleaners. Washed, dried and folded.
Whenever things clammed up for the offense, there he was, beasting down low with driving finishes, post moves, and putbacks. There was a spot-up trey in there and a pull-up mid-range moneymaker, but it was all about the size, the strength and the unyielding will to squish every measly flea who tried to check him. Defensively, he was the target of Oklahoma City’s gameplan early, but once he started to move his feet on the perimeter and then rotate down to provide rim protection on top of it, he shattered that plan apart.
This was a special, special performance. A buck the trend kind of night. A confidence booster heading into a date with the league’s most fearsome offensive fulcrum.
Finished with 28 points (76.9% TS), 11 rebounds, 3 assists and 3 blocks in 29 minutes — +30.6 net rating.
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