The starting pistol has sounded and away we go. It’ll be a maze, a marathon, a meandering trail littered with exultations and melancholies, but this is merely the beginning. The preseason is a time for optimism, experimentation, and implementation, all laced with the fun of results that count nothing toward that mazey marathon.
The game ends 111-99. The perfect way to commence it all. It’d be foolish to proclaim any sweeping declarations on the back of the opening preseason game, but the Minnesota Timberwolves are winning that big shiny bastard next June. Swatting away the Dallas Mavericks with a lazy paw — sans Anthony Edwards — is all the data necessary.
It was a game that required all the necessary asterisks that a preseason game does. Edwards’ tweaked ankle was the first, but neither team committed a starter to more than 23 minutes on the night. The Mavericks started two rookies and played a whopping 18 total players. This was the epitome of preseason basketball, but there was a clear intention from Minnesota to parlay their fairly settled roster into a serious and fast start. There was an edge that belies the meaningless of the game.
By midway through the first quarter, that intention was blatant and it was brilliant. The Wolves smacked the Mavs in the mouth with an aggressive brand of basketball on both ends and by quarter time they had smothered the life out of their opponents. The 19-point lead they held was never truly threatened — even when both teams rolled with their starting units.
So, while it’s just preseason and everybody will always rush to exclaim that it’s really, truly just preseason, it’s always better to win. It’s better to be on the side that loved the way their team is preparing for the season. It’s better to start to the marathon and the maze and the meandering journey on firm ground.
Mike Conley: 8/10
He isn’t just the straw that stirs the drink, he’s the herb that makes the whole potion bubble. The tonic that makes the whole thing worth drinking. Nothing about this game was mid-season Mike, but even his slightest touch on an outing is enough to inject a vitalization into the team on both ends of the floor.
He steps into an early triple in transition, sending the shuddering memory of a thousand such clanked D’Angelo Russell triples flooding away. He consistently gets the team into quick and efficient offense, registering similar feelings. Gobert loves him, adores him, and they hook up for their empty corner pick-and-roll a few times. The defense is bordering on stellar and that’s something that doesn’t get spoken about enough; the old man has legs like grease fucking lightning.
This was all on a quiet night. He’s wonderful.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 9/10
He’s a big bowl of energy, isn’t he? Zipping around on both ends of the floor like this was a playoff game. He knows no different. He couldn’t stop zipping about if his bollocks depended on it.
He’s a shooter, as well, now, isn’t he? The streamlined shot form looks a tad prettier but it’s still ugly. It goes in, though. It went in to end last season, it went in during the summer with Team Canada and it’s still going in now. Each and every time we see him that sword is sharper and its cuts run deeper.
And, he’s a bit of a playmaker, isn’t he? He will always live on the edge of calamity when all that pent-up energy tries to manifest itself in an off-the-dribble game, but the guy has vision and he has floor awareness and he has the big swinging gorilla nuts to make the play for his mate.
He’s not Anthony Edwards and nor should he ever have the honor of being so, but he steps in admirably and plays his own exciting brand of play. If this was but a wedding rehearsal for the season then he strode down the aisle with a graceful beauty.
Jaden McDaniels: 6/10
Not his best night. We were never in the danger zone of any actual tribulation, but he fouled too much and he missed shots that he usually makes with consummate ease. The thing about Jaden McDaniels is that his bad nights are never truly bad because he is a defensive death eater, just Avada Kedavra-ing motherfuckers into a powdery dust.
When you gaze over Luka Doncic’s numbers and see that he posted 25 points on 8-of-14 shooting in just under 17 minutes you can probably dismiss McDaniels’ magical exploits, but when you see Luka’s whiny little face and immediate resort to shameless foul-baiting then you know exactly what McDaniels does to him.
The Slovenian star relentlessly hunted switches away from McDaniels’ talons and feasted every time he was successful. But McDaniels shackled him on multiple possessions when the pair were tangoing, and the lanky forward did chip in four free throws and a swooping transition hammer of his own.
He doesn’t have bad nights. He only doles them out.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 10/10
You could nitpick the occasional semi-lapse defensively or a couple of avoidable turnovers, but nitpicking is for fucking dweebs. Preseason is for excitement. Towns delivered it in spades. If you were looking for a blueprint on how the fan base and organization want him to play, then he laid it out with sumptuous conviction.
From the first tip, his process was elite. He slithered into his spots like liquid gold, launching pick-and-pop treys, attacking off the bounce, and making quick decisions as a passer when the defense collapsed on him. And a pair of athletic blocks on the other end were a testament to his returning spriteliness.
It was a come one come all kind of evening. They tried to stick Doncic on him early, and he patiently picked him apart. Dwight Powell had a go, promptly returning to the bench from whence he belongs. Towns palpably discarded a player who calls himself fucking O-Max, too, which was about all that Jason Kidd and his staff deserved.
Nobody could stop him and that’s what we like to see.
Rudy Gobert: 7/10
If this is what we’re going to get from him then we can all shake hands and call it a gentleman’s agreement.
He still can’t put the fucking ball in the cylindrical thing, despite being the size of a small building, but we’ve come to expect a fistful of cumbersome possessions from him on that end. What he did do was protect the rim as both an aura and a physical shot-blocking entity, which is something we scarcely saw last season. And, most importantly, he was uber-aware of the team’s spacing and his enormous role in it.
Instead of clogging up the lane with rim-runs that end in a lumbering oaf in front of the rim, he was setting off-ball screens around the perimeter, slinking into the dunker’s spot along the baseline, or making smarter decisions as a dribble handoff initiator. What that did was open up the lane far more often and with far greater efficacy. Towns was able to eat at the rim, Naz Reid found the space he so desires, and Minnesota’s guards could saunter freely without Gobert in their path.
That matters more than his fumbling hands and doltish finishing. The team can work with that. The team can thrive with that.
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