Player Ratings: Preseason Game Three | New York Knicks
Wolves continue their winning ways in the preseason.
With each preseason game that drifts by in a hazy fever dream, we get drip-fed a little more of what the Minnesota Timberwolves have in store for us this season. Unlike many an organization around the association, the Wolves seem to be taking preseason extra seriously; working themselves into mid-season form before the campaign even begins.
Thankfully, the New York Knicks entered Madison Square Garden with the same mindset. Tom Thibodeau has never met a game he didn’t want to win or a team he didn’t want to coach into a fine dust. So, while the evening ended as all preseason evenings do — a bunch of third-stringers savagely tugging the last shreds of meat from the bone — this one, for the most part, felt about as real and tangible as a preseason game could.
That made for fun. That made for the joys of basketball and the anguishes of basketball. The entire night was a roller coaster of momentum, with New York gaining a hearty ascendancy early on before losing it to a feisty fightback from Minnesota’s second unit as the first quarter dwindled and the second started up.
The game teetered in a similarly entertaining way in the third quarter, before the starters on both sides trickled to the bench and Minnesota’s deep bench swiped the game by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into their favor.
The notables on the night extended past the score, however, as is often the case for exhibition games. Firstly, Minnesota were jacking those fuckers up from long-range; they finished the night with 48 attempts from deep, knocking down 20 of them to saunter off with a more-than-respectable 41.7 percent clip. For reference, they only attempted more shots from deep twice last season.
And, perhaps on a related frequency, the night was littered with the type of ball-movement that felt like a pipe dream last season. The kind of stuff that wrenches a poor offense out of the depths of hell and pushes it back into the light. All night long, even on shots that ended up clanking, the team was looking to make the extra pass and find the most efficient pocket of space.
At times, it felt like they were overpassing and turning down looks that ultimately should have gone up. That mentality is one worth bottling, though, and turning it down a touch is certainly easier than having to fire it up.
It was far from a perfect night defensively — they fouled too often and they never really found a way to stop New York’s guards and wings from breaking the paint — but Minnesota were able to hang around and ultimately prevail thanks to a process-driven approach on both ends.
The mood music around this preseason feels a lot different to last season. More angelic melodies and less heavy metal chaos. More slow-dancing and head-banging. It’s the kind of stuff worth listening to.
Mike Conley: 5/10
Felt strangely unlike a Mike Conley performance. He’s usually everything you associate with calm. Lapping waters and green meadows and shit like that. This night felt a little more sped up, a little more frenzied as he tried to dodge the grasping tentacles of New York’s defense.
He was harried on the ball by Jalen Brunson, Quinten Grimes and Donte DiVincenzo throughout his entire night and that limited his effectiveness. Conley didn’t fly off the handle, it’s hard to imagine he ever could, but he wasn’t able to slither into his usual gaps and punch his ticket in the usual way.
He had a handful of smart plays as a shooter, driver and playmaker coming off his favorite empty corner pick-and-roll actions, but it was mostly a muted night outside of that.
Finished with 5 points (86.8% TS) and 3 assists in 19 minutes — -36.7 net rating.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker: 2/10
With Jaden McDaniels out of the lineup for the rest of the preseason and potentially onward, Alexander-Walker is suddenly a starter and an important stitch within the fabric of this team. And we know he can handle being that stitch. We know because we’ve seen him add value in his own unique way. However, this was a night where everything went wrong. The stitch wasn’t stitching. The whole fucking tapestry was in danger of unraveling when he was on the court.
The game had barely gotten going before he had bricked three wide-open jumpers, and he was insulating his offensive struggles by fouling everything that moved on the other side of the ball. He managed to right the sinking ship a little before the night was out with a made triple and a few nice defensive possessions, but this was ultimately one worthy of a goldfish’s memory.
Hopefully, this was just one of those games. He has a big role to play over the coming weeks.
Finished with 5 points (41.7% TS) and 2 assists in 17 minutes — -71.4 net rating.
Anthony Edwards: 7/10
He embodied the up-and-down nature of the game. At times, the game was a lawless post-apocalyptic wasteland and Edwards ambled through it, embracing all it had to offer, savoring the whole enterprise.
On any given possession he could be seen jacking up an ill-advised jumper or parlaying machete-sharp crossovers into earth-shaking dunks. Depending on when you looked, he might be turning the ball over with a sloppy pass or lasering a skip pass into a shooter’s pocket. Both shackling point-of-attack defense and inert containment were on the menu, too.
The thing that remains consistent with Edwards is that he has moments. Moments that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and dance a merry fucking jig. The aforementioned dunk was madman shit. The transition crossover-into-bucket was unfathomable. There will always be things that not only shock and amaze, but turn momentum in the favor of his team. Even on a night that lacked consistency, he always has those moments.
Finished with 17 points (44% TS), 8 rebounds and 2 assists in 27 minutes — +5.2 net rating.
Karl-Anthony Towns: 8/10
Compared to his first two preseason games this one came with a few more hurdles to leap and he didn’t always soar over them with the same grace. There were more defensive breakdowns and more questionable decisions with the ball than would be ideal. However, they were still mostly footnotes compared to the intriguing and the exciting stuff.
Emblazed and emboldened at the top of the list is the way he is willing to launch 3-pointers. Eight of his 14 field goal attempts were from long range (4-of-8) and that can only be a good sign. It wasn’t just KAT seeking uncontested looks, either, he was firing with hands in his face or coming off-movement or trailing in transition.
He’s the best shooting big man on the whole fucking planet but that only applies if he is willing to leave the defense marooned in the blender by leveraging and weaponizing that unique skill set. And, when he dovetails that shooting with his playmaking and his driving threat, as he did in this one, then he becomes a multi-limbed basketball alien who can probe the defense from every direction.
It’s been nice rediscovering his dominance again.
Finished with 17 points (57.1% TS), 5 rebounds and 3 assists in 27 minutes — -9.1 net rating.
Rudy Gobert: 4/10
Felt a little reminiscent of last season’s Gobert. Not horrific, not lose-you-the-game bad, but just cumbersome and ultimately unimpressive. More in the way than in the thick of things.
Whereas he’d been doing a great job of staying out of the way of drivers and cutters in the opening preseason games, he spent too much time asking for the ball in post-ups or clogging the lane this time around. He ended with a single field goal attempt and a single trip to the charity stripe whilst failing to link up with Conley, Edwards or Towns in any meaningful way.
He was the chief rebounder out there which is always nice to see and the defense remains much better when he is patrolling the paint, but there still wasn’t anything in either of those categories to get outwardly excited about.
We’ve seen it work much better than it did in this one. They’ll need to quickly get back to that.
Finished with 4 points (106.4% TS) and 9 rebounds in 22 minutes — +6.2 net rating.
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