Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images, courtesy of the Minnesota Timberwolves
Timberwolves
Going into Memorial Day weekend, Timberwolves fans all over the city were shell-shocked. After a long, muddy regular season, the Timberwolves surprised everyone by making it all the way back to the Western Conference Finals, only to forget to bring the ability to shoot on their business trip to Oklahoma City. This oversight, paired with some of the most appalling superstar flopping ever committed to tape, resulted in a 114-88 loss, quickly followed by a second one,118-103. The Wolves couldn’t stop the Thunder and their freshly crowned league MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and they couldn’t score against the Thunder’s D, going 15/41 from 3 in Game 1 and 11/39 from 3 in Game 2. It was an immediate 2-0 series hole that seemed deeper than just two games.
As Minnesota sports fans are well aware, there isn’t a fanbase in the world with a quicker fatalist trigger finger. This time, we all seemed to have decided to skip those stupid early steps of grief and go right into a dour depression. I overheard conspiracy theories about the refs in line at the coffee shop, there was griping about the way our players played and about how our coach coached not just on KFAN but on usually sports-free stations like MPR and Radio K, and obviously ubiquitously on social media. Whether in real life or online, there seemed to be a collective realization that the Wolves were in fact outmatched by the team with the best record in the NBA. This wasn’t a shocking two-game deficit like the one last year against the Dallas Mavericks, where we came off that Denver series expecting to win. This time we were running into the inevitability of the Thunder’s math. And it was humiliating. After Game 2, even the whining about the refs started to feel hollow. We just weren’t good enough, were we?
On the afternoon of Game 3, the day of the first home game of the series, a dude in the sauna at my gym loudly challenged his buddy: “Give me one reason the Timberwolves can win tonight!?” I couldn’t help butting in: “Anthony Edwards?” I felt instantly vulnerable for being such a guileless fan—sticking up for our 23-year-old star in the sauna somehow made me suddenly aware of the flimsiness of my medium grit Life Time Fitness towel. “No way, man,” the sauna skeptic said. “If Ant tries to be the hero, he’s going to turn it over a dozen times. We’re gonna lose by 10.”
This kind of doubt is contagious, and the city was in the middle of a full-blown doubt epidemic. By the end of the second game, Gilgeous-Alexander was giving interviews about how he loves seeing an opponent succumb to the Thunder’s defensive pressure, basically implying that he had already seen the Wolves lights go out. And we all sort of saw the same thing: There was a moment near the end of Game 2 when Jaden McDaniels, the Wolves’ glowering defensive stopper, who plays with a barely submerged rage, was hooked by SGA’s elbow for the umpteenth time without getting a whistle, and simply pushed him in the back with both hands, sending SGA skittering across the polished wooden floor like Bambi on ice. Post-game, when asked about the incident, Jaden, expressionless as usual, spoke for every Timberwolves fan in the world: “I just wanted to foul him for real.”
So by Saturday evening, after getting dropped off at Target Center a couple hours before tip, I was actually stunned by downtown’s game day buoyancy—these legions of Timberwolves fans wearing their Saturday night whites, bounding towards the arena, as if everybody had talked themselves back into some hope after a couple pre-game drinks.
I went with the same buddy with whom I attended Game 1 of the Warriors series. “Let’s redeem ourselves!” he texted me the day before. And in the first five minutes of the first quarter, it was obvious the Wolves intended to do so. The whole team was pressing further up the court, aggressively blitzing the Thunder just as the first ball screen was set. Both Rudy Gobert and Ant created early turnovers, and you could hear a huge pop from the crowd. The first bona fide eruption came after a full court scramble resulted in an Ant dunk, his first dunk of the series. That was followed quickly by an Ant strip of the Thunder’s hulking defensive specialist Lou Dort—and that collision carried that sickening bone-on-bone crunching sound that usually results in a player leaving the field with a concussion. But Ant just controlled the ball, rose up, and gently guided it in. Calm but aggressive. Just business, babe.
The Wolves were cruising and the crowd was going nuts. I’ve never heard a louder, more urgent, “DEFENSE! DEFENSE!” chant. And the Wolves’ shots were all going in. Ant had 16 points by the end of the first quarter, with the Wolves already up by 20. The Thunder looked dazed. Finch put in burly rookie TJ Shannon at the beginning of the second (fans have been calling for Shannon this entire playoff run), and the rook brought even more chaotic energy, scoring on wild rampages to the rim. Each of his layups produced another huge pop from the crowd.
By halftime the Wolves were up 30 and it was a total stress exorcism. The Thunder made some shots coming out of the locker room, going on a 10-0 run, and a nightmare comeback scenario felt briefly inevitable (Minnesota sports fan PTSD = up 25 and nervously waiting for disaster). But the Wolves kept punching. By the fourth quarter we were up 40 and when Thunder coach Mark Daigneault pulled his starters with sevem minutes left, Target Center started chanting “WE WANT JOE! WE WANT JOE!” They were calling for 38-year-old Australian super vet Joe Ingles, who has become a bit of a folk hero for his gruff social media demeanor and being open about the heartwarming journey of his neurodivergent son. Finch refused the mob’s desires, but what we got instead was garbage time Rob Dillingham and Luka Garza (who my favorite Wolves meme account hilariously refers to as a “freaky goth baddie”). Luka went off for seven points in five minutes, splashing a one-foot step-back to put us over 140 points. Not a single person left their seat until after the final horn.
The crowd spilled into the warm spring air completely relieved. Nothing on the immediate schedule but barbecue plans and a suddenly very winnable Game 4. Win that one and the Wolves would be right back in this series.
Photo by Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images, courtesy of the Minnesota Timberwolves
Timberwolves
*****
Two days later, the Memorial Day vibe in Target Center was much less sour, much more relaxed. By the time a sax player had finished a smooth National Anthem, both teams seemed ready from the jump. In the first quarter, there was some scrappy defense but it didn’t deter either team from making shots. Nevertheless, three worrying trends emerged for the home team: The Wolves kept turning it over on bad passes and offensive fouls; whenever the Wolves did force a Thunder miss, they couldn’t keep Chet Holmgren off the offensive glass; and Anthony Edwards didn’t score until 35 seconds left in the quarter. These three trends continued throughout the entire game, right up until the first tight finish of the series.
Another trend that continued throughout the game: The Target Center crowd, perhaps locked into the habit by confronting earlier post-season villains like Luka Dončić and Jimmy Butler, was doing that thing where they booed Shai Gilgeous-Alexander every single time he touched the ball. But unlike on Saturday, good things were happening nearly every time he touched it. The Wolves forced some tough SGA shots, and forced some tough SGA passes, but he made a lot of them, finishing with 40 points, and with his 10 assists, he got his teammates wide-open looks which they kept hitting, especially Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren. These three players alone accounted for 95 points.
Let’s get into SGA’s villainy. SGA is unbelievably skilled, but his likability suffers because of the way he plays. It’s not because of his demeanor—he doesn’t talk egregious trash, he’s quick with a genuine smile, and he isn’t cussing your favorite players out like Luka, or humiliating them off the court like Jimmy. SGA’s game is at times elegant, at times brutal, but always fluid. He operates in the mid-range, about 17 to 20 feet away, which at this point in the analytical era, where everything is geared towards either the three-point line or the rim, seems nearly avant garde. From there, he slithers in and out of his dance steps, daring his opponent to keep time. The problem comes when the defender falters—at which point SGA either rises up for a sweet j, or stumbles and falls. There are two results, each automatic—prob why his nickname is “the accountant”—those being either a swish, or a whistle and a trip to the line. Free throws make up less than a third of his overall points, but selling this contact to the ref, basically conning his way to the line, seems repulsively unethical. This is why he’s so hated at Target Center, with 20,000 people chanting the extremely online epithet, “FREE THROW MERCHANT! FREE THROW MERCHANT!” every time he steps up for those freebies.
The day before the game, a long column by a basketball writer named Ock Sportello dropped on Substack and quickly went viral on NBA Twitter. Titled “Toward a Unified Theory of Uncool,” it spelled out why so many of this newest crop of NBA stars are so unlikeable. There’s something internet-y about them, something grifted from an earlier iteration, and they just don’t feel authentic or new—Sportello accuses them of resembling other modern day simulations. Jason Tatum is to Kobe like a Zyn nicotine pouch is to a cigarette; Tyrese Haliburton is to Reggie Miller as a West Village Girl is to Carrie Bradshaw. He throws SGA onto this scrap heap of unsexy poseurs. Sportello:
Looking, as I often have, to the Western Conference in search of organically-farmed aura is distressing. Anthony Edwards, perhaps the most authentically cool player in professional basketball, is pitted in an alternating series of humiliation rituals against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his troupe of sycophantic court jesters, leaping in coordinated joy at his most anodyne post-game musings. For as long as I can remember, the NBA has served as a cultural North Star. These NBA playoffs portend a crisis of cool.
In his essay, Sportello positions our Ant man as “the exception that proves the rule,” and after these first four games, Wolves fans understand the contrast. Ant, with his posterizing body count, vicious Euro steps, incredibly athletic rises over three defenders, and long-range threes, has a style of play that reminds you of the greats. There’s something honest, heroic, and yes, cool about the true greats. You never see a goat like Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi flop, because they never had to. To be fair, in this series, Ant’s game has been flustered by OKC’s layered, syncopated, extremely physical defense, which in turn has deprived us of the other thing that we love so much about Ant: his equally honest, curse-filled, utterly charming post-game press conferences. We’ve known A1 from day one, and right from the start, it’s obvious that Ant is the real deal. And now we’re all re-learning one of the oldest lessons of being human—over-rehearsed, shameless try hards sometimes get further in life than the coolest people.
That’s precisely what happened in Game 4. Matched up one-on-one with a linebacker-like behemoth like Lou Dort, and almost always with a hard-nosed, savvy help defender like Alex Caruso just off his shoulder in his immediate passing lane, and with the freakishly angular Chet Holmgren lying in wait at the rim, time and time again. Ant was forced to drive into the teeth of the defense, only to make the right read and to give up the ball. Fortunately, the other Wolves usually cashed the open shot made available to them by Ant’s activity. Unfortunately, down the stretch, because the Thunder’s D had also taken away Julius Randle, the secondary Wolves option, this strategy forced the Wolves to continue to look for tertiary offensive options, usually Jaden McDaniels or Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and they were the ones taking that open shot or making the open drive. While on the other end of the court, Gilgeous-Alexander, or the Thunder’s secondary options, Jalen Williams or Chet Holmgren, were taking theirs. This played right into the Thunder’s ruthless math. Their best offensive players were basically in a duel against our second best, and they shot 65 percent in the fourth quarter. The Wolves actually ended up winning the quarter with 41 points, finally beating the Thunder to some boards for some extra possessions, but the Thunder scored 38. Final score: 128-126, Thunder. The Wolves are now down 3-1, which only 15 teams have managed to come back from in the history of the NBA playoffs.
It was a wonderful basketball game, but an incredibly agonizing result, especially for Timberwolves fans, whose chanting and cheering was silenced after one last desperate half-court heave came up wanting. Everybody filed out of Target Center quietly, holiday weekend over, forced to think about work in the morning.
Now, more than a day later, Anthony Edwards is still taking a lot of heat for the loss, simply because he’s our star. There’s a lot of stupid “face of the league” discourse, and that doesn’t mean much, but there were times maybe, while re-watching clips from the game, that Ant appeared to be a hair less than engaged on the defensive end after missing a shot, sometimes caught rotating a half step late, and okay, maybe he could’ve come up with a couple more defensive rebounds. But it’s hard to say. He’s clearly shouldering a lot of responsibility out there. And being called out by both the local and the national media for not being “aggressive enough” has to sting, if he hears any of it, which he probably does.
It’s never cool to make excuses, but he’s only 23, and he’s still learning what is demanded of him at the highest level of playoff competition. Maybe we’re looking down the long barrel of a formidable rival: Michael Jordan lost in the playoffs to Isiah Thomas and the superior Detroit Pistons three years in a row, before breaking through in 1991. Taking blunt criticism shouldn’t tempt Ant into driving into a crowded lane only to lose the ball, and it shouldn’t spur him into taking reckless threes. But maybe there is another level to his game. Or maybe his team is just not there yet—either they just don’t have the pieces to puzzle out this Thunder defense, or they’re running out of time to figure out where to place them. But neither the Timberwolves nor their fans should lose their collective cool just yet. Let’s hope for one more win tonight in a very hostile OKC arena, and at least one more game at Target Center on Friday night.
I know it’s counterintuitive, but try to be cool.
