WCS Game 3: Denver at Minnesota, Friday

[KATKlownFeet]

Whoever wins game 4 wins the series. Wolves no longer can sneak up on the defending champs nor can they exploit Murray's injury. Denver has been woken up and has tasted success against the Wolves. Wolves need to relish being the underdog and scrap for 48 minutes. Three days of non-stop hype about the Wolves, talk of a sweep, their defense and how great Ant is may have gone to their heads and hopefully a good a$$kicking will do them good. We'll see.

[karch34]

Whoever wins game 4 wins the series. Wolves no longer can sneak up on the defending champs nor can they exploit Murray's injury. Denver has been woken up and has tasted success against the Wolves. Wolves need to relish being the underdog and scrap for 48 minutes. Three days of non-stop hype about the Wolves, talk of a sweep, their defense and how great Ant is may have gone to their heads and hopefully a good a$$kicking will do them good. We'll see.

Agreed 1000%

[Nick K]

Moore is under contract.

I believe he is on a team option next year and the year after. I don't see us bringing him back. Why? He's even worse than Culver.

[BlacJacMac]

Moore is under contract.

I believe he is on a team option next year and the year after. I don't see us bringing him back. Why? He's even worse than Culver.

We already picked up his option for next year during the season. His contact is guaranteed.

[KGdaBom]

One year ago we were up by 20 on Denver in the 3rd and lost all 3 games! Can we come back?

One game Nick. Don't overreact. We will get them Sunday.

[Loaf_of_bread]

Whoever wins game 4 wins the series. Wolves no longer can sneak up on the defending champs nor can they exploit Murray's injury. Denver has been woken up and has tasted success against the Wolves. Wolves need to relish being the underdog and scrap for 48 minutes. Three days of non-stop hype about the Wolves, talk of a sweep, their defense and how great Ant is may have gone to their heads and hopefully a good a$$kicking will do them good. We'll see.

We needed it. I wouldn't write us off though even if we lose sunday. We are extremely good, even though we **** the bed tonight.

Best 2 teams in the league going toe to toe... knew this going in. Gonna be ugly.

[life_saver]

Gobert with just 4 rebounds is a rarity...anyways quite a disappointing game all around.

[shangrila]

Obviously not the game we wanted but we had to know they'd hit back.

See how we bounce back in Game 4.

[winforlose]

One year ago we were up by 20 on Denver in the 3rd and lost all 3 games! Can we come back?

One game Nick. Don't overreact. We will get them Sunday.

Agreed. We had a power outage, shooting 43.7/30.2/72.0 they had an on fire game shooting 53.8/48.3/85. Moreover these numbers go higher in their favor and worse for us in competitive minutes when you filter out garbage time. Boston lost a game to the Heat when the Heat shot them out of the gym, tonight was our turn. I also think the refs backed us off on playing our brand of defense and really hurt us by taking Jaden out of the game for most of the first half. I fully expect us to bounce back.

[Guest84]

Wait...so Ant had no FTA?? Hmm

[FrenchMinnyFan]

Jokic got more rebound alone in 38 min than KAT, Rudy, NAZ combined in 80! Totally unnaceptable .Energy was just not there.
Ant and KAT combined 8 assists for 8 TO !
KAT was totally absent after a good start.
Mike shoot really bad at 3 , miss easy lay up, had TO...
Overall we shoot bad.
The only starter who was not too bad was MCD but he was limited by the fouls.
Bench was garbage...

.... too many reasons why we got smashed. It's just one game but it will deflated some heads.
I'm sure energy will be here Sunday night. GO Wolves.

[younggunsmn]

Utterly embarrassed on our home floor.
This was the very bad version of the Wolves tonight from late January.

League sent in Tony Brothers the cooler to make sure this was not a sweep.
Strategically took out McDaniels with a bunch of weak ass ticky tack fouls and just let Denver foul at will all night long and let Jokic elbow and trip players all night long on every screen he set.
Yeah its so much fun watching guys play defense when they are literally afraid to touch the guy they are guarding because Tony Brothers.
99% chance Silver doubles down and we get Scott Foster in one of the next 2 games.
What good is extending a series if you make the games unwatchable in the process?

That said we got our asses handed to us.
They made shots. We did not.

They were aggressive and assertive and put pressure on our defense when they had the ball.
When we had the ball we dicked around and chucked 3 pointers most of the night.
We deserved this beatdown and our coaches got completely wrecked by Denver's gameplan and couldn't make one successful adjustment. Lost in the game 2 hype was that our offense was dreadful in the 2nd half of that game, and that continued tonight.

Naz Reid was the only big who had a clue what he was doing defensively.
Rudy had no energy and was a complete non factor.
Anderson was just outright embarrassing.
KAT was giving way too much space as the help on the pick in the first half and wandering around like a lost lamb on help defense.
And Denver's game plan was, as so many have been over the years, to get him into pick action and exploit it.

Instead of either being assertive and trapping the **** out of actions or trusting your teammate to get through a screen, we got the worst of both worlds with guys getting out of position with a whole bunch of too late over helping while Denver zipped the ball to open shooters and cutters.

Malone made some really good adjustments and that's why he's a title winning coach.
1. He had Gordon bring the ball up (guarded by KAT or Gobert) the court an initiate the offense to counter our full court ball pressure.
2. He spread the floor and exaggerated the spacing to counter our trapping and aggressive help defense.
3. He ran some of their bread and butter actions but dressed them up better from different angles and with new ways to get into them.
So when Jokic got the ball in the middle of the floor like they always want, or Murray curled off a screen or handoff, they had us still recovering from the decoy actions they ran instead of loaded up and ready to pounce and rotate if necessary.

We did not make use of our size at all. There was no purpose on offense.
Games like this are what give Shaq and Chuck the right to criticize KAT doing nothing but chuck 3 pointers.
What in the name of George Mikan is the purpose of having a supermax 7 footer and having him take only 2 non 3-point shots in a playoff game?

The key to breaking their defense is attacking Jokic and getting their better defenders out of position trying to help him.
We spent most of our offensive possessions on one side of the court tonight.

We did not get a very good effort from our players tonight, but our coaching staff absolutely need to level up.
Game 4 is going to be huge. Win and we get 3 shots to win one game.
Lose and we have to steal one in Denver plus protect our home court in game 6.

We aren't as good as we were being talked up just 3 games ago, but we aren't as bad as we were tonight.
Tonight we got the version of Denver that went 16-4 on the way to a title last year.

We need to level up again if we want to win this series.

[younggunsmn]

And the non-Mike minutes were again pretty brutal with either NAW or Kyle running the offense.
We need something from Monte this series.
He hasn't been great here offensively since the trade, but he hasn't gotten much run either.
Coaches must not like him enough in practice if they are willing to put 2-3 of NAW, Kyle, and Rudy on the court together at the same time with no PG, which is a recipe for offensive futility.

[Shaka_Zulu]

Sadly this was too expected for me.

[Guidus88]

Last night I was a bit depressed and couldn’t find a reason for such a bad performance..maybe I was just tired since I have watched all PO games and most of them were really late in the night for European folks…
Now that I’m rested I have two question:

Can we play worse than last night? Answer is no.
Can they play better than last night? I hope no.

I mean, Wolves wise I’m not saving anyone from last night performance while all the nuggets that played were great, they really couldn’t miss!

I have still high hope for Sunday games since a win would mean to have a match point at home!

[_AIJ_]

I dont even care about the refs tonight. The team sucked tonight outiside of Garza. Horrible showing

[TimberKat]

I feel like a 10 or 15 pt loss is fine but let DEN run you over like a roadkill is demoralizing. For those that just blame Gobert, he was -10 in +/-. Ant is -32, Towns -32, JMcD -18, Conley -15, Naz -25, NWA -25. It was a team concerted effort and Gobert certainly didn't carry the team. Although take the +/- with a grain of salt. JMcL was team high +9 ( maybe a lot of that was garbage time).

[Calinks]

Championship-caliber response by Denver, that was the team I had been anticipating all playoffs. Now we need to see if we can respond.

[KGdaBom]

Championship-caliber response by Denver, that was the team I had been anticipating all playoffs. Now we need to see if we can respond.

We will.

[guest81]

The lack of energy from everyone was the weirdest thing all season. However, they did miss a ton of wide open shots and bunnies. Ant could still get to the rim whenever he wants he just didn't last night for whatever reason.

Big thing is if they let jokic get away with those hard screens. They smartly went with the strategy that they won't call every one. Those opened up murray all night and got him going. Can Gordon be steph curry 2 games in a row?

I like the wolves in game 4 all things considered