Quotes from last night include:
"Wake-up call for sure. Lock in. Lock the **** in. Everybody coming in here thinking it’s sweet playing the Pelicans. Whooped our ass. Now our back’s on the wall again. We got to wake up."
"We think we the only ones on the team. We got to be willing to pass the ball. There’s no “I” in team. We can’t beat five people with three people. We beat five people with five people."
"I’m gonna start talking more as far as, ‘you need to lock in, bruh. Pass the ball. Four people on you, pass the ball, know what I’m sayin?’ I’m finna start talking a lot more. It’ll be better coming from me."
I wanted to highlight in part because Ant's postgame was not included in the Wolves Radio postgame soundcloud, suggesting Ant may have been speaking some truths that made some people uncomfortable.
Not going to lie, I didn't think it would be the first loss of the year that Ant would try to take the reigns from KAT and D'Lo..
But you know what... I am Team Ant.
KAT is playing well. He did the work this offseason to get into better shape. But I am not sure he will ever overcome the mental element. (And this has nothing to do with his off court problems, which are truly tough -- I have never lost a parent so can't imagine what he's been through.) He's been this way since his Sophomore season and nothing has changed. He lets players and refs get into his head. He fights his own teammates for rebounds. He is trapped in his own head and he can't get out.
The reason I am being hard on KAT is because he really does have the talent and skill to be MVP in this league and be the No. 1 option on a title contender. But he just doesn't seem to have the head for it. For all that talk last year about how his All-NBA snubs were due to the fact that the team wasn't winning and that his accolades would come if the Wolves were competitive, he hasn't done a whole lot these past two games to contribute to winning basketball.
All of this talk about culture after game 1 and 2 and yet he just cannot live up to it on the court. Culture is a collective concept. If you are stuck in your own head, and are all about you, then you can't participate in culture.
Ant.. You can tell he knows how to turn his ego on and off. Ant can be mad at a ref for a minute and then completely forget about the matter the next. KAT can't do that. It sticks with him. It gnaws at him, reducing KAT to worst kind of NBA Super Star: A glorified stat whore.
I call all this out because KAT's teammates see it. And if you have noticed I have not mentioned D'Lo until right now, it's because no one on the Wolves gives a crap about D'Lo. Sure, they probably like him as a teammate and they want him to succeed. But they have not rested the fate of their season on D'Lo. Not the case with KAT. Everyone on the Wolves roster looks at KAT as the face of the franchise, and in the past two games, KAT has shown nothing to his teammates to suggest that he can lead this team to title contention.
Ant.. The kid is 20 years old and he seems to have the presence of a 10-year vet. I think Ant's comments last night only proved that Ant becoming the face of this franchise is only a matter of when, not if. And by the sounds of things last night, it might come sooner than any of us really imagined.