At first it looked like the Minnesota Timberwolves had a fetish for humiliation.
For the cynics and snark-adjacent among us, peak engagement occurred late in the first quarter of Game Two against the Nuggets in Denver Monday night. There is no better way to announce that your defense is going to be a day late and a dollar short than by fouling a shooter who is in the midst of making a three-pointer. It’s the sort of odd calamity that occurs maybe once in every 10 games that are played in the NBA.
The Wolves did it three times in the space of 99 seconds.
When Denver’s lead grew to 44-25 two minutes into the second quarter, eulogies began to replace summaries as the avenue to describe the outcome of this game – and this 2025-26 season – for a Wolves roster marinating in blithe underachievement. Denver was going to win its 14th game in a row and take a commanding 2-0 lead in the best of seven series. The Wolves were going to enter a narrative where various personnel were shamed or shunted out of town, the pages in their story turned or burned.
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Then came the pinch-me comeback. It didn’t come via the simplistic cliché of a switch being flipped, a superior team deigning to strut into the fray. It came the hard way, with bodies as kindling and the defensive rotations and offensive movement and pace rubbed together diligently enough to generate a spark; then two; then a few; until those sparks were sustaining the kindling into a slow burning glow of desire and belief. Slowly, but surely as these comeuppances get emblazoned, the snarky cynicism and premature season obituary were consumed into ash.
Rudy Gobert vs. Nikola Jokic
Rudy Gobert knows something about snark. For cowards of cruelty who bray from the peanut gallery and know there is a critical mass who insulate them from pushback for making fun of Gobert, he is a punching bag, a tool for light and rhythmic exercise, on social media. But for the big media windbags, former and current players whose attention-getting skills have started to delve into desperation, Gobert is the heavy bag they use to imagine their impact is still capable of crippling body shots that will make Rudy wince and keel over.
Maybe Nikola Jokic listens to or reads those folks. Or, more likely, “The Joker” recalled how well Rudy guarded him in Game One and sought to send the message that recent history wouldn’t repeat itself. Whatever the motivation, one of the most accurate and visionary passers in NBA history wasn’t interested in tapping into that skill during a crucial handful of game-altering clutch possessions Monday night. Instead, he opted for mano-a-mano with his fellow European; may the best man win.
Jokic had already drawn first blood after the game entered the nail-biting stage, swooping down to confront a momentarily wide-open Gobert, who mistakenly paused to gather and then had his lunch eaten via a Jokic swat with 5:38 to play and the Nuggets up 3, 107-104. But Jaden McDaniels gathered the rebound and fed to Julius Randle for a driving layup that shaved the margin to a single point.
For Denver’s next three offensive possessions, it was Jokic v. Gobert.
Jokic received the pass out behind the three-point arc and lofted it over Rudy’s hasty closeout – for an air ball. Next time down, the score still 107-106, he chose to ignore the screen set by Jamal Murray and drove hard-left with Rudy still on him, the Joker intent on either a banked layup or a Gobert foul. But Rudy whittled the angle enough to deny either possibility.
The third time was not the charm. The Wolves were now up, 108-107, and Jokic crab-dribbled Rudy down in the left block, deked left and spun right for an 8-foot hook shot that traveled seven-and-half feet, stubbing the front iron.
Jokic waited nearly a full minute to resume his chosen battle. The score was 110-108 Timberwolves and the clock was a few seconds away from three minutes left to play in the game. His patience worn thin and the shot clock at the ten-second mark, he dribbled down into the low left block and then right into the lane until he was seven feet straight away from the hoop. He feigned a right-handed jump hook that Rudy had sussed and would have snuffed.
Then Jokic really did become the Joker, transforming what looked like a left-side up-and-under counter into a full 360-degree spin to get back to a layup with his right hand. But Gobert didn’t bite hard enough on the gambit, and Jokic was forced to burrow down and around Rudy’s left ribs to get past him, which knocked him slightly off balance and enabled McDaniels to disrupt his dribble. Jokic got it back but Rudy had never left, and was in perfect position to go straight up in full extension, denying the finesse Jokic had planned to deploy at the pinnacle, the shot more of a prayer than nifty plot twist, bouncing high enough from the carom for Rudy to swat it out toward Randle to end the possession.
It was the kind of play that compelled the fates to drop a coin on Gobert’s side of the scales of justice.
Jokic missed another trey, again off the front iron, on the next Nuggets possession before finally getting his consolation prize, a resounding dunk with Denver down four and fifty seconds left to play. Too little, too late.
Let the record show that Nikola Jokic, who missed 17 of 82 games this season and still doled out 63 more assists than any other NBA player, went at Rudy Gobert six times in the final five minutes of a tight playoff game, making just one of those six shots without ringing up a single dime.
DiVincenzo was everywhere in Wolves’ comeback
I call Donte DiVincenzo “Ragu” because his scrappy style of play deserves a nickname and Ragu is the one most commonly deployed. In a game where the Wolves rallied back from ridicule on the strength of sweat equity, Ragu was in his element. Minnesota outscored the Nuggets by 20 points in the 30:34 he played, meaning they were outscored by 15 in the 17:26 he sat. The next-best impact in terms of plus/minus, was Julius Randle at +6.
Granted, plus/minus is not regarded as an especially germane analytic, especially in the tiny sample size of a single game. But over the course of the entire 2025-26 season, Ragu’s total plus/minus of +337 was the only number that eclipsed the Wolves overall regular season total of +275. The next three players were Gobert at +233, Randle at +232 and Ant at +162.
Ragu himself didn’t care for the plus/minus stat when I brought it up in the locker room after Game Two, but he was willing to explain how he tries to positively impact the game.
“Just focusing on the little things. Getting my hands on stuff. Disrupting their rhythm of plays. That half-second where you’re disrupting the play, Jaden gets back in front (of his man on defense), Rudy gets back in front. And then (Denver) make or miss.”
That “fly around” mentality is what fueled the Wolves during Chris Finch’s first full season at the helm, when Pat Beverely and Jarred Vanderbilt were lacing the high-wall defensive scheme with adrenaline. Ragu’s best example on Monday was snatching an apparent offensive rebound away from Jokic to go the length of the court for a layup to bump the lead from one to three during clutch time.
But the sneaky good ingredient Ragu brought to the party on Monday was pushing the pace on offense. Ironically, it is an aspect of the game where he trails Bones Hyland and especially Ayo Dosunmu in terms of setting a tone. It has been obvious all season that a faster pace creates quicker decisions and superior ball movement for the Wolves offense; Bones provided key bits of evidence to that effect and then Ayo dumped a full dossier worth of plays in support of it after being acquired from Chicago.
On Monday, Ragu had six assists (tied for a team high with Randle) and on every single one of them the ball was in his hands less than two seconds. And while single-game measures of pace are a suspect as plus/minus stats over a single contest, it is no coincidence that on a night when Ragu led in plus/minus the Wolves played at a super-quick 108.35 possessions per 48 minutes with him in the game, versus 102.50 possessions overall.
‘Playoff Ant’ returns, Randle contributes
Last but not least, a hat tip to the Wolves top two scorers, Ant and Randle, who bounced back from subpar performances in Game One and absorbed the attention that can, and did, wear out the Nuggets defense.
Despite protestations that he was merely fatigued coming back from a layoff, it is very obvious that the inflammation in Ant’s knee has hindered his mobility and hops in recent games, including most all of Game One and in the early going of Game Two. But on Monday, he pushed through it, did a legitimate facsimile of “playoff Ant” with torrid drives to the cup and accurate step-back treys en route to 30 points.
Randle, who shared the podium postgame with Ant, gushed about how his teammate’s ability to play through pain inspired him to a dramatically improved performance Monday. That upgrade may have been more important, because the type of injury Ant is enduring gets worse with heightened activity, and even with an extra day or two of rest in these first-round contests, “playoff Ant” is far from guaranteed.
Neither is peak Randle, of course, but after a horrible performance in Game One, he emptied a copious portion of his considerable bag in Game Two. On Saturday, his lone two assists were achieved well into the fourth quarter. On Monday, he sprinkled a half dozen throughout the game and gave credit to a faster pace for better decision-making while coming down the court facing the basket rather backing down defenders and flinging it out to shooters later in the shot clock.
I ripped Randle for taking and missing three treys in the span of four minutes on Saturday, terrible shot selection that sabotaged the offense. On Monday, he splashed a pair of threes in the first period and was a rare emblem of competence in the early going. Later on, he got switched on to ace Nuggets scorer Jamal Murray and used his ever-surprising lateral quickness to siphon the smugness out of Murray attempts at a clear field goal attempt, forcing him to raise the white flag with a perfunctory pass to a teammate who airballed a trey before the shot clock expired. And when Gobert got in foul trouble in the second period Monday, Randle helped make it a blessing in disguise by doing a credible job defending Jokic while the team unlocked its offense via pace and spacing with Gobert on the pine.
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There are a lot of things Randle does that are easy to dislike – you’ve read them here more than once. But his rock-solid frame was a potent piece of that kindling on Monday.
At first, it looked like the Minnesota Timberwolves had a fetish for humiliation on Monday night. But at last, the ineptitude looked like rope-a-dope lulling the Nuggets into an overconfident whupping in the minutes that mattered most.
The fourth quarter numbers were stunning. The Wolves outrebounded Denver, the team with the best defensive rebounding percentage in the NBA after the All Star break this season, 16-9 in the fourth quarter, racking up a whopping 20 points in the paint and eight second-chance points. For the game, the Wolves held a 20-3 lead in second-chance points. Meanwhile, Denver’s shots were increasingly short, led by Jokic. The sterling pick-and-roll duo of Jokic and Murray were a combined 2-for-13 from the field in that final stanza.
After flirting with disaster, the Minnesota Timberwolves, participants in the Western Conference Finals the previous two seasons, have rediscovered their fetish for postseason excellence. How long they indulge is suddenly a hot topic.
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