Welcome back to BASKETBALLWEATHER. I don’t know about you but my favorite series of the playoffs is happening now. There have been other good ones but there’s something about this Dallas/Minnesota series that satisfies me rhythmically. It’s like I can relax when I’m watching it in a way that I have not been able to when I’m watching the other playoff games, Milano cookies crumbs and shit all over my shirt.
Perhaps they could bottle up the Dallas/Minnesota series and put it into a capsule so that the good people of the internet can use it to manage their anxiety?
ANT ⬆️
There’s so much to love about Dallas this series, the greatness of both Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, the existential threat Derrick Lively’s defense poses to Minnesota’s entire offense, the sensational court vision of Luka that leads to lob after lob after lob, but I kinda want to focus on Minnesota’s top dog for a beat.
I’ve seen ANT play in person and have always been a fan of his game. He’s made major strides in the playoffs this year, and is clearly on the trajectory to being the so called “face of the league,” a wishy washy title that seems reserved for an American player who embodies the killer instinct of a true military assassin.
But at the same time, what has become clear, is that ANT is exactly what it says he is on his birth certificate — 22 years old. (At twenty two years old I had just ditched my graduation, hungover after a night of clubbing in the Meat Packing District.)
Anthony Edwards led his team to the Western Conference Finals, and yet what was obscured by the Timberwolves’ victory over the Nuggets in the last round is that he hasn’t been playing that well. It was clear after they won Game 7 in Denver, but no one felt comfortable telling that story because they had won, another example of how winning can obscure hard, uncomfortable truths. See: R. Kelly, Bernie Madoff, Brett Kavanaugh, for some more examples of that.
Of course
I’m in no way saying that Anthony Edwards is undeserving of the shine we have given him, or in any way comparable to a creepy Supreme Court Justice, I’m merely saying that he’s too young to be the best player on a championship team in 2024, and that the area where it becomes most apparent is in his end-game decision making, painfully represented by his bad pass in the waning seconds of the Game 2 loss in the Western Conference Finals, a game where his team was on its heels for the entire second half.
The announcers on the broadcast had been making references to it all night . That ANT looked intimidated, that if the Timberwolves had any chance to win he would need to “play downhill,” aka be more aggressive, and play after play, moment after moment, he avoided it.
Was it because he was tired? ESPN reporter Dave McMenamin reported on X that Ant was sucking down an oxygen tank during a game break. So maybe.
But it’s more than that too. I think his decision making, at the highest level, when the pressure was on, and the smartest basketball minds on the planet were obsessed with stopping him, was compromised the way a writer might be compromised when forced to edit a manuscript while a pool of sharks circled his raft.
Pressure undoubtedly affects decision making, and ANT’s decision making under the intense pressure of playoff basketball, like every great player before him, from a young Michael Jordan, to Nicola Jokic, has been compromised because he has never seen anything like this before.
It was supposed to happen prior to the Western Conference Finals, but perhaps the fact that it didn’t revealed nothing except that the Phoenix Suns and even Denver Nuggets were nowhere near as good as the Dallas Mavericks. Regardless, in order to defeat an obstacle, minds need first to absorb it; science says. It’s why astronauts train in gravity tanks before they go to space — it’s impossible to know what the human brain will do until it’s confronted with the real thing, a skin of battle type thing, and unfortunately there’s no gravity tank for high stakes playoff basketball.
On the flip side
No one had the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference Finals this year, even after the trades for PJ Washington & the other dude, the picks for the championship were always Denver and Boston. And The Swifty’s.
Oh wait sorry wrong sports league.
Swift and that football player ⬆️
Here’s the point, when the venerable NBA scholar Zach Lowe makes an official apology on his podcast, and admits that the Dallas Mavericks made the right call trading for Kyrie Irving, a decision that everyone, and I mean everyone, took a shit on for various reasons, it sorta tells me that greatness happens in the shadows.
That real brilliance doesn’t come from the expected places but from the places you might least expect.
Everyone thought that what Dallas was doing last year by trading for Kyrie Irving was idiotic. That it was going to send them back to the underworld of the NBA, they were on no one’s radar when the season started.
You sorta get why.
Kyrie, for years, was considered a toxic piranha, a laughing stock by NBA media and front office types alike.
I don’t even think Dallas was confident that Kyrie was going to work out when they traded for him, but they had to do it. Had they not, they would’ve been stuck with a once in a lifetime talent like Luka Doncic, who unlike ANT had already taken his playoff bumps, and was ready to win, feeling like his team did not put everything on the table for his potential. That would’ve been basketball suicide.
It’s likely that Luka would’ve bounced had the risk backfired, but at least a small chance existed that it might work out if they made the trade, and with their hand forced, and the pressure on, god bless them, they went for it.
Sometimes not having a choice is the only way to make a decision. I’m not sure if that helps Anthony Edwards at this stage of his young NBA life, but here’s what I do know: If the Timberwolves have any shot of winning the next game ANT is going to have to play like it’s the last game he will ever play in his life. There’s something to be said about the power of ignorance too.
Thank you, thank you, thank
You :)