Could you take a punch from Rudy Gobert?
Kyle Anderson can, and let’s be honest, it’s pretty impressive. Gobert didn’t exactly land a haymaker on his teammate during a timeout on Sunday, but the Timberwolves center is a big man — 7-foot-1 and 258 pounds pure muscle. A decent push would send most of us into the scorer’s table.
Not Anderson. With cat-like reflexes, he raised his hands to deflect Gobert’s right jab and let teammate Taurean Prince clean up with an assertive shove. But if Anderson survived Gobert’s wrath — he played 37 minutes in a regular season-ending 113-108 victory over New Orleans — one wonders how the Timberwolves will.
In the short term, the Timberwolves were forced to start the NBA’s play-in tournament without Gobert, suspended by the team, and Jaden McDaniels, who, because these are the Timberwolves, made Sunday an even worse day for Minnesota by punching a wall and breaking his right hand.
For any other NBA team, it would be an astonishing turn of events — best post defender out for the biggest game of the season, one of the team’s best perimeter defenders out indefinitely. Responding to the team’s decision to suspend Gobert for a game, one season-ticket holder on Friday said, “Do they even want to go to the playoffs?”
It doesn’t seem like it, does it?
At least Gobert will be back, as far as we know, for Friday’s elimination play-in game. And then — again, as far as we know — for at least two more seasons. He is the third corner of a triangle, with big Karl-Anthony Towns and guard Anthony Edwards, that Minnesota envisioned as the base for a bright, upwardly mobile future.
Anderson and some teammates said Sunday afternoon’s brouhaha was over by Sunday night and that fences had been mended. But let’s not pretend Gobert, while playing largely as advertised, has been a slam-dunk acquisition. While it hasn’t been a total disaster, it hasn’t gone swimmingly, either.
For one thing, a calf injury that sidelined Towns for 53 games has essentially delayed the two-bigs experiment for an entire season and, thus, delayed whatever gains were to be made this year for another season. For another, rather than provide leadership on a team with promising young players such as Edwards and McDaniels, Gobert, 30, has been something of a live wire.
After intentionally tripping Oklahoma City’s Kenrich Williams and getting tossed from a Dec. 3 loss to the Thunder, Gobert fell on his sword and told reporters, “Always got to be the bigger person. … Especially as a leader of this team.” Then on Sunday, he snaps in the huddle on the Timberwolves bench and goes after Anderson, an eight-year veteran forward the Wolves added from Memphis last offseason.
Speaking Tuesday morning on KFXN-100.3, Finch called the Gobert-Anderson incident “a moment in time” that had come and gone, a heat-of-the-moment outburst that happens a lot more than casual fans realize.
Maybe so, but it wasn’t quite over because the Timberwolves, forced into a corner because the altercation took place in front of 18,000 fans at Target Center and anyone who might have been watching on television, felt it necessary to send a message by suspending Gobert for Tuesday night’s game, which they lost in overtime to the Lakers. Minnesota now faces a do-or-die game at home Friday in which it will either secure the No. 8 seed or an early offseason.
That’s not what anyone, including Minnesota fans, expected this season.
First-year player personnel chief Tim Connelly spent a lot of capital to bring Gobert to Minnesota, trading useful veterans Malik Beasley, Patrick Beverley, and Jarred Vanderbilt, plus four first-round draft picks, to Utah before Minnesota even started paying its portion of a five-year, $205 million contract that runs through 2024-25 and includes a player option in 2025-26.
What a time to be a Timberwolves fan, not that there have been many good ones.
It’s 2023, a full 34 regular seasons since the team was founded as an expansion franchise in 1990, and with the exception of a handful of years under the leadership of the late Flip Saunders, the Timberwolves have vacillated between being awful and mediocre, making the playoffs only 10 times. Yet here we are, mouths agape. Again.
At least it’s never boring. Whether it’s the rules-breaking skullduggery of the Joe Smith contract, Malik Beasley threatening a family out looking at open houses or drafting point guards with the fifth and sixth overall picks in the 2009 draft, the Timberwolves always manage to give their fans — and the rest of the NBA — something to gawk at.
