Wolves prove themselves, end Thunder's 12-game winning streak

Kevin had to Love the performance from his team Thursday night. (Getty Images)

“It’s important,” Minnesota Timberwolves’ head coach Rick Adelman said after his teams 97-91 victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder. “But I would like to see us get to a point where it’s not a big deal.

It’s a big game against the best team but this is something we can do.”

The Wolves snapped the Thunder’s 12-game winning streak in a big litmus test against the league’s best team Thursday night and needed every bit of healthy talent they had on the roster to get it done. They survived a 33-point performance from Kevin Durant and a near triple-double (or a near quadruple-double if you want to count turnovers) from Russell Westbrook in a nationally televised game that showcased just how dangerous the Wolves can be.

There are still question marks for this Minnesota team. They don’t shoot 3-pointers well, they’re still trying to get acclimated to having Ricky Rubio back on the court, and they don’t really have options on the wings without having to go awkwardly big or incredibly small. But here the Wolves were pushing back against the best team the league has to offer at this moment.

A big reason for everything was the play of Kevin Love early on, which set the tone for the Wolves and how they’d attack the Thunder. Love was brilliant in the first quarter of the game with 11 points on 4-of-4 shooting, four rebounds, and four assists. The Thunder had to figure out how to contain a player who set the Wolves’ franchise record against them back in March when he scored 51 points in a double overtime loss. And with that, the rest of the attack opened up.

Alexey Shved and Love set the tone with their passing and ability to make plays. They assisted on 10 of the Wolves 12 baskets to begin the game and made the Thunder’s defense work. When they had to worry about the ball moving around the perimeter, that’s when the Wolves hit them with their biggest weapon -- Nikola Pekovic.

Pekovic scored on five of the Wolves’ eight possessions from the 4:52 mark to the 1:51 mark of the second quarter. The Wolves used pick-and-rolls and found him right around the rim nearly every time. Whenever the Thunder ended up with a small player defending Pek at the rim, he got the ball and delivered. Every time the Thunder tried to make a run to take the lead, the Wolves matched it with one of their own.

Minnesota’s resilience in this game made sure Oklahoma City never held a lead in this entire contest.

In the fourth quarter, J.J. Barea scored 14 of his 18 points and helped the Wolves survive the eventual final push by the Thunder. He even drew an offensive foul from Durant, which got under Kevin's skin enough to cause him to get a technical foul. The Wolves made just six shots in the fourth quarter with five of them coming from Barea, who found mismatches in the defense and exploited them.

“With the way they were defending us, switching all of the pick-and-rolls,” Adelman said after the game, “J.J. did a good job of understanding that the big guy was waiting for him on the other side and the small guy was guarding Pek. (Barea) had nobody guarding him behind the pick. He saw that for three times in a row.”

The other big key in this game was Andrei Kirilenko, who had to defend Kevin Durant two nights after going against LeBron James in Miami. And while Durant ended up with 33 points on 12-of-21 shooting, Kirilenko made him work as much as possible for those points.

“As I said before the game, with those guys like Kevin Durant, LeBron and Kobe, it’s almost impossible to cut their scoring abilities,” Kirilenko said after the game. “All you can do is just make them work for those points.”

Kirilenko’s gameplan against Durant was to limit his catches. He admitted in the second half he even tried denying Durant once he passed halfcourt to make him use energy and work for every touch of the ball before he had to work for more points.

And while Durant had a great scoring night and Kirilenko eventually fouled out, Durant only took three field goal attempts after the 6:45 mark of the fourth quarter and made none of them.

What’s Kirilenko’s reward for defending LeBron and Durant in consecutive games? His next assignment is defending Carmelo Anthony in New York on Sunday. 

“No, it’s actually fun to play against the best players in the world,” Kirilenko explained. “It’s tough but it is what it is. It’s a job. When you’re preparing before the game, you understand it’s going to be a hard night for you if you don’t prepare.”

“I’ve been there and I’ve had 50 points scored on me. I don’t like that feeling.”

To withstand a 63-point effort from the Durant-Westbrook duo and still walk away with a victory is not an easy thing to do and it required a big effort from a lot of players on the Wolves. Love’s line of 28 points, 11 rebounds, and seven assists helped set up the scoring from Pekovic (24 points), the double-double from the rookie Shved (12 points, 12 assists), and the fourth quarter heroics of J.J. Barea. 

On a night in which Ricky Rubio struggled to inject life off the bench and the majority of the role players off the bench couldn’t contribute much to the bottom line, the Wolves still had enough depth and effort to stop what was the hottest team in the NBA.  

“The next time we beat a good team is that our best win? No, I don’t want that,” Adelman said in the post-game press conference. “I want to be consistent in what we do.”