Minnesota @ Brooklyn - 11/5/12 (NBATV)

Last night I found a nice temporary refuge from election noise when I stumbled on a live NBATV broadcast of the Minnesota-Brooklyn game at the Barclays Center. I picked this 107-96 Wolves win up with 9:00 minutes left and Brooklyn holding a comfortable 90-82 lead.

This was my first live, in-game look at the Nets new arena and new jerseys. My initial impression is that they’re clearly the new standard-bearer on the Any Given Sunday Scale for Athletics Aesthetics. By this I mean, the sleek black & white of their uniforms and court are awesome, but definitely look and feel like they were designed by Oliver Stone in an attempt to portray professional sports as a corrupt, unfeeling, and entirely commercial enterprise controlled by the greed of malevolent, conspiratorial tycoons. If Steamin’ Willie Beamen were a shooting guard, or Cameron Diaz's Christina Pagniacci owned a real-life NBA team, they'd definitely be Nets all the way.

Life imitates art

 As I start to follow the game action, I look to my Hoops Hype season previews to catch up on their respective off-season moves, leading me to this question about the Timberwolves: If you add Louis Amundson, Chase Budinger, Will Conroy, Dante Cunningham, Chris Johnson, Mike Harris, Andrei Kirilenko, Brandon Roy, Alexey Shved, while subtracting Michael Beasley, Wayne Ellington, Darko Milicic, Brad Miller, Anthony Randolph, Anthony Tolliver and Martell Webster in a basketball forest, does anybody actually hear it? Seriously, how can 16 players come and go from a roster without any clear consequence? Have any more junk parts ever been swapped? This has to be the most that roster management will ever resemble a hamster running on a treadmill, right?

That aside, let me just say, after watching this 9 minutes of basketball, I am decidedly not bullish on the Nets at the moment. As your arithmetic has already told you, in the time I watched, Brooklyn blew their lead by letting the game end on a pretty astounding 25-6 Wolves run. What’s worse is that the comeback was mounted almost entirely by those NBA vagabonds: JJ Berea, Alexey Shved, Lance (Chase Budinger, I’ll explain in a moment), Dante Cunningham, and Nikola Pekovic. Together, that sounds like a 3rd seed in the Israeli League playoffs, not a lineup that can take over the 4th quarter of an NBA game. This is a bad sign for the Nets.

A couple key observations from the Wolves’ comeback.

1. Nikola Pekovic was a beast. Guy went for 21 points on 9-15 from the floor, attacked the offensive glass HARD en route to six o-boards, and just generally bullied Kris Humphries and Brook Lopez throughout the 4th quarter. A lot of people expected Pekovic to start the year slow after spending much of his off-season shooting Taken 2, where he co-starred as one of Liam Neeson’s daughter's unnamed, scary-looking Eastern European assailants, but he was sharp tonight. (Side note, a Taken 2 question: Why does Liam Neeson’s fictional daughter keep taking exotic vacations to Eastern European countries?? I mean, kidnap me once, shame on you, kidnap me twice…)

Pekovic starring as Anonymous Evil Euro Gangster #6 in Taken 2

 

2. I just realized that in 1994, Chase Budinger had a small but memorable role as the heroin dealer, Lance, in the greatest movie ever made, Pulp Fiction. He has since cut his hair, but there’s no doubting its him.



He ditched the mid-90s grunge look, but there's no mistaking these men are one and the same

Last night, just as he did in the movie, Lance gave the Wolves a major shot of adrenaline. He went for 16 and 6 and 7-10 from the floor in just 26 minutes, logging a monster +21 on the plus/minus scale. He buried a big three to cut the Nets lead to 5 early in the run, and hit the back-breaker to make it 103-96 with 0:38 seconds left.  The guy shoots moon balls (and sells them too!) but when he's feeling it, he's feeling it (Heroin jokes!).

3. Brook Lopez stinks. During the period from 9:12 – 2:11 remaining, as the Wolves mounted an 18-6 run, Lopez took shots on 6 of 12 Nets possessions, going 1 of 6 from the field, while letting the Euro League All Stars from Minnesota do whatever they wanted around the rim. If Brook Lopez is your 4th quarter closer, especially on a team with Deron Williams and Joe Johnson, there is a major problem.