Wolves hold on to beat Suns 115-108

The Suns rolled into Minneapolis tonight with a slightly better record than the Wolves at 8-19. The Wolves and Suns are built fairly similarly at the moment. Both teams have an “older” point guard, obviously Rubio for the Wolves, and Bledsoe for the Suns, to lead a group of enticing young assets. The Suns package of young talent (Booker, Warren, Len, Chriss, Bender) isn’t quite on par with the Wolves’ but is a group that should give Phoenix fans some hope for a bright future. Still, the Wolves should be better than the Suns this season and they showed that tonight with a win.

This victory was a product of the starting unit. The Wolves “Big 3” combined to score 77 points on 29/54 shooting, Rubio had 12 assists, and Gorgui had a near double-double. This is sort of the blueprint for this team, the key young studs score a lot of points, Rubio gets them the ball in the rights spots, and Gorgui fills in with energy and defense. However this blueprint is more applicable in the playoffs. Every starter played over 35 minutes and only one bench player, Shabazz, played over 15 minutes. The fact that Dunn only played 11 minutes is concerning, he needs to be given some more playing time to get in a groove.

As this game came down the stretch I couldn’t help but think about the collapse against the Rockets from Saturday night. While the Suns aren’t exactly a team I’d expect to pull off a comeback like the Rockets had, it still felt very important that the Wolves held onto the lead they had built. This game was in striking range for the Suns for much of the 4^th quarter but the closest it got was at 103-105 with 4 minutes left and then the Wolves closed it out. There were some mistakes in the final quarter, notably a bad TO from a Rubio pass to Gorgui who had decided to set a down screen after it appeared he was looking for a pass. When it really mattered the Wolves made the plays they needed. Towns had a series of put-back attempts that ended with an old-fashioned three-point play to stop the Suns momentum. Next possession down Lavine hit a big three that put the Wolves up 6 and from there the Suns were the team making the errors in the final few minutes.

Overall it was a good win for the Wolves. It’d be nice to win more convincingly against teams like the Suns but with the rough start to the year we’ll take wins of all margins. The Wolves now move half a game ahead of the Suns in the standings.