What a night of scoreboard watching it was on Monday night in the Western Conference.
Were your hands sweaty while going from the Wolves game to the Spurs game to the Blazers/Nuggets game?
Same.
On the base level, the most-important news for a Wolves fan is that they won on Monday night against the Grizzlies.
Minnesota needed a Spurs win over the Kings and a Blazers win over the Nuggets to clinch a spot.
The Spurs came back to beat the Kings in the fourth, but the Nuggets ruined everything by beating the Blazers in quite the ugly fourth-quarter battle. No clinch for the Wolves on Monday night.
As of Tuesday morning, the Wolves sit at 46-35, eighth in the West. The Nuggets are also 46-35 after their win over the Blazers in Denver.
The Wolves have the 2-1 tiebreaker over the Nuggets as of now, but guess what? In today’s “you can’t make this up” news, the two teams are scheduled to play on Wednesday night at Target Center with a playoff berth on the line in the season finale.
GIVE THE SCHEDULE MAKER A RAISE!
If Denver were to win, it’d have a better divisional record, thus giving the Nuggets the tiebreaker. But let’s not think like that.
The Wolves are 2-1 against the Nuggets this season. Both wins came with Jimmy Butler in the lineup, while the loss last Thursday was Butler’s last game sitting out with a knee injury. In those two wins over Denver (one in overtime), Butler averaged 32 points, 4.5 assists and 3.0 rebounds while shooting 51.4 percent from the field and 40 percent from the 3-point line.
Read: Having Jimmy Butler in the lineup is a very good thing for the Timberwolves.
This isn’t necessarily a “battle for the eighth seed.”
Well, for the Nuggets, it is.
But, if the Wolves were to win, they could climb up in the standings depending on how other teams do. For instance, if the Pelicans fall to the Spurs on Wednesday night and the Wolves beat the Nuggets, the Wolves would jump over the Pelicans since they’d have the same 47-35 record and the Wolves have the 4-0 season-series tiebreaker over the Pelicans. Same goes for the Thunder. OKC is unlikely to fall to Memphis on Wednesday, but if so, the Wolves would also jump the Thunder with the 3-1 season-series tiebreaker. And to blow up your brain a little more . . . In a vacuum, if the Jazz would fall to the Warriors and Blazers on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, the Wolves and Jazz would have the same 47-35 record and since the teams split the season series and Minnesota would have a better divisional record, the Wolves would have the tiebreaker.
Confusing stuff, I know. The most-important thing for a Wolves fan to know is that a win on Wednesday gets them in. Everything else will take care of itself.
Wednesday night will be the most-important Timberwolves game in more than a decade and it’s a chance for the Wolves to earn at least four more games of equal importance.
Let’s party.