The KAT came back

The Timberwolves sets up a potential future opportunity to make things interesting.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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The Wood; Max Ernst; 1927

We will not have two sweeps in the conference finals and a nine-day layoff before the NBA Finals this year. We will have one sweep — the Celtics are on break for a good, long while — but the Mavericks must indeed show back up to work on Thursday. All because Karl-Anthony Towns finally had a good offensive game in this series. And yet, it’s really hard to just plainly call it a “good game.”

In the first half, KAT faced foul trouble and took just three field goal attempts. Even though the game was tied, it felt like Dallas was in control. Anthony Edwards had a marvelous first quarter and iffy second quarter. KAT, Rudy Gobert and Edwards all had three fouls already. The Minnesota bench was 3/9 from the floor, Luka Doncic was hitting threes and the Mavericks were tied despite bad shooting and finishing.

And then KAT got rolling, finally. He went 4/4 with a three and an and-1 in seven minutes in the third (more foul trouble) and scored 10 more in the fourth … before fouling out on the most obvious “he’s going to foul here” possession perhaps of the entire postseason to date. (Luka in isolation with KAT. Doncic stepback, foul, goodbye.)

Towns finished with 25 on 13 shots. It honestly felt like 50 given how bad he’d been in the series.

The fouls were so bad. His bad fouls are a mix of predictable and unfathomable. I’m still so deeply confused about his decision to give P.J. Washington some sweet chin music on a … fake jumper to jump pass after he’d just scored eight points in three minutes? At first I thought it was incidental contact and a flop. How do you really elbow someone in the chops when faking a three-pointer to pass it off to the side? But it turns out Karl-Anthony Towns really did that! That was No. 5. He sat the rest of the third.

Critical and yet so flawed. It makes for an interesting team, if nothing else.