The Minnesota Timberwolves will take on the Toronto Raptors tonight in the Air Canada Centre.
The youthful Wolves will be a little more relaxed coming into this game seeing that Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns and Zach LaVine all performed extremely well inside Toronto’s arena during All-Star weekend, and Minnesota beat the 37-18 Raptors just 14 days ago.
If the Timberwolves want to repeat their last performance against the second overall seed in the Eastern Conference, they will need to play even better as the Raptors are playing particularly well, winning seven of their last 10 games.
Let’s take a look at how Minnesota got the job done on Feb. 10th.
In a 117-112 come-from-behind victory, Minnesota’s starters (Rubio, LaVine, Wiggins, Dieng, Towns) accounted for 107 of their points. If I would have only told you that the Wolves bench only scored 10 points, you most likely would have thought, ‘wow, we must have gotten crushed,’ but thanks to a stellar performance by everyone who each played more than 35 minutes, the Wolves took down the more experienced Raptors.
Towns turned in a huge game with 35 points, 11 rebounds and three blocks; while Ricky Rubio had a near triple-double, with 19 points and eight rebounds/assists.
Gorgui Dieng provided a nice double-double with 14 points and 10 boards, and the athletic LaVine/Wiggins backcourt combined for 39 points.
When it comes to a blueprint on how to beat the Raptors, in my opinion it’s a ‘pick your poison’ kind of game.
Toronto starts two incredibly good players in point guard Kyle Lowry and shooting guard DeMar DeRozan. If you want to come out victorious against the Raptors, you need to prevent one of these two studs from ‘going off,’ and that’s exactly what Minnesota did in the last matchup.
Take a look at the following statistic comparisons. The first line shown will be Lowry and DeRozan’s season averages. The second will be their performance in their last game against Minnesota.
Lowry (avg.): 21 points (43 percent), five rebounds, 6.4 assists, 2.1 steals and 2.7 personal fouls.
Lowry (Feb. 10): 14 points (26.6 percent), four rebounds, seven assists, one steal and five fouls.
DeRozan (avg.): 23.3 points (44.3 percent), 4.3 rebounds and four assists.
DeRozan (Feb. 10): 35 points (57.8 percent), three rebounds and four assists.
Based off those numbers, it’s obvious who Minnesota did a great job containing and shutting down, and who had his way against the Wolves.
After their last game, a disappointed Lowry said, ‘We’ll see them again.’ Make sure to tune in tonight at 6:30 p.m. on Fox Sports North to see if Minnesota can once again come out with the ‘W’ by containing one of Toronto’s backcourt beasts.
