Oh, to have young legs.
Back-to-back sets don’t bother them. They would have been playing ball the next day anyway.
That is what the Minnesota Timberwolves brought to Denver on Saturday night — young legs, a carefree attitude and Andrew Wiggins.
That’s all that was required. It was enough to keep running when older legs would have worn down, and ultimately, it was enough to knock off the Nuggets 113-105 at the Pepsi Center.
“They’re a little bit younger,” Nuggets coach Brian Shaw said. “We’re a fairly young team, but that’s not an excuse. We’ve got to give them credit. They came in and did all of the things they needed to do to win the game.
“That’s a bad loss. Not because we’re playing a bad team, but in light of our schedule that we have coming up, Golden State on Monday, San Antonio on Tuesday, I viewed this game as a must win, just in terms of looking forward to our schedule.”
PHOTOS:
The Nuggets’ second consecutive loss was the product of porous defense. That started with trying to defend Wiggins.
Wiggins was a problem early and stayed that way throughout. The overall No. 1 pick in the 2014 draft displayed every bit why, knocking down shot after shot in the first quarter to get the Timberwolves off to the kind of start road teams desire.
Wiggins had 15 points on 6-of-7 shooting after 12 minutes. The Timberwolves rode that to 37 first-quarter points, and the Nuggets looked helpless to stop the rookie from Kansas. Because, in large measure, they were.
Wiggins kept pouring it on all game long on his way to a career-high 31 points on 11-of-17 shooting, along with nine rebounds. The makes started out mostly as jump shots, but by the end of the game he had made his presence felt on drives and put-backs and every other shot imaginable.
Meanwhile, the Nuggets could never get a full foothold on their overall game.
They fell behind by 14 points in the second quarter. A 23-9 run brought the Nuggets back from that deficit to tie it at 48. A few minutes later, Arron Afflalo’s 3-pointer gave the Nuggets the lead. And from there, it seemed the Nuggets had a better handle on the game. They took a nine-point lead and settled into a good groove.
But then the third quarter started. It looked a lot like the first, as the Timberwolves were able to retake the lead and gain a ton of confidence. It set up a fourth quarter in which the Nuggets had to work extremely hard in order to just keep the game close.
By the end, the Timberwolves had more in the tank. They beat the Nuggets to loose balls, were faster to tip-ins off their own missed shots and generally displayed more energy on the court. Late in the game, that energy was combined with clutch shooting, which doomed the Nuggets.
Minnesota’s starters scored all but 20 of their points. The Nuggets were led by Ty Lawson’s 22 points, but he didn’t have much help offensively. Fellow point guard Jameer Nelson finished with 16 points on 7-of-10 shooting. But it seemed that no one on the team could make a shot down the stretch when the team needed it.
The Nuggets didn’t score in the final 1:42 of the game, going 0-for-4 to seal the loss.
“I feel like they just got hot,” Lawson said. “We let them stay in the game, and then they started hitting shots toward the end. With a team like this, you’ve got to put them down early.”
