Being emotionally fragile is an important part of being a successful critic; it’s an integral element to being engaged with mainstream art, assuming you aspire to write about it in public. If you hate everything, you’re a banal asshole . . . but if you don’t hate anything, you’re boring. You’re useless. And you end up writing about why you can no longer generate fake feelings that other people digest as real.
–Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat
Friday’s loss generated hate. Tonight’s generated shock. Hopefully the next game — Friday versus the Wizards at Target Center — will generate joy. Whatever happens, I’ll continue to try to be objective with the analysis and subjective with the emotional reaction. But sometimes they blend together and sometimes that’s for the best.
Kevin Love scored 45 points tonight. Nikola Pekovic scored 34. The Wolves led by 5 with 26 seconds left, but managed to lose the game. Leading by 2 and only needing to cleanly inbound the ball and successfully possess it until being fouled, Kevin Martin coughed it up. The game went to overtime and Chris Paul was a little too good to be given a second breath of life.
Rick Adelman was too upset to speak with the media. Kevin Love was not impressed by the questions he received from local media while he sat at his locker. Everyone is pissed. As they should be.
It’s a long season. I’ll overreact to a good Robbie Hummel or Gorgui Dieng performance just as often as I’ll describe a sky falling on the green Target Center rooftop. Sometimes that’s part of why I do this. Sometimes it’s the only reason why I do it.
But I won’t ignore the bad things as if they have no meaning. They obviously do. Tonight’s loss, removed from the context of how it occurred, isn’t so bad. The Clippers are a great team. They were the home team. But in the flow of that game, with Matt Barnes being ejected and Love and Pek playing their best game ever as a duo? It really sucks. Why else would Adelman storm out of the presser before it begins?
It doesn’t mean the team will miss the playoffs or even lose the next game. But it means something. And it obviously isn’t something good.
Punch-Drunk Wolves 