Gobert is the best defender on the currently best team in their conference. If he keeps up his amazing performance he should win Defensive Player of the Year easily.

To a certain extent these are just the consequences of the American draft + franchise system. Losing teams don’t fear getting relegated and they might even get a great player out of it. Since losing isn’t as bad, there’s a certain level of heartlessness there.

Look at the Bulls and Lavine for example. If the guy was a European soccer player his career prospects would seriously tank, since players with loser mentality that don’t perform are seen as really bad. In the Nba he might get acquired by a serious contender that wants to win.

TLDR: The system doesn’t punish losing enough to make players and teams seriously compete all the time

That Halftime run by the Timberwolves was great. Both Ant and Kat performed great there after the team struggled earlier.

It is really fun to see how KAT and Rudy are defending the pick and roll together, which really shows the defensive strengths of the timberwolves. When both of them switch it’s still a great matchup for the wolves, since an athletic big covers an offensive player either way.

Winning a cup is something exciting, even if your team isn’t going to win a league. If you win both it’s better than winning just one thing and if your just winning the cup you won at least something. It’s less important than a league and in this case the Nba championship, but it’s the next best thing.

That basically means that fans can celebrate a secondary objective, which can be nice if they’re chance at winning the league is low. In the case of the Nba, teams like the Pistons, Rockets or Magic are far from championship contenders if we are honest.

A cup were some teams might overperform in a knockout game could be a chance for those teams to do something relevant. As a Piston fan you are unlikely to see your team win anything other than the new tournament for years, so it’s a slim hope of celebrating success.

This kind of leads to a problem with the current setup as well. Since games are part of the regular season as well it can get hard to distinguish between new tournament and regular season. If you completely separate them it also allows teams to focus on winning either the nba championship, the new tournament or both which could make things more interesting.

KAT was amazing in the end and overall the best Wolves player today. It’s really fun to see Towns in his element. BI was having a good night as well, especially the contested midrange ball at 3:50 was clutch. A really great game to watch, especially the ending.