The Wolves are playing cohesive basketball, even without their top guys.
Nobody was picking the Minnesota Timberwolves to win Game 6.
Not without Anthony Edwards, Donte DiVincenzo, Ayo Dosunmu, and Kyle Anderson, and definitely not against a Denver Nuggets team that went 54-28 and had Nikola Jokic on the other side.
The whole game felt borderline impossible. But Minnesota won anyway, 110-98, at Target Center on Thursday night to wrap the series in six games.
The Collective Effort
Mike Conley talked about what made the win feel different after the game.
"Resiliency and toughness to come out with a playoff series win... It was wild," Conley said. "Given the circumstances, I thought that it was a special night for TJ, a special night for Jaden. You go down the list of guys who we needed and everybody did. That's what's so amazing about this series — contribution from every single person."
Conley is 38 years old.
He averaged 4.5 points and 2.9 assists per game this season in a reduced role, playing fewer minutes than he has in years.
But with backcourt injuries piling up, he logged 26 minutes in Game 6 and ran the offense as the most experienced guard available.
In his 18th NBA season, Conley did not flinch when the Timberwolves needed him to take on a much bigger workload with everything crumbling around the roster.
Next Man Up
The guys Conley was talking about backed it up all over the box score.
Jaden McDaniels went off for a career-high 32 points and 10 rebounds while locking Jamal Murray into a 4-for-17 shooting night.
Terrence Shannon Jr., who found out he was starting when he got to the arena, poured in 24 points across 35 minutes in his first career playoff start.
Gobert added 10 points, 13 rebounds, and eight assists while the Wolves outscored Denver 64-40 in the paint and grabbed 17 more boards.
Minnesota became the first team in NBA playoff history to win a game while missing three players averaging at least 10 points per game in the series.
Dosunmu had been putting up 21.8 a game, Edwards 18.5, and DiVincenzo 10.8 before injuries knocked all three out.
The adjustments Chris Finch made, going supersized with Gobert, Randle, and Naz Reid all on the floor together, turned out to be enough to slow the league's top-scoring offense from the regular season.
What's Ahead
The Timberwolves (49-33) move on to the Western Conference Semifinals against the second-seeded San Antonio Spurs (62-20), starting Monday in San Antonio.
The Spurs handled Portland in five games and have Victor Wembanyama anchoring one of the best defenses in basketball.
A 13-win gap in the regular season standings tells the story of how steep the climb is for Minnesota, especially if Edwards is still out.
But this Wolves team just beat Denver without three of its best scorers, so counting them out feels like a bad idea.