Last season, the three matchups between the Houston Rockets and Minnesota Timberwolves ended in a combined score of 350-351. None of the three were blowouts, as the largest margin of victory was Houston\u2019s lone win in the series (by 5 points).<\/p>\n
The two losses were different levels of devastating, though. Both came towards the end of the season and basically tanked any chance Houston had of holding home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. It turned out that not having those first two games in Houston really hurt since the Los Angeles Lakers rode the crowd to 326 TS%* over those first two games (*all stats are approximate but seriously the Lakers couldn\u2019t miss in Games 1 and 2).<\/p>\n
The first loss was the one where Houston held a 13-point lead in overtime. It was easily one of the most impressive first two minutes of an overtime period I\u2019ve ever seen. Then it was followed by the most devastating three-minute stretch in overtime, as Minny closed on a furious 15-0 run to win. It was yet another in a long list of late-game collapses for that Houston squad.<\/p>\n
The T-Wolves come in without Anthony Edwards, who is recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery, but there was enough success early for proof-of-concept in the Ant-LaMelo Ball pairing. It definitely looks like they can work together, and the further ascension of Jaden McDaniels gives them enough cover for the two months waiting for Ant\u2019s return.<\/p>\n
The Wolves also have this generation\u2019s Thaddeus Young in veteran Rockets killer Jonathan Kuminga. He\u2019s playing well this season so I expect another career night out of him against a team he always shows up to play.<\/p>\n
Terrence Shannon Jr.: GTD<\/p>\n
The Line (as of this post)<\/p>\n
Schedule Advantage Counter<\/p>\n
Looking ahead because we can<\/p>\n
Saturday night in Phoenix against the Suns<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last season, the three matchups between the Houston Rockets and Minnesota Timberwolves ended in a combined score of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,6330],"class_list":["post-485753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-rockets-game-previews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}