I enjoy analyzing complex basketball strategies, but--as Charles Barkley succinctly put it during TNT's Western Conference Finals game four telecast--sometimes basketball is a simple sport: if your team's stars outplay the other team's stars then your team has a great chance to win. That simple story explained what happened in the Minnesota Timberwolves' 105-100 win versus the Dallas Mavericks: Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns outplayed Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving. Edwards scored a game-high 29 points on 11-25 field goal shooting, and he led the Timberwolves in both rebounds (10) and assists (nine). Towns scored a series-high 25 points on 9-13 field goal shooting, including 4-5 from three point range. Towns was far from perfect--he fouled out in just 30 minutes of playing time as he still has not cured his habit of committing stupid fouls, and he grabbed just five rebounds--but the good outweighed the bad: he shot efficiently from the field, he attacked the paint more often than he had in recent games, he was both more accurate and more judicious on this three point attempts, and he posted his highest scoring total in his last nine playoff games. Mike Conley was steady as always (14 points on 5-9 field goal shooting along with seven assists and no turnovers in 34 minutes), and Rudy Gobert scored 13 points while tying Edwards for team-high honors with 10 rebounds.
Doncic posted his league-leading sixth triple double in the 2024 playoffs (28 points, game-high 15 rebounds, game-high 10 assists), but he shot just 7-21 from the field, had a game-worst -13 plus/minus number, and shot 1-5 from the field in the fourth quarter with the outcome up for grabs. Irving scored 16 points on 6-18 field goal shooting while dishing for four assists but amassing a team-high four turnovers. Dallas keenly felt the absence of Dereck Lively II, an active and energetic center who suffered a neck injury in game three of this series. Minnesota outrebounded Dallas 40-38 and outscored Dallas in the paint 46-36.
Facing not just elimination but the humiliation of being swept, Minnesota stormed out to a 24-12 first quarter lead, but Dallas trimmed that margin to 27-20 by the end of the first quarter and then went ahead by three points in the second quarter before settling for a 49-49 halftime tie.
Minnesota won the third quarter 29-24 as Towns scored 10 points on 4-4 field goal shooting after scoring just five first half points. Minnesota enjoyed a fourth quarter lead in each of the first three games of this series only to fall apart down the stretch, but in this game Towns (10 points), Gobert (eight points), and Edwards (six points) dominated the final stanza. Dallas countered with balanced but inefficient fourth quarter scoring, matching Minnesota with 27 points but shooting just .435 from the field while Minnesota shot .526 from the field.
Game five will be very interesting, because the Timberwolves will show if they are satisfied just to avoid being swept, or if they are excited about the opportunity to win at home and put the pressure on the Mavericks to win game six in Dallas to avoid game seven in Minnesota. The Timberwolves are bigger and deeper than the Mavericks, but that did not matter in the first three games because of how much Doncic and Irving outplayed Edwards and Towns. The Timberwolves are capable of replicating in game five at home the effort level and efficiency that they displayed in game four on the road.
What struck me most about this game, though, is the pregame commentary about Kyrie Irving. Many media members are pushing the Kyrie Irving redemption narrative, but Barkley is one of the few media members who has the courage to speak the truth about Irving. Barkley declared that many of Irving's problems were "self inflicted," noting specifically, "You can't say antisemitic stuff." Barkley concluded that Irving deserved both the criticism he received and the suspension handed down by the Brooklyn Nets in 2022 in response to Irving's unrepentant antisemitism. It is very disappointing that Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kenny Smith--who rightly do not hesitate to speak out about a host of social issues--remained silent about Irving's antisemitism, particularly at a time when both antisemitic vitriol and antisemitic violence are at unprecedented levels. In their initial response to Irving's unrepentant antisemitism, Johnson and the TNT studio crew did better, with the exception of Smith, who has consistently been off target about this issue.
Some points that I made in my November 4, 2022 article about Irving being suspended are worth repeating and emphasizing:
I know better than to try to persuade people who are willfully blind to the truth, but when thinking about who has power, what are the limits of free speech, and what is the nature of objective historical truth, it is interesting to keep in mind a few facts that I have mentioned in my previous articles about Irving:
1) Irving has more social media followers than the Jewish population of the world. Irving has over 20 million followers, while there are fewer than 15 million Jews in a world that has a population of nearly 8 billion people. When Irving boasts that he has an "army" supporting him, that is not an exaggeration. He is far from powerless both in terms of his personal, generational wealth, and in terms of the influence that he wields. If each of his followers spreads his messages to just five more people, Irving potentially reaches 100 million people every time he makes a social media post.
The Jewish people are so powerful that less than 80 years ago a third of their population was massacred in Europe while the Jewish people were unable to get immigration quotas lifted in any major Western country, including America.
2) No one has challenged Irving's free speech right to post whatever he wants to post. The First Amendment protects against government restriction of a citizen's free speech rights--but just like Irving has a right to say what he wants to say, other people have a right to respond to him, to question him, and to decide to not employ him or do business with him.
3) I have seen some people assert that the film that Irving promoted speaks the truth, and I have seen other people say some version of "everyone has a right to speak his truth."
Regarding the first sentiment, the movie that Irving promoted asserts that the Holocaust never happened, that Jews controlled the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and that Jews worship Satan. Those statements are all demonstrably false. This would be equivalent to a white supremacist stating that slavery never happened, that Black people are responsible for harming white people on a massive scale, and that Black people worship Satan. If you support Irving's promotion of antisemitic falsehoods, then you have no standing to challenge white supremacists who state that they are not attacking Black people but rather defending white people, and you definitely need to stop talking about so-called "micro-aggressions." To be clear, I find both white supremacy and Holocaust denial to be offensive; I condemn both. I just don't want to hear about "micro-aggressions" from people who endorse "macro-aggressions" that contradict historical truth and contribute to a climate in which antisemitic violence is soaring to unprecedented levels.
Regarding the second sentiment, this notion that there is not an objective truth but that each person has his or her own "truth" is precisely what George Orwell warned about in his classic dystopian novel 1984. If words lose their objective meaning and if history can be whatever each person believes it to be then we have no shared past and no shared future because there are no longer standards for what is right, what is wrong, what is true, and what is false. There are far too many people in our society who would love to take our educational system in that direction. The Soviet Union tried it, China is doing it now, Cuba is doing it now, and we have seen--without fail--that every nation that goes down this path ends up persecuting its own people and terrorizing its neighbors.
To anyone who suggests that the above commentary does not belong in a game recap, my response is that Irving's on court revival and his off court issues are two separate matters, but too many people are acting as if Irving's willingness to be a better teammate has some connection with the abhorrent views that he promoted and refused to disavow--and as long as that confusion is being propagated and as long as even otherwise standup people like Ernie Johnson are silent I will speak loudly to confront the confusion and the silence.
It is demonstrably true that Irving had a negative impact on team chemistry with multiple teams prior to being acquired by Dallas last season. He has not been in Dallas very long, but up to this point it appears like he has become a better teammate and--for the first time in his career--is demonstrating leadership qualities. Good for him as a basketball player--but what Irving says, does, and stands for away from the basketball court is far more important, and I will conclude by repeating the key point that I made two years ago when Irving promoted antisemitic tropes, and that I repeated in this article, because the truth about this simply cannot be stated too many times:
If you support Irving's promotion of antisemitic falsehoods, then you have no standing to challenge white supremacists who state that they are not attacking Black people but rather defending white people, and you definitely need to stop talking about so-called "micro-aggressions."
During yesterday's pregame show, Kenny Smith made the bizarre statement that he urged Stephen A. Smith to stop criticizing Irving because they are all from the same neighborhood. Would Smith apply that same reasoning to preclude white people from criticizing racists who come from their neighborhoods? The normalization of antisemitism is frightening, and portends doom for our society, because any society that targets the weakest groups has lost its moral bearings.