Early in Saturday’s tilt in Minnesota it looked like the Raptors might pull away from the home Timberwolves, who were missing Jimmy Butler due to soreness in his right knee. That turned out not to be the case—the Wolves pulled ahead during a lopsided third quarter, and won the second half, and the game, behind big nights from Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns, and someone named Marcus Georges-Hunt.
The Wolves were also helped along in the second half by the absence of Raptors big man Jakob Poeltl, who was destroyed in the first half by a pair of ruthless Wiggins dunks:
Yowza! Wiggins is one of the great leapers in the NBA, and I for one would like to thank young Poeltl for contesting the finish, so that the world could be reminded of Wiggins’s insane dunking ability. Very cool! This next highlight is less cool. It is the moment when Poeltl’s soul is banished to the land of wind and ghosts:
Poeltl’s ruined corpus staggered through eight minutes of minus-11 ball in the second half, as the Timberwolves completed their comeback. He was never seen or heard from ever again.