Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Expulsion: Moon and Firelight; Thomas Cole; 1828

Sometimes with Luka Doncic, you just know he absolutely has it and he’s going to make life hell for the defense all night.

Twenty points on 8/11 shooting in the first quarter? Yeah, he’s got it. We’re going to Sheeshville.

Kyrie Irving’s offense can be more temperamental — he’s capable of having two straight incredible plays amid a messy game overall, or a stretch of getting swallowed up amid a heater. But he found himself on a heater in Game 5, too: in the first half he had 19 on 7/11 shooting.

At halftime, Luka and Kyrie had 44 combined points. The Timberwolves had 40. And that’s the story of the game: the best defense in the league had absolutely nothing for the league’s most high-octane backcourt.

After a series full of close games that the Timberwolves mostly biffed in endgame scenarios, Dallas just came out and stomped on the Minnesota in this one. The Timberwolves had few very Timberwolfian offensive stretches were things looked difficult against a high-rated Mavericks defense. There was so much Rudy Gobert on offense. Like, well above the FDA-recommended limit of your daily Rudy Gobert on offense. Really weird decision by him to wear oven mitts in this game, leading him to bobble almost every interior pass.

Anthony Edwards and Karl-Anthony Towns (28 each, limited turnovers) were fine on offense. But the Minnesota offense was not fine in the aggregate. Dallas bullied them into doing difficult things, like scoring late in the shot clock with frantic read-and-recovers, like running the offense through Gobert, like leaving a reluctant Kyle Anderson wide open from the corners. Dallas sold out on Edwards especially and worked to make Towns drive the lane instead of spotting up. It led to a very discombobulated Minnesota offense that never started flowing. All the while, Dallas moved the ball like water on offense. I actually don’t know the last time I saw Luka so free, moving like a knight on a chess board, just getting to every spot he wanted and punishing the attention paid to the lob threat with Dereck Lively II back in action.

Luka and Kyrie weren’t alone either: Josh Green had one of the best games I’ve ever seen him play despite a very modest box score. Daniel Gafford and Lively again controlled the paint … against a giant opponent. Lively finished the series — the Western Conference Finals, mind you — 16/16 from the floor. He didn’t miss in the entire series! You know why? Every shot was practically a dunk (if not literally).

You know who could use that lesson? Rudy Gobert! Just go up strong. If you get blocked or fouled, you get blocked or fouled. Frankly, it’d be good to see Towns and Naz Reid (who had maybe his worst game in a rough series) do that, too. If you can’t go over the rim protector, go through them. The weird angle layups around them aren’t working.

The Timberwolves are a great team that ran into a buzzsaw on fire. If you ignore the two meaningless games their B-units lost at the end of the regular season once their seed was set, Dallas is 28-7 since early March. That’s an 80% winning clip …

… which is, ironically, about the same for the Boston Celtics for the whole season. But we’ll get to that.

We don’t know if Dallas will experience sustained greatness over the next few years. It’d be very easy to mentally overreact to getting blown off the floor in a close-out game after losing three of four close games in the series. The financial stakes are well known and real. But to me, some smart roster adjustments — which we know Tim Connelly is capable of — and growth from Edwards, Towns, Jaden McDaniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Reid is worth betting on. The Wolves don’t have the season they had without Gobert or Towns. That’s plainly obvious. Maybe you think the Gobert playoff experience is such that the Wolves will never get past the conference finals because of the self-inflicted problems a player like him causes. I’m not certain of that at all, and I really don’t think the rest of the Wolves are good enough to have a No. 1 defense and top-4 record without him.

Dallas may be a No. 5 seed that missed the playoffs last year. But there’s absolutely no shame in losing to them in the conference finals. They might just go win the whole thing. Treat this as a stepping stone to the ultimate goal, not a roadblock that knocks you off your path.

The Finals begin on Thursday. I’ll have my assessment on Monday.

Yes, I Did Pick A Celtics-Mavericks Finals

Back in October, I predicted Suns over Bucks in the Finals. Welp. Welp welp welp. Yes, both of those teams flamed out in the first round.

Right before the playoffs, I updated my predictions … and picked Celtics over Mavericks. Not everything in there is correct: I had Philadelphia making the conference finals (the Knicks ejected them in Round 1) and I had Dallas beating Denver, not Minnesota, in the West finals. But I’ll stand most of that stuff, including being one of the few with a platform like this to pick Dallas in the Finals. Never say no one believed in you, Mavericks!

I’ll write more on it next week, but the lesson of the past five years is that the list of legitimate title contenders is way longer than anyone thinks. These days there are almost never just 3-4 title contenders in the entire league. Superstar injuries, the three-pointer, the death of home court, the death of superteams: there’s a ton of variance in the NBA playoffs these days. Predicting chalk in the playoffs is not just boring: it’s also likely to be wrong!

And Finally

The great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on his friend and rival Bill Walton.

Be excellent to each other.