Shaquille O’Neal made it well known in advance that he didn’t want to do what he was about to do during TNT’s halftime show Wednesday evening, but he had no choice.
He had to praise Rudy Gobert.
“Rudy Gobert,” O’Neal said, while making gagging noises with his mouth, “is dominating.”
Truth hurts, Shaq.
O’Neal is one of the four-time defensive player of the year’s many critics. But you get the sense that wouldn’t be the case if Gobert delivered more performances similar to the 27-point, 24-rebound spectacle he put forth in Minnesota’s series-clinching Game 5 victory over the Lakers in Los Angeles.
“We need that every single night,” Wolves wing Donte DiVincenzo said.
Not that 20-20s should be the expectation. But after a fairly quiet first four games of the playoffs — in which his impact was minimal and the center played roughly 25 minutes a game — Gobert was the premier presence felt on the floor on Wednesday. That’s the type of player Minnesota could use on a game-to-game basis in these playoffs, particularly when staring down a second-round matchup against either another small-ball team in Golden State or a Houston team that often deploys multi-center lineups.
“That’s the Rudy that can win you championships,” Wolves guard Mike Conley said. “When you have that type of mentality to go get every rebound, go get every block, defend every guy at the rim, we needed that. He came at the biggest moment of our season. We knew this game was going to be a dogfight. They were not going to lay down at all. He willed us tonight, especially when things weren’t going too well offensively.”
For years now, Gobert has been a safety net for Minnesota when things aren’t going well, particularly against cellar dwellers. His interior dominance creates a high floor. If opponents can’t score at the rim and have to battle for every rebound, Minnesota automatically becomes three times more difficult to beat.
But can he also lift Minnesota’s ceiling? He did on Wednesday. Los Angeles doubled down on a defensive scheme that largely left Gobert unattended in an effort to account for Anthony Edwards.
There have been times in the past when Minnesota would not have made an opponent pay for such an approach. But the Wolves found Gobert early and often in Game 5. And whenever the big man didn’t get the ball, he often grabbed it off the glass.
Gobert gobbled up nine offensive rebounds in the win. In the process, he silenced many of his often loud critics — at least for one evening.
“Rudy is a winner at the highest level. He drives winning. You can not like who he is, how he does it, what he looks like, etcetera,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said. “When you have this guy on your team, you understand what a professional and a winner is.
“He’s just such a competitor, as well. He doesn’t listen to the outside noise, we don’t listen to the outside noise. No one is happier for Rudy than his teammates right now, particularly Anthony, who let everybody out there on the floor know that it was Rudy’s night and nobody was around to stop him.”
For his role the past couple of years in ending the seasons of Kevin Durant, Nikola Jokic and now Luka Doncic and LeBron James, Anthony Edwards has been dubbed “The Kingslayer.”
What does that make his center?
“He was a dragon,” Edwards said. “He was the dragon from ‘Game of Thrones’ tonight.”
Fierce, fiery, dominant.
If you’ve ever seen “Game of Thrones,” you know the dragon is the ultimate weapon of war. Had Jaime Lannister been armed with the fire-breathing creature, world domination would have been the likely outcome.
On Wednesday, the dragon was a vindictive beast retaliating against those who’ve wronged him in the past, whether it be critics, Lakers guard Luka Doncic or any others who have dared to doubt him.
“But my vindication is not about beating a specific person,” Gobert said. “It’s about winning a championship. We’ve got a little more work to do for that.”
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