The Gophers men’s basketball team continues to flirt with disaster in nonconference games to start the season.

Minnesota was pushed by Central Michigan on Monday, but the U escaped with a 68-65 win at Williams Arena.

Chippewas guard Jacobi Heady’s game-winning three attempt at the buzzer hit off the front of the rim.

The Gophers (5-1) were a 13-point favorite against Central Michigan, which had a KenPom ranking 121 spots below Minnesota. The Chippewas (3-3), however, did have only an 8-point loss to No. 10 Marquette on Nov. 11.

Minnesota’s previous loss was to North Texas on Nov. 13, but their KenPom ranking is 72 — now 10 spots ahead of Minnesota going into Monday. The U also trailed Omaha and Yale at the half this season.

Lu’Cye Patterson was off to a slow shooting start to the season and knew he just needed to see a few go in. On Monday, Patterson finished with 19 points and made four 3-pointers, none more important than one that hit the iron, bounced high in the air before falling through the net with less than two minutes left. It gave Minnesota a 62-58 lead.

Dawson Garcia made four clutch free throws in the final minute to make it 66-61, but a Drew Barbee 3-pointer helped cut it to 66-64.

Garcia missed two of three more from the stripe, and Patterson missed one of two to allow the Chippewas chances to stay in the game before Heady’s heave.

After missing its first five shots Monday — which continued a trend of slow starts in first halves — Minnesota used a 14-0 run to go up 14-4 with 12 minutes remaining.

But the Gophers suffered a string of consecutive turnovers as part of Central Michigan’s 21-7 stretch to take a 25-21 lead.

Tied 32-32 at the half, the Gophers shot 46 percent from the field in the first half, include 40 percent from 3-point range. Both were improvements over season averages.

In the opening 20 minutes, Dawson Garcia led Minnesota with eight points and Isaac Asuma chipped in six. Both had a pair of 3-pointers.

Brennan Rigsby, the U’s second leading scorer, picked up two quick fouls and said for the final 17 minutes of the first half without scoring.

New Gophers forward Frank Mitchell had his best half of the young season, with six points, four boards, three assists, two blocks. The 6-foot-8, 260-pounder threw off Ugnius Jerusevicius and Jerusevicius retaliated for a technical foul. Mitchell later shouldered a CMU player asl players walked back to the huddle

Most memorable thing was drawing a tech on Chippewa player then pointing to his temples to indicate mind games. Then the block of a man shouldered a CMU player before timeout

Chippewas forward Ugnius Jerusevicius led all scorers at the half with 13 points. He had two 3-pointers on this season but made all three of his attempts in the first half.

After missing each of the Timberwolves’ last two games, starting point guard Mike Conley remains questionable for the team’s home bout Tuesday against the Houston Rockets — the third of four NBA Cup group-play contests — with a toe sprain.

At practice Monday, Minnesota coach Chris Finch said Conley is “day to day” with the injury. Finch said Conley was set to meet with medical people on Monday to discuss the injury.

Conley has already missed three games for the Wolves this season. Minnesota is 0-3 on those occasions. The offense has largely sputtered in each defeat.

Should Conley miss more contests, Minnesota needs to find more consistent offense sans its floor general.

Finch noted everyone must carry a “make the right play mentality.”

“It just unlocks shots for others,” Finch said. “Sometimes, the ball – of course we want it in (Anthony Edwards’) hands, we want it in (Julius Randle’s) hands early – but they’ve got to still trust the actions of the offense to get everybody else involved, and it’ll come back enough times. It just gives us a different look, as well.”

Donte DiVincenzo started the Boston game for Minnesota in Conley’s stead, while Nickeil Alexander-Walker has started the other two games Conley has missed. Neither is a true point guard by any stretch, and both seem to have to sacrifice themselves to a degree when they take on the bulk of the point guard responsibilities. Outside of Conley, rookie Rob Dillingham is the only other point guard on the roster.

He has received more run of late, and played the best game of his young NBA career on Sunday in Boston. Dillingham scored 14 points on 6 for 10 shooting in 16 minutes.

“Offensively, I thought it was really the first time he saw the whole game,” Finch said. “We look different when he’s on the floor. He gives us a change of speed. He was instrumental in helping us get back into the game. This is all part of the growth.”

That growth, the coach noted, has been continuous for the 19- year-old, who has also shown an impressive level of competitiveness on the defensive end in spite of his small stature. Still, Dillingham doesn’t figure to be a 30-minute solution when Conley is out. It’s not the role Minnesota envisions for him on this team this early in the rookie’s NBA career. The slack for Conley’s absence will need to be picked up by the collective.

If that occurs, Rudy Gobert said the team can be better for it in the long run.

“Obviously, we miss Mike and obviously everything he does on the floor for his teammates is valuable for us,” Gobert said. “But I think when he’s not there it’s a big opportunity for us to get better in those situations and even to require us to be more aware and connected, because he’s somebody that connects everyone and is unselfish. So I think playing without Mike now can probably help us for later. Keep getting better and pushing everyone to keep getting better.”

That connectiveness — the willingness to make a play for someone else — is something Gobert conceded has been lacking when Conley misses games.

“We realize that when we don’t do that, we can’t be as good,” Gobert said. “Ant has been amazing the past few games making the right play or putting us into our actions. I think that’s the key for us just trusting the action, trusting the team, trusting all our strengths. We’re a very talented team so when we do that, good things happen.”

Throughout much of the 1980s, there was a regularly-scheduled game between the original Winnipeg Jets franchise (which moved to Arizona in 1996 and now resides in Utah) and the Minnesota North Stars (who relocated to Dallas in 1993) played on December 26 – which is known as Boxing Day in Canada.

One year the Jets would travel to Bloomington the morning after Christmas to face the North Stars at Met Center. The next year, the North Stars would hop on a northbound plane early on the morning after Christmas for a trip to the old Winnipeg Arena, which featured seats shoved into every available inch of space, and a massive portrait of Queen Elizabeth II smiling down upon the skaters on one end of the rink.

The hockey was frankly never that great, with the teams skating off their holiday ham, and while the Jets and North Stars both had some great players in the 21-team era of the NHL, they collectively won a combined total of three games in the Stanley Cup Final before the franchises moved to the Sun Belt.

Flash forward to 2024, where we’re 25 years into the life of the expansion Wild and more than a decade into the new Jets, after the woeful Atlanta Thrashers moved to Manitoba in 2011. When these teams met on October 13 in downtown Winnipeg, not many expected what would shake out as (for now) two of the top teams in the Western Conference were on the ice that day for a 2-1 overtime win by the Jets.

But with the two teams off to red-hot starts, Monday’s rematch in Minnesota was clearly viewed as a measuring stick by people on both benches.

“We’ve talked about this, the Central Division doesn’t get any easier. Everybody is a tough out and these guys, obviously, have been having a great start – just like us,” Jets coach Scott Arniel said following the team’s morning skate in St. Paul. “We know what they’re about, and we saw them early in the year. They’re banged up a little. But at the same time, they’ve found ways to win hockey games. They’re well structured, they’ve got great goaltending and good specialty teams.”

With these two teams atop the division standings, Wild players were as focused on trying to show that the Jets were human and perhaps losing a little altitude following Winnipeg’s eye-popping 15-1 start to the season.

‘We’re looking at it as a Central Division matchup, a rivalry and a team that we’re chasing,” Wild forward Marcus Foligno said. “Measuring stick? I like to think that those games are the ones you play against the Stanley Cup champions from the previous year. But Winnipeg’s playing really well this year, and whenever you get a chance to beat a top dog in your division, it’s always something that you’ve got to be prepared for.”

Kaprizov plays, but Boyd stays

Two days after his eventful Minnesota Wild debut, Travis Boyd was in street clothes after he warmed up for the game versus Winnipeg, but he was notably still in St. Paul, and not headed back to Iowa. The Hopkins native was on the fourth line for the Wild’s 4-3 shootout loss in Calgary on Saturday afternoon, after an adventure just getting to the rink.

With the injuries to Kirill Kaprizov and Marat Khusnutdinov suffered in a 5-3 win in Edmonton last Thursday, Boyd had been recalled from Iowa under emergency conditions. Boyd was one of the last players to leave the ice at the team’s morning skate at TRIA Rink on Monday, indicating that he would not be in the lineup versus the Jets. But a few hours prior to the game, the Wild terminated the emergency conditions, indicating that Kaprizov would return to the lineup, but Boyd would remain with the team, at least for the time being.

If the former Gopher is to play a home game for the Wild, it would likely be on Black Friday versus Chicago, or Saturday night versus Nashville.