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I went back and forth on this series a half dozen times since last night, but I did find an answer I will be revealing at the tail end of the show. Again, we're going to go through our usual routine. We'll go through the season series, we'll talk about some of the metrics, we'll talk about the gambling odds, and then we'll focus on Minnesota on offense, then Oklahoma City on offense, talk a little bit about their benchmark and then we'll get to our prediction. You guys know the drill before we get started. Subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on twitter@_jasonlt so you guys don't miss show announcements. Don't forget about our podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts under Hoops Tonight. It's also super helpful if you leave a rating in a review on that front. Jackson's doing great work on our social media feeds, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Make sure you guys follow us there. And last but not least, keep dropping mailbag questions so we can get to them throughout the remainder of the postseason. All right, let's talk some basketball. So two two season series Little weird. There was a game towards the end of the year where the end of the bench guys with like Nikhil Alexander, Walker and Nas Reed managed to come back from down like 14 with three minutes left to send a game to overtime that ultimately Minnesota won. And there was some interesting stuff in that overtime period where they Minnesota was able to get some big offensive rebounds and have some successful stretches of defense versus Oklahoma City. If you guys remember, Anthony Edwards had a huge block on Shay Gil, just Alexander right at the rim, got up in his face and was flexing on him. But that was a game that Oklahoma City had taken control of until the final minutes and it was like a Rob Dillingham Group with like Terence Shannon that actually brought them back into it. So two two, but kind of a weird one. Julius Randall only played in one of the games. Dante DiVincenzo only played in one of the games. Rudy Gobert only played in one of the games. Chet Holmgren only played in two of the games. Alex Caruso only played in two of the games. So as is always the case, I'm more looking into those games for just opportunities to see what it looks like when certain guys guard each other. Certain stretches of the games where you see something that might be translatable. Not too much to take away. The metrics were just about as close as it gets. Minnesota logged at 114.7 offensive rating. Oklahoma City log day 114.6 offensive rating. Rebounding was a big advantage towards Minnesota. They grabbed 53.2% of available rebounds, including 31.5% of their own misses. So definitely an on the glass advantage for Minnesota There for odds Again, all of our odds are provided by our partner draft draftkings. Oklahoma City is a -3.30 favorite. This I flat out don't understand. Uh, but I'm also not surprised. Obviously Oklahoma City puts up crazy metrics that influence the algorithm that these sports book sportsbooks use. So like Denver's three wins in the SE at conference semis were by 23 points combined. Why? Because they're a veteran team. They're not going to pound you into the dirt. Right. Oklahoma City had a 43 point win and a 32 point win in the series because they're a bunch of dudes in their early 20s that are never going to stop playing until the until the buzzer sounds and the veterans are going to let go of the rope, so to speak. So that's going to influence a lot of the way that these odds will come out. I think this is a pretty interesting betting opportunity on the Minnesota side of things. In terms of value, I think Oklahoma City should be a favorite, substantial favorite like somewhere in that like minus 1. 50 to minus 200 range. But you can get Minnesota right now to win the series at +2.65. I think that's a good price for a team that absolutely has a good chance to win this series, even though we can all agree Oklahoma City should be favored. So let's start with Minnesota on offense. Matchups. We'll see Lou Dort start on Anthony Edwards. Oklahoma City did a great job on it in the regular season. They held him to 22 points per game on 36% from the field in 32% from three. They forced him into 3.5 turnovers per game, which was above his season average. It is a team job though. Kayson, Wallace and Alex Caruso, we'll both see time in this matchup. Alex in particular defended Ant really well in the couple of games he played in. The Thunder did a ton of double teaming and like gapping in driving lanes against Ant and they were able to pretty consistently rotate out of it without giving up more than like a mildly contested catch and shoot. 3. Lou Dort Super Physical on Ant. He's got that unique combination of like the strength to hold up against Ant's power, but also the quickness to beat him to spots. He also did a good amount of denying, especially in their first game that they played this year where he was just like getting physical with him off ball, just kind of two hands on his jersey, face guarding. And that played Ant into some passive stretches. Interesting stat. Ant took four fewer shots per game in this matchup than he did in his regular. With his like regular season average, he averaged around 20 shots per game. He ended up taking about 16 shots per game, specifically against Oklahoma City. Ant's got a really tough job in this series. On the one hand, Minnesota's clear advantage on offense is at the power forward spot. Nas Reed scored 19 or more points in all four games against Oklahoma City this year. I think he had a 27 point game as well. Julius Randle only played once and struggled, but he also will have substantial size advantages and he's just playing at a much higher level than he was when he played against Oklahoma City way back in. I think it was like December in the game that he actually played in. So I think Ant's gonna need to on one hand, avoid forcing the issue, play in the flow, keep it moving, make sure his forwards get their touches. But I also think this series will inevitably degrade into ugly half court shot making contests between him and Shay. And so for stretches he'll need to be aggressive and so he'll need to find ways to maintain his rhythm and apply a certain amount of aggression no matter what. But he also has to read the room and be like, this is a team that's got a million dudes who can defend guards and not a lot of guys who can defend forwards. So that's going to be his job to make sure as the point guard or as the on ball guard getting a lot of opportunities for his bigs. And one of the things we've talked about a lot over the course of this playoff run is I kind of like Ant playing more as an off the catch, old school two guard anyway and so I want to see Ant be aggressive, but I think it's a good opportunity for him to be aggressive off of those post touches. For guys like Nas and for Julius, this is the next challenge in Ant's journey as a basketball player. I thought Golden State was probably the second best defense Ants ever faced just because last year's Mavs team had a combination of a really strong on ball defender and Derek Jones Jr. But also RIM protection with in terms of like real vertical size, which as good as Draymond Green is, and he's arguably the best defender of this era, I wouldn't necessarily count him as like a, you know, vertical, really staunch rim protector if that makes sense and and passed that test and his last three wins against Golden State he averaged 29 points, five rebounds and seven assists on 50% from the field and 47% from three. But this Oklahoma City defense is going to present kind of the best of both of those teams. It's going to be a lot of the depth of speed and on ball defense that Golden State presents and I'd argue just better versions of those guys, but also the rim protection that Dallas had. The big difference is just the overall defensive playmaking and IQ of guys like Draymond and and Jimmy Butler. Like that's going to be less of a factor here. But I think just in terms of just pure on paper defensive talent, OKC's got a lot of stuff to match up with him. So I'm just really curious to see how Ant particularly handles the challenge. And as far as Dort goes and his job, you literally couldn't conceptualize a better physical build for a player to contend with. Ant strong enough to hold his ground, quick enough to beat him to spots J Dub on Julius Randle Again, Julius did not play in three of the four matchups this year, but in the one matchup against Oklahoma City, he did not play well. He's 11 points, four turnovers. J Dub bothered him with strength by beating him to spots and had the length to kind of poke at the ball every time Julius Randle exposed it. I trimmed a clip and posted it on Twitter this morning of just an example of Julius trying to go through J Dub and not having any success because of his ability to attack the basketball. But again, Julius is playing at a much higher level now than he was back when that game took place. Julius is going to have substantially better physical advantages than Ant throughout this series and so they're going to need him to be great with both Julius and Nas. One of the things I want to keep an eye on in this series, I was actually talking with Jackson before we started recording. This was one of the big swing factors for me. I can't get out of my head the problem that Denver had just simply getting the ball to Nicola Jokic in Game seven when Alex Caruso started denying and fronting. And this is going to be a series where I think Minnesota is going to need to get the ball to Nas and they're going to need to get the ball to Julius and I think we could see a lot of that similar type of J Dub and Alex Caruso post fronting, three quarter fronting, full on denial. Just doing everything they can to prevent those post catches and to force turnovers when Minnesota tries to force the ball to those post mismatches. So let's keep an eye on that in this series. Just the specific challenge of Minnesota trying to get the ball to Julius and Nas in scoring position, I think we'll see Shay Guard Mike Conley Mike Conley's pretty low usage for the Wolves at this point. He runs about five ball screens per game in the playoffs, including passes, but he's getting just 0.77 points per possession. He's just 2 for 10 on pull up jump shots in the postseason and just 3 for 12 on floaters. So not too much to worry about on ball in terms of Mike Conley, but he has been doing a good amount of damage off ball as like a transition scorer and as a spot up player. He's shooting 41% on catch and shoot three so far in the playoffs. So Shea's just going to have to do a good job of tracking him when he's in his help and recover situations. Mike's also been pretty successful as an offensive rebounder in this postseason. He's getting two rebounds, two offensive rebounds per 36 minutes. So it'll just have to be a little attentive to him crashing out of the corners. I think we'll see Chad holmgren on Jaden McDaniels operating as a roamer again. He just has to be careful here. Jaden has been a very good offensive player in these playoffs. He's been active as a cutter, active as an offensive rebounder. He's shooting 35% on threes. He's had some explosive scoring games. He had a 30 point game and a 25 point game just in these playoffs, albeit in the Lakers matchup where he had a substantial athletic advantage. The job for Chet will be to be that effective kind of roamer. Just got to be attentive to Jaden. If you let him get free runways to the basket over and over again, he can do real damage there. Isaiah Hartenstein on Rudy Gobert Gobert played in just one game against Oklahoma City this year. He was a plus three in 31 minutes. He had a couple of blocks, kind of the classic Gobert performance in that he makes them so much easier to guard on offense. But then he also causes substantial problems for Oklahoma City's offense with his rim protection. Isaiah Hardenstein will be playing up off of him in ball screens up high in pick and roll. That was something we talked about earlier. They're going to be up at the level against Ant, but he doesn't really have to worry about Gobert on the back line as as a scoring threat he did. He does have offensive rebounding ability there, but in the regular season in their one game he did just get two offensive rebounds. So Oklahoma City did do a good job in that one matchup of keeping him off the glass. We'll talk about this a little bit more later, but I think there's a potential for Hartenstein and Gobert to kind of have their roles minimized over the course of this series as both teams lean more into Chet and Nas Reed at center, but we'll talk about that in a few minutes.