All season, Chris Finch lamented the idea of “flipping a switch” when the stage gets big and the lights get bright. Every coach does.
Ideally, in sports, habits are built throughout the course of repeatedly executed processes during the regular season that carry you forward in the most impactful moments.
And it might look like Minnesota flies in the face of that on nights like Monday, when an underachieving team cranks it up to 10 over the final three frames to knock off a perceived title contender in Denver to even its first-round series at a game apiece.
Until you look at a central cog in the Game 2 equation.
There is one player on Minnesota’s roster who played all 82 games this season. There is one guy whose effort – regardless of output – was not questioned at any point in the campaign, because his physical will was on full display night in and night out. Sometimes his hustle was productive, other times not. But it was always ever present.
The guy Rudy Gobert – who’s bemoaned habits and questioned motivations of the team at large at various points in the season – simply refers to as “a winner.”
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As Game 2 grinded down to a slog in the latter stages of the fourth quarter – with Denver seemingly running on fumes and the Wolves tank not too far behind – it was DiVincenzo who paired with Gobert to prove to be the primary difference makers as the guard played at the only gear he knows: full tilt.
With Minnesota trailing by one with fewer than five minutes to play, DiVincenzo darted up the side of the floor in transition. He collected, took a hard dribble to collapse two defenders and fired a strike to Jaden McDaniels for the go-ahead slam.
Gobert forced a Jokic miss on the ensuing Denver possession, though it looked as though the Nuggets star would be able to corral his own board, that is until DiVincenzo came flying in to instead nab the rebound and race the other way for a transition bucket at a speed so fast he nearly clipped his own feet.
After an Aaron Gordon triple brought Denver back within one with 78 ticks to play, Anthony Edwards drew two Denver defenders and made the simple pass to his nearby open teammate – DiVincenzo – who, without hesitation, launched from 28 feet, and cashed the bomb to put the Wolves back up four.
After the game, Edwards told DiVincenzo he had the genitalia of a gorilla (in not so many words).
“He’s willing to take any kind of shot at any moment of a game, no matter how far it is, and you’ve got to live with it, because he makes those a lot of times,” Edwards told reporters.
Edwards first thought as DiVincenzo let the jumper fly? “Ahh,” Edwards said.
But when the jumper tickled the twine: “Let’s … go Donte,” Edwards said.
“I feel like his confidence is at an all-time high,” Edwards said. “Every time he shoots, I believe it’s going in.”
And he’s earned the right to take such shots because of everything he does on the floor. It was fitting it was DiVincenzo who put the exclamation point on the victory, grabbing one more impressive board on a Jamal Murray missed jumper inside the final 10 seconds and immediately starting a runout that resulted in an emphatic slam to put Game 2 on ice.
DiVincenzo finished with 16 points, seven rebounds and six assists. The Wolves won the guard’s 31 minutes by 20 points – 14 clear of anyone else in the plus-minus department.
Par for the course for DiVincenzo, who’s now led the Wolves in plus-minus in both games of this series after leading the team in net rating all season.
“Donte makes winning plays,” Gobert told reporters. “Even on the nights when the shots don’t go in, he’s going to get rebounds, contest shots at the rim, be physical on defense and make winning play after winning play. … I love it.”