The responsible way to approach opening night is to remember that it's just one game out of 82. The lowly Bulls beat the 60-win Pistons last year, and the Jazz, who tanked so shamelessly later on that they were eventually fined for it, blew the doors off the Clippers. Weird things are going to happen.
Destinies are determined in the spring, not in October. But we're human, and we come into opening night knowing we're seeing something new. It's one of 82, but it's the first of 82, and therefore perhaps the single most informative game out of those 82 about how we should expect the other 81 to go.
Wednesday's 11-game slate featured debuts for 22 of the 30 NBA teams, and inevitably, there have been standouts thus far. Here are the biggest winners and losers from NBA opening night. Minnesota's last two postseasons ended in distressingly similar ways: Anthony Edwards, with no suitable sidekick, trying and failing to will his way through doubles to lift an otherwise hapless half-court offense.
Tim Connelly traded the team's jumbo identity for a new, more finesse-oriented theory of a team. The Timberwolves won't overwhelm opponents with size and defense anymore. The name of the game now is speed and shooting.
Edwards and LaMelo Ball are two of the NBA's most prolific pull-up 3-pointers, and everything Minnesota does will flow out of the attention defenders need to pay to them behind the arc. Sure enough, in Wednesday's opener against the Heat, a possible top-five defense, Edwards was free to bomb 3-pointer after 3-pointer against relatively light coverage en route to a 45-point outburst in a 131-106 win. Doubling is much harder with Ball on the floor because he'll destroy 4-on-3s, and when he's shooting as well as he did against Miami, defenses are effectively helpless.
This was proof of concept in a single game, an example of just how explosive two guards like this can be together, and how much they can amplify a supporting cast as athletic as Minnesota's. There's plenty to tighten up, but opening night went about as well for the Wolves as they could have hoped. Giannis Antetokounmpo did his job against the Timberwolves.
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