By Geoff Lepper
48minutes.net

These days, beating the Minnesota Timberwolves – coached in an ever-more-bizarre manner by Kevin McHale in the absence of lone star Al Jefferson – falls somewhere on the degree-of-difficulty scale between “clubbing baby seals to death” and “blasting .300 Win Mag rounds into wolves from a helicopter.”

But just because this was a game the Warriors should have won doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be rewarded for actually, you know, winning it.

Their 42 defensive rebounds were a season-high, a mark made more impressive by the fact that the Timberwolves (with Jefferson at least) are a top-10 team in terms of their offensive rebounding. Minnesota grabbed a combined 37 offensive boards in two earlier meetings with the Warriors this year; last night, that number was 12.

Golden State should get extra credit for that, because even though Minnesota plumped up the Warriors’ DREB opportunities by shooting 35.9 percent, a large chunk of those misses (almost a third — 19 out of 59) came off of 3-pointers, which generate the long bounces that become prime OREB territory.

The Sit-The-Veterans Experiment schedule was thrown off when Ronny Turiaf came up legitimately unable to play due to illness, so Corey Maggette did not get a night of rest and instead came off the bench to make sure the Warriors’ didn’t threaten their season best for turnovers (six in 28 minutes; the rest of the team had combined totals of five in 212).

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