The Minnesota Timberwolves‘ road luck didn’t favor them this time. Nikola Jokić and Co. torched the Wolves in a resounding 112-97 win in Game 5, taking a 3-2 lead in the series! Jokic finished the night with 40 points, 13 assists, seven rebounds, and 0 turnovers as he becomes the second player in NBA history to achieve such a stat line.

The only other player to have 40+ points, 10+ assists, and zero turnovers was Chris Paul. But nobody can’t stop talking about the Joker’s impressive game against the 4x DPOY Rudy Gobert tonight. The reigning champion played him like a fiddle and let the results speak louder than words.

Draymond Green once again joined the TNT crew, and he had quite the take on Nikola-Rudy tango tonight. “What Joker showed tonight is that he doesn’t fear Rudy Gobert…Yes, it was personal, and he embarrassed the hell out of Rudy Gobert!”

It was almost like Denver lulled the Wolves into a false sense of security with their two wins on the Nuggets’ turf. “Rudy Gobert and those guys came out and played great defensively in those two games at Denver. Denver came back home and wanted to show that that wasn’t real. ‘We are who we are!'” Green explained further.

That was exactly what happened – a harsh reality check for Minnesota! Not only did the ‘Mile High City’ beat the TWolves at their home court, but they cooked them back at Ball Arena tonight, again.

Nikola Jokić and Co. outplayed, overpowered, and overthrew the Wolves to become the first team to win at home

Well, if we are trying to sympathize with Minnesota, then we could say that they were missing veteran point guard, Mike Conley, nearly lost Karl-Anthony Towns with an injury to his right knee, and the Ant was struggling. Or rather, the Nuggets made sure he would. Edwards finished the night with 18 points, shooting just 5-of-15 from the field and 1-of-5 from beyond the arc. This comes in the wake of the franchise superstar scoring a career-high playoff score (44 points) just last game.

As for Towns, he and KCP collided in the first quarter of the matchup. KAT immediately went down, clutching his right knee. The same one he had to have surgery due to a torn meniscus earlier in the season. Although he left for the locker room after playing for eight minutes, the Wolves’ big man returned to finish with a team-high 23 points and fared much better than everyone despite foul trouble.

Conley might not have taken the floor, but he was every bit as involved. Sitting on the bench, he took the role of an assistant coach. The ex-Grizzlies’ all-time leading scorer tried his best to keep Edwards locked in. Unfortunately, the Nuggets had him in a death grip. Double-teamed for most of the night, Denver kept the dangerous ANT-MAN on a leash by throwing multiple defenses at him.

We don’t even have to go to the Jokić-Gobert dance. Dance would mean the mutual involvement of two people. In here, though, it was the new MVP who was dancing while making the fresh DPOY dance to his tunes. TNT analyst Jamal Crawford provided an impeccable description of Nikola Jokić’s performance tonight.

“I just saw three different players. I saw the Dream Shake, the Kareem hook, and now he’s running Magic Johnson at the points with a little Larry Bird.” Thoughts?