DENVER – Maybe it is the shoes.
Whatever the reasons, Timberwolves young star Andrew Wiggins is scoring in rarified air since he slapped on vibrant green Adidas shoes nearly three weeks ago.
In Wednesday’s 112-99 victory at Denver that sent his team off into the nine-day All-Star break, Wiggins became only the second player in team history to score 40 points in consecutive games.
He did so by following Tuesday’s 41-point night in a home loss to LeBron James and the Cleveland team that drafted him with a 40-point game on 15-for-26 shooting at Pepsi Center.
Kevin Love is the only other player who has done that in Wolves history.
He did it by scoring 43 and 40 in consecutive games in April 2014.
Teammate Karl-Anthony Towns’ supplemented Wiggins’ big scoring night with a 24-point, 19-rebound game of his own.
Wiggins scored 17 points in Wednesday’s first quarter after he scored 19 in Tuesday’s third quarter and he reached 40 points when he made a penalty free throw with 1:30 left after Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic was called for a dead-ball foul.
He provided the exclamation point midway through the fourth quarter with a hanging slam-dunk over Jokic that even brought some Nuggets fans to their feet.
That dunk gave the Wolves a 98-89 lead. When the Nuggets scored to get back within six points, Brandon Rush answered back with a jump shot that pushed the Wolves back to an eight-point lead with five minutes left.
The Nuggets never got closer than seven points again just two nights after they played as shorthanded as they did Wednesday and beat mighty Golden State by making a NBA-record tying 24 threes.
Wiggins now has scored at least 20 points in his last 15 games, a stretch only surpassed in team history by Kevin Garnett.
Before Wednesday’s game, Wiggins sat at his locker when someone walked by and said maybe his recent scoring stretch is due to those shoes.
“It definitely is,” he said.
Wiggins started Wednesday just where he left off in Tuesday’s 41-point performance against Cleveland.
This time, he made seven of his first 11 points and scored 17 of his xx points in the first quarter alone.
The Wolves led 32-31 after a quarter, doubled that lead to 62-60 by halftime and led 85-79 after three quarters before they stretch their lead to 11 points, at 92-81, with fewer than nine minutes left.
Nuggets guard Gary Harris answered right back with consecutive three-pointers that quickly cut the Wolves lead to five points with 7:11 left before the Wolves countered with that 6-2 run that included Wiggins’ exclamation point.
After beating Golden State by 22 points on Monday, the Nuggets once again played shorthanded, this time missing five injured or ill players.
Such a circumstance mattered little against the Warriors because the Nuggets simply tied a NBA record for three-pointers made in a game by making 24 that night.
They scored 132 points against a championship team that is accustomed to doing the very same to their opponents.
But despite the ease with which his team won, Nuggets coach Mike Malone refused to guarantee before Wednesday night that his team would make 24 threes again.
“We’re going to take 24,” he said. “I’m not going to guarantee 24 makes, though. Somebody asked can you do that every night. We just try to get the best shot possible and there have been nights we had great shots that didn’t go down. Golden State was one of the nights when we got rhythm, confidence and everything we put up kept going in, which was great to see.”
The Nuggets took 34 threes Wednesday and made 11 of them.
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