Not a terribly exciting game tonight,but this was my first game seen in Minnesota.  Some highly anecdotal notes and generalizations:

1) The T'Wolves are so nondescript that all the home arena's attempts to get the crowd excited I think are secretly making fun of that shitfest. 

2) Whenever Craig Smith scored, the announcer would scream "THE RHINO!!!!!!!!!!!!"  If you went to Sacramento or Indiana and asked, "Which NBA player is known as 'The Rhino?' where do you think Craig Smith would fall on the list of responses? 

3) There's a feature that I guess they have every gameday called "IS RYAN GOMES RIGHT?" (Might've been Randy Foye, can't remember.)  It's a game where they ask Ryan Gomes a random question, he gives an answer, and the lucky fan has to say whether Ryan is right or wrong.  Tonight, Ryan was asked what the highest mountain in the world is.  He answered 'Mount Everest,' and the fan correctly guessed that Ryan was right.

Riveting theater all.

4) Speaking of which, I haven't been at a basketball game in a while, so this might be the rule, but I felt like this was more an infomercial than a basketball game.  Every timeout, there was some wacky event or feature.  Are they afraid that if they shut the fuck up for twenty seconds, everyone will bolt the building?

5) Brian Cardinal looks like he's 52.  I think he'll have a promising acting career someday, launched when he takes the Woody Harrelson role in a 20-years-later sequel: "White Men Can't Jump 2: Jump of Doom"

6) Shitty crowd.  This might be the elitist New Yorker in me coming out, but at MSG, I remember the people around me screaming at Francis (yes, it was that long ago) for not moving better off the ball and being lazy in his screens.  Here, whoever happened to show up was talking on cellphones, staring like zombies, or sometimes screeching when the HOWL-O-METER came up as Nate shot free throws.

Final note: for all the ripping I've just done on non-basketball activities, there was one winner.  At halftime, they pulled a woman from the crowd, blindfolded her in the middle of the court, and made her crawl around on all fours trying to find Crunch the Wolf to recycle a bottle or something.  She must have been crawling around for a good three minutes with the suddenly alive Target Center screaming and cheering and booing as she frantically tried to find the giant wolf.  Her prize when she eventually grabbed his leg was a year's therapy, I hope.

Knicks won so it's all good.

-tck