LOS ANGELES – Timberwolves coach Kurt Rambis brought his new franchise back home with him to play the Los Angeles Lakers Friday night in a game that featured teams who share nothing in common except a belief in the same system of basketball.
When Rambis left Staples Center with an eighth NBA championship ring to hide away in his "attic," his former Lakers team owned an 11-game winning streak, a league-best 18-3 record and a 104-92 victory over a Wolves team that Phil Jackson had warned his players about.
The Wolves departed for Sacramento late Friday with a 3-20 record – one away from the 3-21 start reached by the franchise's 2007-08 team – and perhaps a better grasp of what it takes to succeed with a triangle offense Rambis borrowed from Jackson, his mentor who has won 10 NBA titles with it.
"I feel good, I'm ready to play again," Rambis said about a night that honored him before the game with a ring ceremony and a video montage that declared him "Always a Laker." "I'm ready to see another ballgame and see if our team can add something to this and get better tomorrow."
The Wolves inevitably were overcome by Kobe Bryant's presence and 20 points – achieved despite playing the final three quarters with a fractured index finger on his shooting hand– and the champions' size and length on a night when Lakers forward Pau Gasol exceeded Kevin Love's career-tying 19-rebound night with a career-high 20 rebounds of his own.
"They're such a big team, a long team," said Wolves forward Al Jefferson, whose 24-point, 13-rebound night was his fifth consecutive double-double. "We're a small team."
Love moved into the starting lineup Friday for the first time this season, exactly one week after he made his return in New Orleans from that broken hand that caused him to miss the season's first 18 games.
He made three of 14 shots and scored just seven points, but matched that career rebound high before a Staples Center crowd that stood and applauded Rambis to being the evening and ended it by cheering the two free tacos owed each of them because their Lakers held the visitors to fewer than 100 points.
"That's very nice," Rambis said of the reception he received "I've had such a unique experience with this organization, as a player, a coach, in the front office. It will absolutely hard and impossible to shake that Laker out of me."
Eventually, inevitably on Friday, Love's rebounding, Jefferson's double-double night and Ramon Sessions' scoring off the bench (15 points) couldn't counter a Lakers team that had five players reach double-figure scoring.
Bryant, of course, led all of those five with 20 points, and he did so with what the team called an "avulsion" fracture on his right index finger sustained in the first quarter.
The Lakers trainer simply wrapped the finger with a splint and Bryant played on, all the way to that 11-game winning streak.
"That doesn't surprise you, that doesn't surprise me," Rambis said. "That's who he is as a very driven basketball player. I would love to have 14 Kobe Bryants on my team with that attitude. Just that attitude alone makes a world of difference.
"He's done it before with multiple distractions. You just love competitors like that."
Through the years, other coaches – Jim Cleamons in Dallas, Bill Cartwright in Chicago – had used some elements of the offense with which Jackson now has won more NBA titles than any other coach who ever lived.
But nobody has borrowed as liberally from Jackson's non-existent playbook – the triangle is a read-and-react offense, remember – as Rambis, the man who spent seven seasons as his assistant.
Even Gasol was curious to see an opponent that Jackson referred to as a "mirror image" of his own team.
"It'll be interesting to hear them with our calls and they'll hear their calls," Gasol said. "It's just a matter of personnel and intensity, of who wants it more. If their guys want it more than we do, they're going to have an advantage.
"The system will be the same. The calls will probably be the same. The intensity guys decide to bring, that will be the difference."
And, for a while, the Wolves' effort countered the Lakers' superlative talent that now has lost just three times in their first 21 games and that Rambis suggests is so smooth and so superlative that he doesn't "see any other team even comparing to them this year."
With Love clearing the backboards in his first start and Sessions making his first six shots, the Wolves kept the game competitive until the Lakers finished the third quarter with a 14-3 burst that provided an 86-68 advantage from which the Wolves never recovered.
Sessions had 12 of those points by halftime, when the Wolves trailed by just a bucket after he helped rally them from an 11-point deficit with a 30-23 second quarter that the Lakers trumped by winning the third 30-14.
"We can learn from them, especially the best team in the league running the same offense we run," Jefferson said. "Of course, we can learn a lot from that."
