Jim Souhan: Wolves are best team in basketball, even if they can't say it

MINNEAPOLIS — The Timberwolves, at the moment, are the best team in the NBA.

They need 10 more victories to win a championship and have the right to say that themselves. The rest of us don't have to wait. We can see it.

The Denver Nuggets were the best team in the NBA last season and destroyed their competition in the playoffs to easily win the title.

In this second-round playoff series, the Wolves won the first game despite playing inefficiently on offense, then embarrassed the champs in Game 2 on Monday night in Denver, winning 106-80 after taking a 61-35 lead into halftime.

In two games, the Wolves have reduced the defending champs to a bumbling bunch of whiners.

The Wolves blew out the Nuggets at altitude, in a supposedly tough place to play, and without presumptive defensive player of the year Rudy Gobert, who was with his fiancée for the birth of their child.

The infant could not have cried any more than the Nuggets did Monday.

Jamal Murray complained all game, seemingly because he's not used to being guarded so intensely. Cameras even caught him throwing a heat pack (or something similar) from the bench onto the court when a call went against Denver, a classless and dangerous act. He also gestured to the officials in a way that suggested he thought they were on the take.

Michael Malone, the Nuggets' usually likable coach, rushed an official, screaming in his face, and didn't get called for a technical foul.

Nikola Jokic, who might be ceding his title of "World's Best Player" to Wolves star guard Anthony Edwards in this series, joked after Game 1 that the solution to Denver's problems was to clone him.

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