Minnesota Timberwolves: Ricky Rubio shows just how important he is to Wolves

It was only one game, but, holy cow, was it a good game for Ricky Rubio. Rubio had a career-high 28 points in the Minnesota Timberwolves 112-111 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers in the teams’ first game of the season.

Rubio didn’t just put up this points in one little selected portion of the game, no, Rubio was seemingly on fire from the field, all over the field, all game long. The guy that looked good shooting a basketball in maybe about five games of his NBA career was all of a sudden hitting three-pointers and finishing at the rim quite effectively.

The Spaniard’s 28 was a game high that featured Kobe Bryant! Rubio shot 10-17 overall and was 2-4 from beyond the three. Rubio also had 14 assists in the contests. By my math, that means that Rubio either assisted or scored on over 55 of the Timberwolves points. In other words, Rubio was literally directly responsible for at least 50% of the Wolves offense against the Lakers.

No one expects Rubio to put up 28 points every game. Heck, 20 points is not really expected either, but we saw against the Lakers the amazing player Rubio can be. Sure, it was against the Lakers, but Rubio still has true star potential in him.

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Rubio’s passing ability is still beyond amazing and he had another couple passes that made me howl in the season opener. If Rubio has actually found a shot on top of that, well, the Wolves will be not just fun to watch, but they will be hard to beat.

This site has been saying that Rubio will be the Wolves’ MVP this season and he certainly was in contest number one of 82, but one thing is for certain: this Wolves team is so much better and so much more dangerous with Rubio at the helm.

Rubio could have had an even sexier boxscore if Sam Mitchell would have decided to change up his second unit before they puked all over themselves in the first half of the ball game and put Rubio back in the game earlier, but we’ll just leave that for another time.

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