Karl-Anthony Towns joins Niederreiter, Brunette as latest Game 7 Playoff Hero in Colorado
Karl-Anthony Towns joins Nino Niederreiter and Andrew Brunette as the latest game 7 playoff hero in Colorado.
Nino Niederreiter sat alone in the Pepsi Center, now called Ball Arena, before his game seven overtime winning goal in 2014. Karl-Anthony Towns sat alone in the stands of Ball Arena yesterday before one of his best games in a Timberwolves uniform.
Before Niederreiter and Towns there was Andrew Brunette. In 2003, Brunette scored one of the most iconic goals in Wild franchise history. His game seven overtime-winning goal beat the star-studded Colorado Avalanche to advance to the second round.
The Avalanche won the Stanley Cup two years prior and entered the 2002-03 season with the second highest odds to win the Stanley Cup. They finished the year with the leading goal scorer Milan Hejduk and the NHL's leading assist and point getter for the season in Peter Forsberg, who also won the MVP that year.
They had Joe Sakic, Forsberg, Hejduk, Alex Tanguay, Rob Blake, and of course the best goalie in the game and one of the greatest goalies ever, Patrick Roy. Yet the Minnesota Wild, who had only been a team for two years before the 2002-03 season, beat the Avalanche super team in seven games.
It was all thanks to Brunette's game seven overtime-winning goal. Roy never played a game after that. He announced his retirement after that game. His career ended on the heels of Brunette's game seven magic.
In 2014 a young Niederreiter sat in the lower bowl of the Pepsi Center taping his stick before a game seven clash with the Avalanche who went 52-22-8 that year with 112 points. They finished the year as the third best team in the NHL.
Niederreiter ended the Avalanche's incredible season with a game seven overtime-winning goal of his own. That season the Avalanche had the Rookie of the Year winner Nathan MacKinnon, Gabe Landeskog, Paul Stastny, Ryan O'Reilly, Matt Duchene, and Semyon Varlamov, who finished second in the Vezina voting and fourth in MVP voting.
Their head coach was Patrick Roy. Yet Niederreiter and the Wild crushed Colorado's hopes again with another game seven victory on the Avalanche's home ice.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baVBWrfyuGk[/embed]
The latest Minnesota game seven hero in Colorado is Timberwolves' power forward Karl-Anthony Towns.
Last season the Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship. They have one of the best players in the whole NBA on their team in Nikola Jokic who won the MVP again this year for his third time in the last four years.
Yet Jokic was left stunned in Colorado like Roy, Sakic, Forsberg, Hejduk, MacKinnon, Varlamov, and Landeskog all once were.
KAT finished the game with a team leading 23 points and 12 rebounds. He was the one who put the game away in the fourth with under a minute left.
Up 93-88 with 41 seconds left, Mike Conley missed a layup that KAT swooped in and slammed home. This was referred to as "the dagger."
Towns' game seven performance helped the Wolves erase a 20-point deficit with less than 11 minutes to play in the third quarter to shock the world. Before Sunday, teams had been 21-0 when leading by at least 15 points at halftime of a Game 7.
The Wolves trailed 58-38 with ten minutes left in the third quarter but ended up walking away with a game seven victory.
Although the name of the arena has changed, likely because the history of Minnesota teams owning Colorado in game sevens, the history remains the same.
Minnesota is now 3-0 in playoff game sevens in Colorado. The Wild are 2-0 and the Wolves 1-0. All three of those games should've gone Colorado's way. They were favored in the series in all of them and favored in game seven as well.
But that meant nothing to Andrew Brunette, Nino Niederreiter, and Karl-Anthony Towns.
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