Here’s all you need to know about tonight’s game, courtesy of coach Kevin McHale:

“Off the top of my head I can think of seven or eight or nine wide-open shots we missed.”

Yup - that about sums it up there, coach. Make even a fraction of the easy buckets that were thrown away tonight (more than nine, for sure) and this one is a different story.

Funny, though, how good Kevin Love, Mike Miller and Rashad McCants (!!!) looked tonight was equally as poor as Ryan Gomes (1-for-10), Sebastian Telfair (0-for-9) and Randy Foye (4-for-19) finished.

In the end, turnovers (18 leading to 18 Hawks points) and the inability to deal with Atlanta’s zone defense did the Wolves in.

Tonight this was clearly a team fighting many battles. The players were obviously tired - particularly through the first three quarters - and for a time fell into that dangerous hole of feeling sorry for themselves when things began to go wrong. But credit the team for not giving up. Minnesota out-scored Atlanta 24-19 in the fourth quarter, and got it to within two with about a minute left.

Mike Bibby’s three-pointer with 44 ticks remaining, though, was too much to handle.

McHale said he will not look at film tonight for fear of not getting any sleep at all. He’ll eventually take a look Thursday. Players, though, will not practice. The Wolves don’t play again until Saturday in Houston, then again Sunday in New Orleans.

Yes, another back-to-back is on the horizon. Whatever the Wolves did in January to win three times in such back-to-back situations would be good to find once again. Because tonight, it just wasn’t there.

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