MINNEAPOLIS _ If revenge is a dish best served cold, then what better place for the Timberwolves to right a wrong against the Los Angeles Lakers than Minneapolis and Target Center.
Well, except for maybe in January rather than on April's doorstep.
Six days after they lost a game in Los Angeles they should have won, the Wolves got their comeuppance 119-104 against a Lakers team that had lost 14 of 15 games before they beat the Wolves in overtime Friday.
They did so with starters Ricky Rubio, Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins all scoring 27 points or more in a game when the Wolves again built a big third-quarter lead against the Lakers, but kept it this time unlike last week.
Rubio's 33-point night _ 20 of them scored in the first half alone _ set his career scoring high by five points. He also had 10 assists.
Two of those points delivered late in the game on a right wing jumper pushed the Lakers away at 111-100 with 2:41 left after they had pulled within nine points three different times.
Towns added 32 points and nine rebounds while Wiggins had 27 himself.
Wiggins and big man Gorgui Dieng delivered the victory's punctuation with back-to-back 3-point shots made that kept the Lakers away for good in the final two minutes.
The Wolves now have won consecutive games after they had lost six consecutively before that. Thursday's victory was their 30th this season, one more than they won last season under interim coach Sam Mitchell.
The Lakers had seven players score in double figures, led by Jordan Clarkson's 18.
Rubio had 20 of those points by halftime and by then the Wolves had gone from an early 18-5 lead to a 53-49 by midway through the second quarter and then back again, all the way to a 67-60 lead by the intermission.
Rubio did so by making eight of his 12 first-half shots _ including all four 3-pointers he tried from the field _ attempted from the field on a night when he didn't attempt a free throw until the third quarter's fifth minute.
Not long after that, Rubio stepped to the free-throw line alone after Lakers guard D'Angelo Russell was whistled for a technical foul and he made the shot. By doing so, he extended his streak of consecutive free throws made after an opponent's technical to 48, the longest current such streak in the NBA.
On Tuesday, Rubio made all 13 free throws he attempted, including three consecutively with 3.4 seconds left that won the game 115-114 at Indiana.
The two teams played again just six days after the Wolves led by 15 points in the third quarter and by 108-100 with less than 2 { minutes left in regulation time and still lost the game 130-119 in overtime after Lakers guard Jordan Clarkson made shots down the stretch every which way.
"That helps, yes," Lakers coach Luke Walton said before the game. "Hopefully that happens again tonight."
It didn't happen this time.
The Lakers had lost 14 of 15 games before beating the Wolves at Staples Center last Friday night, but they received a boost from former Lakers superstar Shaquille O'Neal and many of the storied franchise's all-time greats who attended the unveiling of a Shaq statue outside Staples Center late that afternoon.
"Obviously, there was an extra electricity in the building," Walton said. "It was a pretty special night. Once the game gets going, the players get caught up in the competition. Now maybe the fans are a little louder _ they're rowdy and they've been there for a couple hours and excited to see some of the old Lakers in the building _ but most of it was the players playing a really good game."
Befitting such a star in a place such as Los Angeles, O'Neal and his entourage arrived to the game fashionably late, causing a commotion when they made their entrance from an upper concourse during a first-quarter timeout.
"I felt it," Wolves rookie point guard Kris Dunn said. "I just turned around and saw the big guy walking down the bleachers. He came literally from the top of the bleachers and I'm like, what? Nobody is supposed to do that, but whatever. Everybody rose up and clapped for him. That's special, you know, for somebody who played in the NBA for the fans to react like that.
"It definitely brought the energy to another level and brought their play to another level."
The two teams will complete their four-game season series in Los Angeles a week from Sunday.
