On the latest episode of Flip This House, Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor has reportedly agreed to a contract with Flip Saunders to be the new president of basketball operations. This means the old president of basketball operations, David Kahn, is not going to have his team option for next season picked up. Continue Reading…
Ricky Rubio Instragram’d a photo of a vacation in Puerto Rico in which Greg Stiemsma, Dante Cunningham, and JJ Barea joined Rubio in trying to woo unrestricted free agent Lou Amundson.
Teams can’t officially start talking to teams before July 1st, but that doesn’t mean players can’t do a little “light tampering” by inviting their friends to a great weekend vacation in Puerto Rico. It’s nice to see Rubio and the other Wolves’ players take the initiative to improve this team’s talent level before the rest of the organization is allowed to.
That’s how title teams come together, folks.
UPDATE: I will come up with a sarcasm meter that is very AWAW, but from the suggestion of Brian and the response of a few on Twitter, let’s just use this one for now.
Lou is just good friends with everybody on the team still.
On draft night in 2009, the Minnesota Timberwolves had the fifth and sixth picks in the draft. They watched Blake Griffin expectedly get drafted with the first pick to the Clippers. They watched the Memphis Grizzlies hilariously draft Hasheem Thabeet with the second pick. Then James Harden and his unaffordable beard were selected to the Oklahoma City Thunder with the third pick. That’s when this story takes a turn. Continue Reading…
Is it time to Flip out?
Let’s just cut to the chase. Our friend Steve Aschburner of NBA.com is reporting that the Wolves are working out a four-year, $9 million that will bring Flip Saunders in to be the president of basketball operations. David Kahn is currently the president of basketball operations. So that leaves us with a math problem here.
You have one president of basketball operations already. You want to bring in another basketball of operations but you only have room for ONE president of basketball operations. So in order to accomplish this move, what mathematic operation do you need to accomplish this goal? I’ll have the answer to this math problem after an excerpt from Asch’s column on NBA.com:
Former NBA head coach Flip Saunders is expected to return to the Minnesota Timberwolves as the team’s next president of basketball operations, NBA.com has learned.
Saunders, 58, has been negotiating a contract that, with option years, could run through the 2017-18 season and could be worth more than $9 million over the full five years, according to league sources who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the hiring.
The move, which could become official as soon as next week, would end David Kahn‘s controversial tenure after four seasons and an 89-223 record during which the Timberwolves’ failure to reach the playoffs stretched to nine consecutive seasons. Kahn’s contract includes a team option for 2013-14 that will not be exercised.
The answer to the math problem above is SUBTRACTION. You use subtraction. And really if the reports are true, it’s addition by subtraction.
According to a few people around the Wolves and the NBA that I’ve talked to, Kahn was never supposed to be making the basketball decisions of the organization when he was hired back in May of 2009. He was supposed to handle the contracts, money and business side of it. For whatever reason (details have been murky about this), Kahn ended up being the de facto decision-maker when it came to the actual basketball side of this. Again, I have no idea if this is the absolute truth here but I’ve been told it by a handful of people, so I think there’s some partial truth in there.
He was asked to fill a role he wasn’t really capable of doing, and he was asked to do it for years. During those years, he managed to alienate the majority of the fan base, a lot of people around the league, and even his own star player. He always made cheap, high reward-low risk moves that never came to fruition and tried to trade Love multiple times (even after his breakout season). And now he’s being replaced by Flip Saunders, who may or may not be a good front office decision-maker.
We also don’t know if Adelman is going to leave or not. What we do know is if this report is true and this is settled by next week, a big cloud over the organization has dissipated. It doesn’t mean another cloud can’t replace it, but for now, you can start to feel confident about the continued direction this team seems to be headed.
Thoughts?
Maybe it doesn’t matter what type of team you have.
People get tired and worn down. It’s hard to continue to fight for something that really doesn’t have an end game. There are days you don’t want to be at your job, even when you make a lot of money and have a cool profession. And what we see with a lot of teams that don’t have anything to play for at the end of a lost/wasted season is they give in to the regular human nature the majority of us have and they just kind of stop fighting like they used to. It’s something that you can get frustrated about as a fan, but at the same time, I get it.
I don’t want to say the Wolves aren’t fighting. I think they’re clearly fighting. Continue Reading…
This has nothing to do with Beasley but here’s an old photoshop I did.
I’ve been watching the HBO series Entourage lately when I go to bed for a couple of reasons. The first reason is it helps me clear my head when I’m lying down to sleep. It’s something that’s fairly mindless and I can just relax to. The episodes are relatively short (25 minutes) so if I fall asleep during one of them, it’s not really a pain to go back and finish the episode later.
The second reason is I’m curious as to what my fascination is with this show. Is it that Entourage is a minuscule peek into a world I’m fascinated by? People have often wondered why I like bad movies because they equate it with not being entertaining. I would argue that bad movies can be just as valuable in the entertainment department because it can bring about questions you might never think of asking. How did this get made? Was this how the original draft of the script was? Why would a studio dedicate this much money to such a terrible project? What was the side deal that went with this movie? Is that really the best take they could have gotten out of Hayden Christensen? Continue Reading…
We were hoping to see a glimpse of Kevin Love with this core of a surging Ricky Rubio, Nikola Pekovic, Andrei Kirilenko, Chase Budinger, and friends so that we — and more importantly management — would have a good idea of what this team looked like when everybody was on the court this season. The ideal lineup of Rubio-Chase-AK-Love-Pek played exactly zero minutes and zero seconds on the floor together this season, which makes it hard to evaluate what they need to know heading into this offseason.
Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen at all. Love is going to have knee surgery to clean up some scar tissue and that will keep him out of action for about a month. Considering there are only eight days left in the season, math tells me he won’t be back before the game against San Antonio on the 17th. From the team: Continue Reading…
It’s amazing how fun Ricky Rubio can be at times.
We know about the passing and the steals. We know he can crash the boards and break down opposing perimeter defenders. And we see glimpses of an improved jump shooter. In fact, over Rubio’s last 10 games, he’s over 40% from the field (41.2%) and he’s made 50% of his 3-point shots. Now, I wouldn’t say he’s fixed his ability to put the ball in the basket; it’s still very much a work in progress. But there are signs of improvement.
Two things I look for when Rubio taking a jumper are 1) was he readying himself before the pass got to him and 2) where is the arc on his shot? Continue Reading…
To tank or not to tank?
That’s what teams are left trying to figure out at the end of disappointing seasons. For some organizations, the entire season is one big tank fest as they rebuild and try to bring some youth and cheap labor to their re-growing roster (see: Bobcats, Charlotte). For other teams, the season just hasn’t gone their way and they go with a “change in direction” for their organization so they start focusing on “the young talent” on the roster (see: Suns, Phoenix). Teams would never admit to tanking because it’s a nightmare in terms of selling your product.
Also, you can’t tell players not to try hard unless they’re Michael Olowokandi. In that situation, he’s WAY ahead of you. You have to finagle the roster and the lineups as an organization to put out a crappy product. But you can’t come out and tell the coaching staff that a guy isn’t allowed to play because you want a higher draft pick. Players get “held out with injuries” because it’s an easier sell than being “held out with hopes of landing a top-3 pick.”
I don’t have a problem with tanking either. I wish the system wasn’t constructed in a way that promotes tanking. I’d rather have an unweighted lottery because it wouldn’t give teams any incentive to put out a crappy product the last three weeks of the regular season. But the system is what the system is. You get more beer pong balls by losing more games and that means more chances at putting together the right combination to win the draft lottery. As long as the system is this way, you would be stupid not to tank in most cases. Continue Reading…
During Friday night’s stunning win over the Oklahoma City Thunder, Rick Adelman talked about how he was happy to see that the team didn’t have any lulls throughout their game. It was a reason they were able to match the runs the Thunder went on. It was the reason they were able to topple a more talented team. If you can stay even keeled throughout the course of a game, you’re almost always going to be in great shape to win that game. It’s hard for even the toughest teams to do because the peaks and valleys that occur in the NBA are so commonplace.
Against the Thunder, it didn’t happen to be a problem. Against the Memphis Grizzlies Saturday night, that was the Wolves’ undoing. The final score makes the game look like a typical Grizzlies’ blowout of their lesser opponents, but really this was a highly competitive game. Without Nikola Pekovic and without Kevin Love, the Wolves had the daunting task of trying to handle the tandem of Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph inside. And I was actually quite impressed with what we saw from the undersized Wolves. Continue Reading…