Let’s say you were trapped in a cabin somewhere. No, this isn’t some bizarre R. Kelly musical idea; I’m serious.
Sometimes I watch this team shoot 3-pointers and I feel like I’m trapped in a cabin. I typically get this feeling when I review all of the 3-pointers from the past month, chart down the results, and realize progress hasn’t been made. For a while, I thought it might feel like a zombie apocalypse survival journal, but I ultimately determined this wasn’t the feeling. Continue Reading…
For the final play of the Wolves-Blazers game, Rick Adelman drew up a play that gave Ricky Rubio a fairly basic pick-and-roll set with the floor spread and plenty of options off of that play. And the Wolves actually ran it really well. They ended up with Dante Cunningham pump-faking, nearly traveling, and then having to rush a jumper just a bit against his defender.
After the game, Adelman described the play they ran:
“The last play was a bang-bang play. I thought it was the best play we had. Pek might have been open rolling down the middle. At least he was going right to the basket and forcing the action. Dante made a nice pump fake, missed the shot but he’s not used to having the ball in his hands like that.”
Cunningham had made eight of his 10 shot attempts in the fourth quarter and was 20 for his last 25 heading into that final play. The Wolves options on the play were essentially spot-up shooting from Barea and Shved on the two sides, Rubio driving to the basket, Pek rolling to the basket or DC pupping near the top of the key.
“When Rick draws up a play, it’s not only one option,” Rubio said in the locker room after the game. “You never know what’s going to happen. It was like a different option and I felt that was the best option because he was shooting pretty good. But they defended it pretty good too.”
How good was the play and could it have been better? Let’s take a look. Continue Reading…
We’re all really sad.
The idea of wanting it more than the other team is a confusing concept to me. Wanting it more doesn’t really mean anything positive, necessarily. Do the Wolves lose games because they don’t want to win enough? Or do they lose games because they don’t want to win it correctly? Or do they lose games because they are simply too banged up?
After playing an abominable 38 minutes to start out against the Portland Trail Blazers Monday night, the Wolves found some pride and decided to fight back by executing basketball plays. It sounds simple because… well, it is simple. When the Wolves play basketball like they’re designed to play, good things can happen. It doesn’t mean they’d always win if they played the way they’re supposed to. Certain match-ups will always be problematic for what they have for personnel.
However, watching them run pick-and-rolls, pick-and-pops, and get controlled dribble penetration in the fourth quarter against a team like Portland showed they have potential to compete even with the current injuries.
After Saturday night’s blowout victory over the Pelicans, I said it was really hard to learn anything from a blowout win or loss because you don’t see your team tested or responding. Have enough blowout losses in a short amount of time and you’ll learn that your team just isn’t very good, but having them sporadically really just means they’re random occurrences rather than tell-tale signs. But when your team keeps consistently getting down big early in games and then has to fight its way back, what does that teach you?
What it teaches the Wolves’ team is a lesson. Continue Reading…
How now, Sad Bro Brow?
Remember how we felt late Friday night?
The Wolves had just gotten pummeled by the Lakers. I know the final score was pretty close, but any time you’re down 29 points to a team at any point in the game, you’ve been pummeled. The Wolves eventually whittled a 29-point second quarter deficit down to four before losing by double digits to Kobe and Friends Colleagues. And the cliché in games like that is “use the momentum of the run to make it a game and roll it over into the next game.”
I don’t know if there are statistics readily available to back this up, but I feel like that doesn’t happen a lot. The idea of game-to-game momentum doesn’t seem real to me unless the team has walked away with a victory. And yet, the cliché rang true Saturday night for the Wolves. After getting down 61-32 just a few minutes into the second quarter of Friday night’s game, Minnesota built their own 29-point lead. Theirs existed in the third quarter of their victory over the Pelicans but it existed.
Know what I realized during the Wolves’ blowout victory when juxtaposed to their ginormous deficit just 24 hours prior? I have a hard time learning anything from blowout games. Continue Reading…
I didn’t expect to be writing this post.
At the beginning of the game, the Wolves were undermanned and completely overmatched. This Nets team is healthy and a lot better than what the Wolves are able to run out there. That much was evident in the early minutes of the game. I was going to write about Starbursts — you know, the candy? I was formulating my thoughts about Starbursts while hoping to catch a glimpse of a great pass by Rubio to placate my necessity to see him light up the Target Center. Continue Reading…
Reserves are headed the Wolves’ way.
The team announced today that they’ve signed both F/C Chris Johnson and G/F Mickael Gelabale to 10-day contracts, following the expiration of Lazar Hayward’s 10-day contract and a hardship exception granted by the NBA to allow a 16th member of the roster on a 10-day contract. Here are the press releases for both: Continue Reading…
The Wolves are in a bad place right now and have been all month long.
Heading into the month of January, the Minnesota Timberwolves had a lot of hope. The team was 14-13 and one of the top defensive squads in the NBA. Kevin Love was still trying to find his way after coming back early from his hand but he was at least rebounding and providing a threat to the defense (he wasn’t shooting well but they defended him like he might). Ricky Rubio was working his way back from an ACL tear and showing some flashes of the wunderkind point guard that dazzled us in his rookie campaign.
And while the team was struggling offensively, they could rely on defense and grinding out victories to stay in the playoff hunt in the Western Conference. It wasn’t going to be an easy road by any means, but the Wolves were avoiding the eventual fallout of having to deal with so many injuries to so many key players in their rotation.
Once January hit, everything changed for the worse. Continue Reading…
We have kind of been talking about tempering expectations over the last week or so. The Timberwolves are extremely banged up and I think it’s becoming apparent that without a shooter (Chase Budinger) to space the floor and without an All-NBA focus of the offense (Kevin Love) for the defense to key in on, we’re headed into a very dark and murky area of not knowing which team is going to show up most nights.
The natural inclination is to find someone to blame. The blaming of Love seems to have passed through our area for now. Since he’s not around and won’t be for a couple of months, there’s no point in belaboring the point and hammering down a guy that can’t prove anybody right or wrong. His hand just won’t allow it. And thankfully, fans seem to acknowledge that for now and I haven’t really seen any blame placed on his beard. However, you still have someone to blame. Eventually, it will be Rick Adelman because the coach always takes the fall at some point. But for now, his situation doesn’t allow him to be with the team and our thoughts go out to him and his wife right now.
So who else is blame-worthy? A lot of the sentiment peppering the Twitter waves last night went toward the guy pictured above. No, they weren’t blaming Tony Parker. I mean… Parker was a big part of why the Wolves got destroyed. He had 20 points on 10-of-15 shooting in just 29 minutes of action. He did whatever he wanted out there.
No, people started freaking out about Ricky Rubio, saying he shouldn’t be playing if he can’t produce like we need him to produce. I’m not going to lie; this enraged me. It enraged me because it seemed so short-sighted and desperate. Is Ricky Rubio 100%? Not even close. Is Ricky Rubio 80%? I’m not even so sure of that. I know Rubio definitely isn’t healthy enough to do what he did last year consistently. That much is obvious. But to pretend that Rubio has been bad this season because he’s not scoring the ball or even looking to score the ball seems odd.
Each game for Rubio is a building block. It’s not a building block for improving his game, necessarily. That will have to come during the summer months and into next season. That’s when we’ll see if he can improve his impressive but flawed set of skills. It’s a building block with his body and more specifically his leg. If you notice on every single shot Rubio took last night, they were all short — every single one of them. Rubio’s feel for the game is still impressive. He knows where to deliver the ball most of the time.
However, his feel for when and how to score is back to square one. There is a certain snap of the wrist you can have in passing the ball that doesn’t need much leg strength at all. That’s not the case with shooting a basketball. You want your legs on that wall; you need your legs on that wall. Shooting a jumper without legs is like throwing a football off your back leg. There are times you’re going to complete the pass to the intended receiver but most of the time you’re looking at it going the other way.
Sitting Rubio, even when he’s struggling, is not the answer. He needs to continue to build strength in his legs and confidence in his game. It will waver from time to time but ultimately, it’s a lot better than the alternative. The alternative brings about more questions about his game. Not letting him play his allotted minutes leads to a lack of trust in his game and in his body, and it also leads to atrophy.
And you know how the old saying goes: atrophy never leads to a trophy.
Okay, that’s not a saying. I just made it up. But it kind of makes sense.
If you want to blame something, then blame injuries. They happen and they suck but they’re a part of the NBA. There seems to be a team every season that gets blitzed by them and never quite recovers. Apparently, it’s the Wolves’ turn to suffer through this for whatever reason.
The Wolves got done in by the bench of the Spurs last night. Their bench was A LOT better than our bench and it showed. They had more skill and more energy. I don’t think that would necessarily be the case if these two teams faced each other completely healthy, but “what if” scenarios don’t do anything but make you daydream about a healthier time. The Spurs kicked the Wolves’ butts fair and square. A lot of that could be you’re asking the Wolves’ reserves to be starters and their reserves to be part of the second unit.
Greg Stiemsma, Dante Cunningham, and Lazar Hayward are being asked to do way too much because of injuries. Alexey Shved is being asked to create way too much and you can see how inconsistent his production has been lately because of it. There isn’t any real blame that has to go around right now. Guys are hurt, units are depleted, and our one “savior” is trying to get his body right. He probably won’t accomplish that until next season. Maybe he can get consistent play when March rolls around, but most likely, we probably won’t see him being consistently back to himself until October of this season.
For now, we’re just hoping to see some highlights here and there.
It would be nice to see consistently competitive games but that’s going to be hard against the elite of the NBA. This is what the Spurs do; they destroy those that are beneath them. And the Wolves are definitely beneath them for the time being.
After a night of next to zero sleep (not Wolves related, just your basic insomnia), I was in a zombionic haze all day long. Because of this, I never got around to writing a recap of the Wolves’ loss to the Thunder from Wednesday night. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to write about it; I just didn’t really know what to say about it.
The Wolves are incredibly short-handed, especially with Barea missing the game. Having three guards, one of them on a minutes restriction due to ACL rehabilitation, is not an ideal situation for facing Russell Westbrook. Throw in the fact that Kevin Love isn’t around and the Wolves are almost out of shooting guards, and you could see the writing on the wall before this game even started. And that’s fine. You can’t expect to have a Disney moment every time this season. The Thunder are just too good to topple consistently. They aren’t going to let that Wizards game happen often.
While trying to come up with something to write, I looked at a pen I recently got and couldn’t help but think about Nikola Pekovic. Continue Reading…
Welp, here’s the news with Kevin Love that we already know.
The Minnesota Timberwolves today announced that after an examination by Dr. Andy Weiland, a hand specialist at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, forward Kevin Love will require surgery to repair the third and fourth metacarpal in his right hand. He injured his hand during the third quarter of the Jan. 3 game at Denver.
Details of the surgery expected to be announced tomorrow. Love is expected to be sidelined for 8-10 weeks.
So now what? The Wolves will fight; we know that about them. This is arguably the most talented roster from top to bottom this franchise has ever seen. I don’t know if that says more about this roster or it says more about this franchise, but it would be a pretty good argument to have if you said this is 1 through 15 the best Minnesota has seen. Continue Reading…