When we watch March Madness we watch very young, extraordinarily gifted men burn like roman candles. It is a carnival, less a display of basketball prowess than an ecstatic frenzy. We see the spirit carrying the body to places it literally cannot go. There are shows of incredible effort and passion, fevered battles for loose balls, defense played on the edge of exhaustion, wild last-second drives to the hoop. But also: shots crush the back iron; muscles drown in adrenaline; so many turnovers. The tournament is like the most spectacular party you barely remember, the one where the floor bent to the beat of the music, where you could not speak, only scream, where your veins ran with gold, where you loved everybody.
Archives For 2012-13 Season
I’m not sure if any of you have been in the kind of situation the Wolves found themselves in last night, but I feel like I definitely have.
In the fall of 2003, things were not going so well for my band. A little less than a year after we changed the band’s name—a name we’d had for almost a decade—because we felt it no longer fit what we were trying to do, a little more than six months since we’d fired our bassist and not been able to find a consistent replacement, a few weeks after our drummer had to cancel several dates because of conflicts with another band he was in that paid him better, we played our last gig.
It was at a pretty new spot in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, not more than half an hour from Pittsfield, where we regularly packed them in whenever we played. Or rather, we used to, before the name change. The other guitarist—who was also the singer—and I were living in southern Connecticut at the time and trying to make inroads into New York City, where we’d played a good number of gigs, but hadn’t really found our niche. Massachusetts was supposed to be our safe space, our home turf, where we could be comfortable.
But nobody showed up on that October night. And I mean just about literally NOBODY. We had ringers on bass and drums, had maybe chucked whatever name recognition we had, and had barely rehearsed the drummer enough to get him through both our sets. I don’t think we knew for sure it was our last show, or at least we hadn’t said so out loud, but I think we had a sense that things were going off the rails, that any gig might be our last.
And we couldn’t rise to the occasion. It would be great to be able to tell you that we played our asses off that night, that our play rose to the level of the moment and that we really brought it. But we didn’t. And neither did the Timberwolves last night. Continue Reading…
You live by the Dante Cunningham midrange jumper, you die by etc. With Pekovic out with calf contusion, this game—for as close as it seemed down the stretch—was yet another lesson in how a steady diet of pick and pop from Stiemsma and Cunningham in the early going doesn’t set the table the way a heart pick and roll from Pek does. It’s not rocket science; it’s just basic nutrition. Look: Continue Reading…
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…
A game the Wolves should have won and did. Against a thoroughly depleted Celtics squad whose frontcourt rotation consisted of Brandon Bass, Chris Wilcox, Shavlik Randolph (who is apparently the first person named Shavlik in the history of the world based on my research) and even 3 minutes and 50 seconds of D.J. White, the Wolves found themselves with an advantage in the post thanks to the return of Nikola Pekovic from a brief ankle injury. And Pek put in work on the offensive side of things, dumping in 29 points (2 short of his career high) even though he only collected 5 rebounds.
The Wolves shot badly from 3-point range (naturally), managing only .278 on 3-pointers, but they didn’t need to space the floor with Boston’s centers so badly overmatched physically by Pekovic. The aforementioned ankle injury didn’t seem to bother Pek, and Adelman said that he didn’t go the last game because he just couldn’t get it loose before the game.
Kirilenko looked Kirilenkish with 17 pts, 9 rebs, 5 asts and 2 stls. Honestly, the only reason this was even a somewhat close game was that the Wolves’ defensive effort just wasn’t there in the first half. Their offense clicked immediately, but they couldn’t seem to transfer that energy into their defense, which lagged until they tightened up in the second half, pushing the lead out to as much as 14 and holding it mostly steady around double digits.
We cool with all that? Because now I want to talk about Jordan Crawford. 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…