Archives For Andrei Kirilenko

Jazz 106, Wolves 84: The air up there

Zach Harper —  January 3, 2013 — 6 Comments

Donde Esta el athletico

This game was crap.

Complain about officiating or the effort or the energy or whatever. Doesn’t really matter. The Wolves played like absolute crap in this game. It happens every once in a while in this league. You hit a road game, you don’t have anything to offer that night, and the home team blows you out. The Wolves have been on the winning side of this equation before and they’ve been on the losing side of this equation before.

Tonight was the losing side and the Jazz just absolutely outplayed them in nearly every way. There isn’t much analysis that can go into it. The team still can’t make 3-pointers. They shot 2-of-17 from the field. It was the eighth time in team history they’ve shot worse than 12% from 3-point range while taking at least 17 3-point attempts. They’re 1-7 in those games with the only win coming on opening night against the Kings this season. It’s not a recipe for success and at a certain point, you have to wonder if they should even take more than a few 3-pointers in a game anymore.

But we’ll get into the 3-point debacle of the season more in the next post.

I don’t really want to talk about the game directly because it was just a bad game. We can eviscerate the people involved with it, but I’ve never been one for overreacting to a small sample size of “evidence.” What I really want to talk about is the lack of athleticism within this team right now.  Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves sign Lazar Hayward

Zach Harper —  December 31, 2012 — 1 Comment

LazarHayward

With the final roster spot vacated because of Josh Howard’s torn ACL, the Timberwolves have settled on Lazar Hayward to provide some depth on the wing. After working out James Anderson, Joey Graham and Hayward this past week (according to the Star Tribune), the Wolves have settled on Hayward after James Anderson went to the Houston Rockets.

As many of you may remember, Hayward scored 160 points in 42 games as a rookie for the Wolves in the 2010-11 season before being dealt to the Oklahoma City Thunder last December. Personally, I would have preferred James Anderson because he does more offensively and would fill more of the shooting guard role the Wolves need when they decide to go small or even just to have backup for Shved at times. Anderson can also play the 3 in a pinch. However, Hayward will most likely provide a few minutes here and there to save Andrei Kirilenko’s legs and back and allow Adelman to not lose too much size at the backup small forward position, if he decides to keep Derrick Williams more at the 4 when he plays him.

The deal is non-guaranteed, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he was only here for a week or two as they try to acquire or sign someone else to fill in for the rest of the season.

So yeah… that’s pretty much all there is to this story.

Oh wait, there is one more thing.  Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves 111, Suns 107: Getting big

Zach Harper —  December 30, 2012 — 5 Comments

LoveDunk

The makeup of what this team is good at and what they struggle to do still confounds me a bit.

Going into this season, I don’t think there were many people who assumed the Wolves would struggle offensively (22nd) and be a defensive juggernaut of sorts (6th). A big part of the reason is the outside shooting of the Timberwolves. This team is still under 30% on the season and no team in the history of the NBA has taken more 3-pointers per game while making under 30% of them. The Wolves just can’t shoot the 3-ball right now and probably won’t shoot it well until Kevin Love gets back into rhythm and Chase Budinger gets back onto the court.

Until that happens, the Wolves have to go inside and they have to be clever about the way they go inside. Just straight pounding the ball into the post with Love and Pek is too basic to be consistently effective against opposing defenses. The Wolves have an advantage in the frontcourt that most teams don’t seem to have around the league. Between Andrei Kirilenko, Nikola Pekovic and Kevin Love, there are few SF/PF/C hydras as crafty at scoring the basketball as the Wolves’ trio.  Continue Reading…

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Magic 102, Wolves 93: We’re halfway there

Zach Harper —  December 18, 2012 — 7 Comments

Sleeping unicorns are the least fun unicorns.

What a fantastic win for the Minnesota Timberwolves last night. I wrote yesterday that to be a really good team, you have to win games that should be wins. The Wolves need to win games like this against the Magic and that’s exactly what they did. Kevin Love was phenomenal in his performance. It was great to see him back to being himself.

He knocked down 3-pointers as the trailer in transition, he scored out of the post, and he was active going to the basket. Andrei Kirilenko’s passing was incredible and it seemed to be contagious with Love. This was by far his best passing performance of the season. It didn’t result in any assists, but I thought he moved the ball extremely well. He helped Nikola Pekovic dominate the paint inside. The Wolves didn’t finish at a high rate in there, but you could tell they were determined to break the will of the Orlando interior and that’s exactly what they did.

I was disappointed that Ricky Rubio didn’t really have much impact on the team when he played, but you can’t expect him to be a unicorn at all times. Sometimes unicorns have to sleep and that seemed to be what he needs to do. But overall, I think we can be extremely proud of the tenacity, execution, and effort that the Wolves showed us. This is what good teams do. They take care of lesser teams in a destructive and matter of fact manner.

What’s that? No, I didn’t watch the second half. Why? What happened? Did Ricky have a great second half I should be talking about? Did Love end up with 40-20? Did Pekovic eat the Epcot Center and then reconstruct Disney World into Euro Disney with all of failed robots from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride?  Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves 108, Nuggets 105: We’ve got (no) controversy

Zach Harper —  December 13, 2012 — 11 Comments

PekMeatGrinder

There should be pitchforks and torches headed toward #42 at the Target Center right now.

After “spouting off” in a national column that he assumed would include many of the positive things he allegedly said about the team, Kevin Love had a horrific night of basketball. The 3-of-17 from the field doesn’t really even begin to show the struggles Love had in this game against the Denver Nuggets. He got the shots you’d want him to get: spot-up jumpers, half hooks six feet from the basket against poor post defenders, basically everything he’s supposed to be good at.

The ball awkwardly came off his finger tips, often coming up short or looking like he was shooting the ball off of his wrist. His touch wasn’t there and he didn’t really know how to make up for it. He heard heckles from fans, although it was nothing to attempt to really write about. He was neutral about the things that were said to him, not giving in to prodding questions hoping for a sound byte.  Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves 91, Cavaliers 73: A ‘Lenk to the Past

Steve McPherson —  December 8, 2012 — 6 Comments

First of all, his name is Alonzo Gee and he likes to dunk.

Little known fact: The Timberwolves were in Gee’s first NBA team. After going undrafted in the 2009 NBA Draft, Gee was signed by Minnesota on September 24, 2009, then his contract was put on waivers on October 6. It was a brief run that, sadly, did not contain any dunks.

But back to the matter at hand. No one would call this a pretty win, but it was a game in which the Wolves never trailed, and that’s encouraging. After games in which they’ve wilted against teams both superior and inferior, sometimes coming back and other times never climbing out of that hole, the Wolves hung tough even when Cleveland tied the game at 35-35 with 2:12 left in the second quarter. They went on a run to end the first half and kept the lead stable until about halfway through the fourth quarter when they started to push it out and Cleveland seemed to pack it in. It was a slow game, but that’s the way the Wolves have preferred to play this year; they came in under their season average of 93.2 points per game, which is 25th in the league. Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves 3-point shooting: Infinite Sorrow

Zach Harper —  December 4, 2012 — 10 Comments

The NBA 3-point line has been around since the 1979-80 NBA season. Even the rule change was supposed to help usher in a new era of basketball from the 1970s to the 1980s, it wasn’t exactly an accepted practice to start chucking 3-pointers like we see teams doing today. Instead, it was a seldom-used arrow in the quiver for most NBA teams.

Because it wasn’t a widely practiced action in the NBA and used more for shooting games after practice than anything else, we saw some hilariously low 3-point production from NBA teams during the first 13 seasons of the 3-point arc. The 1982-83 Los Angeles Lakers have the lowest 3-point percentage in NBA history. They shot just 10.4% from the 3-point line that season. Sounds absurdly low, right? Well, they only took 96 attempts that season and made 10 of them. They also went on to win the Western Conference Finals because they had Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

From the 79-80 season through the 2011-12 season, there have been 171 teams in NBA history who have shot less than 29% from 3-point range in a season. But the problem with this statistic is the 3-pointer wasn’t really a thing until the 1992-93 season. In the first 13 years of the NBA 3-point line, only three teams (88-89 New York Knicks, 90-91 Denver Nuggets, 91-92 Milwaukee Bucks) took more than 1,000 3-point attempts in an NBA season. That total doubled after the Suns, Hawks, and Rockets all attempted over 1,000 3-pointers in the 92-93 season.

In the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, only seven teams DIDN’T attempt at least 1,000 3-pointers.

Why this little bit of 3-point history?  Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves 95, Clippers 101: Universal Magnetic

Steve McPherson —  November 29, 2012 — 2 Comments

As my wife often reminds me, there are a lot of games in an NBA season and truly, this was one of them. I mean, listen: they can’t all be State of the Union-level referendums on the soul of the team. So here’s the game wrap, shorter edition: The Wolves outrebounded the Clippers 52-35 and took 9 more free throws, but shot 27% from the arc, had 10 fewer assists, and let the Clippers score 22 fast break points. Even with Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan in foul trouble down the stretch and players like Matt Barnes and Ronny Turiaf getting technical fouls, Minnesota couldn’t take control. I guess you could say at least this wasn’t like the games of the 5-game losing streak where they would jump out to a lead only to see it disappear in the third quarter. Although they almost established a double-digit lead in the second, they felt shaky the whole game and that it was even close towards the end is more an indication of the Clippers’ own difficulties than anything else. Continue Reading…

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Timberwolves 97, Kings 89: This Is Basketball—The Gods Will Not Save You (Every Time)

Steve McPherson —  November 28, 2012 — 5 Comments

The five-game losing streak is no more. And yes, it was snapped against a team now in sole possession of the worst record in the West and just as prone to meltdowns as the Wolves. But as is often said, you have to win the ones you’re supposed to win, and Minnesota won this game with a combination of activity on offense, Kevin Love getting more integrated into the team, and a healthy dose of the kind of good fortune every team requires. Oh and there was that singularity created by the double foul on DeMarcus Cousins and Love, but more on that later. Continue Reading…

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Blazers 103, Wolves 95: We need to talk about things

Zach Harper —  November 24, 2012 — 13 Comments

Screen Shot 2012-11-24 at 12.18.54 PM

All of the talk and panic about this team last night seemed to be two-fold:

1) The team is 0-2 since Kevin Love surprised us with an early comeback. Is he hurting their chances of winning?

2) Derrick Williams has had two straight DNP-CDs. HIS CAREER IS OVER.

I feel like this is easily explained, or at least it should be pretty easy. In regards to Love, I really think fantasy basketball and basketball video games have skewed how we judge performance on the court. Numbers and stats mean the world and they exist in a vacuum. Kevin Love had 34 and 14 in his first game back. He had 24 and 13 in the loss to the Blazers last night. Those are good stat lines for any player, so he must have had an enormous impact on the game. And if he didn’t, why can’t he make this team much better when he comes back.  Continue Reading…

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