Archives For David Kahn

Kurt Rambis finally exits

Benjamin Polk —  July 12, 2011 — Leave a comment

Well, our long national nightmare is over. The Timberwolves have finaly announced that Kurt Rambis has been “relieved” of his coaching duties. (I continue to love that sickly passive aggressive-phrase: “Oh, thank you so very much for doing me the favor of relieving me of my duties. It’s such a terrific relief.”) From the Wolves:

“I want to thank Kurt for his contributions to our franchise and wish him the best in his future endeavors,” said David Kahn, Timberwolves President of Basketball Operations. “His arrival signaled we were serious about building a championship-contending ballclub over the course of time. We have accumulated a solid nucleus of young talent with a bright future during the last two years. I am hopeful Kurt receives his share of the credit for helping develop that talent and his contributions are not forgotten as we become a better basketball team. It is always hard to make these decisions. It is especially hard when it involves somebody of Kurt’s reputation. Even so, this is the right time for us to make a head coaching change now that we’ve identified our roster and its specific needs.”

See post below.

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Wolves slouch into the break

Benjamin Polk —  February 22, 2011 — Leave a comment

When it comes to the Timberwolves, it make little sense to mince words. After consecutive pleasant surprises against New Orleans and Houston last week, the Wolves’ final four games leading into the All-Star break were pretty disheartening. These games were wrapped in an aura of grim defeat. Physical and emotional fatigue permeated the air.

But let’s please be a little bit generous with our Wolves. These losses were the culmination of an exhausting string of injuries and absences, in which the depleted Wolves struggled–admirably, for the most part, if futilely–to craft some coherence from the ruins.

And so I’m not prepared, on the basis of those four unpalatable losses, to call this season an unmitigated disaster. This is not rock bottom. The truth is that, win totals notwithstanding, this team is an improvement over last year. They have played competitive basketball against some of the best teams in the league. They are more energetic and athletic; they are more creative. They can usually shoot the ball pretty well; sometimes they even engage in the kind of sublimely unconscious ball-movement that is the hallmark of the Triangle offense.

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Notes on a dark Sunday

Benjamin Polk —  January 24, 2011 — 3 Comments

Run Ricky, Run

Question: is it a good or bad thing when the New York Times wonders aloud if the  putative savior of your franchise is over the hill at age 20? “Through 28 games in the 2010-11 season,” says Jonathan Givony in the Old Gray Lady, “[Ricky] Rubio has continued to struggle. He is shooting just 32 percent from the field, including 11 of 61 from beyond the arc, and his team has lost more games in the ACB and in the Euroleague than it did all of last season. Why has Rubio’s development stalled? Will he be able to turn his potential into production?”

Good, sobering questions. The piece also includes a nicely in-depth look at the financial implications of Rubio’s coming decision. Things are definitely more complicated than David Kahn would have us believe. Here’s how the article ends: “‘I’m not focused on the N.B.A. right now,’ Rubio said. ‘Right now, I don’t want to talk and I don’t want to think.’” Oh boy.

Faces of Death

Our sincere hope is that none of us will ever have to experience a basketball season as desperately miserable as the Cleveland Cavaliers 2010/2011 campaign. But if we do, I can only hope that we’ll have someone like John Krolik of Cavs: the Blog to read. Routinely plumbing the depths of a team this hopeless and emerging with sanity and good humor intact is a serious project and Krolik is taking it seriously.

Not only is he summoning up the courage to actually analyze this punishingly irrelevant squad, but check out some of the recent entry titles: Whoever said ‘that’s why they play the games’ was not talking about this game bullets; The Cavs totally would have won this game if they didn’t suck bullets; History is now chasing us, and we cannot run fast enough bullets. He has a post called “Most things in life are less terrible than the Cavaliers.” That’s intense!

Watching Krolik waver between indignation and resigned exhaustion is pretty compelling in a wrenching, Cassavetes-esque kind of way. Cavs: The Blog is a painful place right now, but I suggest you read it anyway.

In Miscellaneous News , , , ,
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Wings and prayers: Johnson and Webster scuffle

Benjamin Polk —  January 23, 2011 — 1 Comment

Photo by Terry Bain

Here’s an interesting thing David Kahn said in his FSN live chat on Wednesday:

I think we have too many wing players and it may be something we have to address, if not before the deadline then certainly next summer. The concept was we would create a lot of competition for playing time in practices but I don’t think it works as well. It works more theoretically than practically.

Of course, the Wolves’ wing bounty was one of the primary criticisms leveled at Kahn and Rambis this offseason. And as recently as last month, Kahn and Tony Ronzone were still defending those moves on the aforementioned grounds: that competition would raise everybody’s level of play and allow the Wolves to identify the best players of the bunch.

So it’s pretty striking for Kahn to now admit that this little experiment hasn’t worked as the team had hoped. My guess is that it has to do with the recent struggles of Martell Webster and Wes Johnson.

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Blake Griffin and Kevin Love: the style wars

Benjamin Polk —  January 21, 2011 — 2 Comments

Blake Griffin prepares to transcend Samsara.

As Hanny and Jim Pete repeated more than once, Wednesday night’s Wolves-Clippers matchup was likely the most highly anticipated game in the entire history of this storied rivalry.  And it turned out more strangely than I could have imagined.

The strangest of all is a point that Myles alluded to in his writeup: Kevin Love actually did a solid job of forcing Blake Griffin into tough shots, but then couldn’t prevent Griffin from putting back his own miss, often in stunning style. Of course, Love then proceeded to grab 10 boards in the second half while matching up with the 7-foot tall, 300-foot wingspanned human elevator, Deandre Jordan. So I thought this called for some rebounding bullets. There’s also a little Jonny Flynn and David Kahn in this mix.

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The great conversations: Kevin Love

Benjamin Polk —  December 22, 2010 — 8 Comments

My interview with Kevin Love was another treasure trove that I couldn’t really find a place for. Picture: an insanely cold day. Me drinking tea at the Starbucks across from the Target Center. A very tall man sitting across from me at an embarrassingly small table answering my questions–about his role on the team, his relationship with Kurt Rambis and the entire controversy over his minutes–with candor and good humor. I appreciate that.

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Darko captivates, Timberwolves baffle

Benjamin Polk —  December 1, 2010 — 10 Comments

Photo by Rubyblossom

Two new internet sightings caught my attention recently. The first is an acidic little number by Matt Moore at ProBasketballTalk. It’s sort of a dark Socratic dialogue riffing on Darko’s recent resurgence. The piece is called “Three Good Games from Darko Justifies the Kahn Era…or Something”. Let’s take a peak:

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Open Letter To The Fans: Leave Them Wanting More

Zach Harper —  September 14, 2010 — 7 Comments

Advertising and promotional work are tricky things.

There has to be a balance between boosting the product you’re trying to sell in a way that makes it desirable for the customer and at the same time you can’t really insult their intelligence too much. At a certain point, you’re trying to trick your clientele to giving their “hard-earned” money to you for a service or product that you’ve convinced them they want or need. But transparency can still be a tactic used while trying to trick your potential customers.

As many Wolves fans have seen by now, there was an open letter to the fans in the Monday edition of the Star Tribune. And the strategy was something that wasn’t all that surprising and yet still refreshing to see. The Wolves front office took a page out of Eminem’s character in the movie 8 Mile to promote themselves as a necessary part of Wolves’ fans lives.

They criticized themselves and essentially brought certain criticisms of the organization and rebuilding plan to light before it could be used against them. It was just like the final rap battle in 8 Mile. Eminem’s character wins the competition by ripping on himself throughout the freestyle (warning: language NSFW). It’s essentially a version of reverse psychology to get you to let your guard down while they try to throw ticket package options your way.

But how much do you believe the message they’re giving you? Do you buy into the plan and the way it’s being executed? What about how they shaped their message in describing the players on their team?

The plan is a curious one because while they’ve done exactly what they claim they have wanted to do the entire time (younger, faster, more athletic), we don’t know that the team is truly any better than it was in the first place. Maybe there is more unknown with the future of how these players could develop and therefore it’s easy to think, “Sure, they could be better.” At the same time there is still too much confusion of how they get a #1 guy on this roster and how these pieces fit into the triangle offense.

While it’s unfair to criticize the EVERY move made by David Kahn simply because it’s him (even I’ll admit he’s done some good stuff in the year-plus he’s been in charge), it’s also ridiculous to defend him just because people are making fun of your team all the time. The justification of the Darko contract is baffling to me. Just because other teams spent money more irresponsibly on big men than the Wolves did doesn’t mean the contract is a valid move towards rebuilding. The execution of the plan is just as confusing as the figuring out how all of the pieces fit into the halfcourt system. It doesn’t mean that neither will work out but to say, “we know we’ve turned the corner” is a weird way to shape the sales pitch being given to Wolves fans in this letter.

The overall context of the message was well crafted and at the same time a bit of a head-scratcher. They opened with poking fun at themselves, stating the plan they believe in, being brutally honest about the present likelihood of success and describing the team and then ending it with an air of confidence before one more bout of humor. The letter was very well laid out and symmetric in its approach. But it was confusing how they could go 518 words of an organizational state of the union address with only mentioning the best player on the team as “one of the best outlet passers in the game.”

This was really the only weird/off-putting thing I took from the letter. Kevin Love is/should be the face of this franchise. I think you can actually sell tickets with him. He just became a cult hero of the basketball-following world during the FIBA World Championships and he gets a slight blurb. He’s by far the best player on the team and yet gets less praise attributed to him than the adolescent years of Michael Beasley received. Maybe I’m just nitpicking this point but I found it to be really odd and disheartening.

Other than that, the Wolves are telling the NBA world and more importantly Wolves fans to take a look into the glass house before they throw stones at it. They’re being fairly open and honest about their feeling of where the franchise is headed. And they’re even able to poke fun at themselves while doing it in a clever way to push tickets.

“Enough talk. It’s time to play.

Oh, wait. We forgot to talk about Rubio.

Next time. “
Way to go out on a high note.

In Miscellaneous News
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Timberwolves: a Team in Turmoil?

Benjamin Polk —  August 16, 2010 — 17 Comments

Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

ESPN’s panel of experts has been speaking for nearly two weeks now. So far, they think the Heat will win lots of basketball games, that Amare Stoudemire will be a disappointment and that Lebron James will be good. Nothing all that controversial there. Today, though, the panel pronounced that our Timberwolves would be the most tumultuous team in the NBA this year. The Pups narrowly beat out the Cavs and Hornets but still, I thought, our honor needed some defending. So over at the ESPN NBA page, I did just that. Here’s the nuts and bolts of the thing. As you can see, they caught me on an optimistic day:

I realize it seems questionable to brazenly flout the “best player available” maxim by drafting Wesley Johnson over DeMarcus Cousins, and then immediately duplicating Johnson’s skill set by trading the 16th pick for Martell Webster.

It’s strange to trade Al Jefferson, the team’s best player over the past three seasons, for two draft picks, and then bring in Michael Beasley to replace him as your go-to scorer. And even stranger to sign two Serbian centers for a grand total of $34 million over the next four seasons, especially when one of them is named Darko Milicic.

And maybe you’re also amused and/or exhausted by the knowledge that in the first year of Kahn’s tenure, the Wolves have acquired no fewer than seven point guards, some of them more than once (although, to his credit, not all at the same time).

And that teenage prodigy Ricky Rubio — the fifth pick in the ’09 draft and maybe the best player of all of those PGs — currently runs game in Barcelona with no guarantee of ever setting foot in Minnesota…

It’s fashionable at the moment to ridicule Kahn as an abrasive, unqualified hack. It’s clear the man has had some awfully low moments this summer and that he and Rambis haven’t yet found that transcendent player who will give meaning to their long-suffering franchise. And it’s equally clear that the Wolves are going to lose a lot of games this season.

But if you scan this lineup — Kevin Love, Nikola Pekovic, Wes Johnson, Martell Webster, Corey Brewer, even Darko Milicic and Michael Beasley — you’ll find a lot of young, smart, athletic, hungry players. These are players who want to learn, who want to run, who want to move the ball and play defense. Aren’t these just the type of players who would seem to fit well into Rambis’ up-tempo-and-triangle offense? And when you consider the Wolves have roughly $10 million in cap space, doesn’t the picture look a lot less ridiculous than this chaotic offseason might have suggested?

Am I just being naïve? Is it wrong for Wolves fans to hold on to even these tiny shreds of optimism? Let me tell you a story.

For the three years beginning with their six-game Western Conference finals loss to the Lakers in 2004 and ending with the Kevin Garnett trade of 2007, the Wolves slowly melted down. With very few exceptions (KG among them), the team became a nightmare of ball-hogging, extravagant contract demands, intentionally careless defense and mediocre effort. As the front office hemorrhaged draft picks, this collection of aging jump-shooters and corrosive personalities contributed to the firing of both Flip Saunders and Dwane Casey and helped hasten the KG era’s sad, pathetic end. What I’m saying is: We’ve seen turmoil and this isn’t it.

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This Sessions Is Over… Get it? Because His Last Name Is Sessions And He Just Got Traded

Zach Harper —  July 27, 2010 — 4 Comments

March 14, 2010: Ramon Sessions of the Minnesota Timberwolves during the game between the Sacramento Kings and the Minnesota Timberwolves at Arco Arena in Sacramento, CA. Ben Munn/CSM.

A lot of people are not going to believe this but David Kahn did something I like.

Meat And Potatoes Of The Trade

T’Wolves trade Ramon Sessions (3 years, $12.7m), Ryan Hollins (2 years, $4.8 m) and a future second round pick.
Cavaliers trade Sebastian Telfair (1 year, $2.7m) and Delonte West (1 year, $4.5m)

Ryan Hollins and Ramon Sessions both have player options for the final years of their contracts while Delonte West’s contract is only guaranteed for $500,000 if he’s waived by August 5th. According to Yahoo! Sports, the Wolves will waive Delonte West and save themselves the $4 million this year.

So what does this mean for Minnesota?

When Luke Ridnour signed with the Wolves for the exact same contract Ramon Sessions autographed last summer, the writing was on the wall that Sessions would be moved to a new team. I never understood the Sessions signing last summer. I had no problem with him joining the Wolves. But considering Minnesota had just drafted Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn, signing another point guard for four years just didn’t make a lot of sense.

Fast forward a year and they’ve signed another point guard to a four-year contract that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me if they have the intention of having Rubio and Flynn running the point for the future of this franchise. Luke Ridnour is the newest floor general signed by David Kahn in what has been a running joke of him trying to acquire all of the point guards in the league. But for once, the running joke against Kahn is a little unfair.

Ridnour is possibly a better point guard than Ramon Sessions in the traditional sense. Sessions is a fantasy basketball legend. He does a nice job of distributing the ball at a high level in the final weeks of the season when the effort is gone in meaningless games. That’s not to belittle what Sessions can do on a basketball court. He is a willing passer and that’s something that can be overlooked in today’s NBA. He doesn’t take a lot of bad shots and rarely will hijack a possession.

But Ramon Sessions was such a liability on defense last year that it’s hard to truly know if he could fit in with this team. Ramon was bad at closing out on shooters and defending guys when isolated. He didn’t fight through screens well or make sure to rotate properly in help. He also doesn’t have great vision for a point guard despite being good at racking up assists. He can miss the obvious play far too much for my liking and with a pass-first point, that’s sort of a problem.

Instead, the Wolves bring in a more veteran and steady presence with Ridnour while bolstering the depth with this trade. Ridnour will be better in the triangle system with a whole lot of tempo than Sessions could have been and a lot of that has to do with his three-point shooting. It’s hard to believe a career 34.7% shooter (career-high 38.1% last season) from long range can be a huge upgrade. However, Ridnour does make the defense have to account for him on the perimeter. Sessions and his 10 career three-point makes do accomplish that whatsoever.

With West already gone, it’s essentially a swap of Sessions and Hollins for Sebastian Telfair. Is this a little one-sided? Absolutely. But is this trade good for the franchise? I believe it is.

A team in the process of rebuilding doesn’t need four potential point guards. Let’s play Make Believe and trick ourselves into thinking Rubio will willingly come to this franchise in the 2011-12 season. Then you’ve got Rubio signed for four years, Flynn signed to two more years (assuming the Wolves pick up his two team options), Sessions signed for two more years (assuming he picks up his player option) and Luke Ridnour to three more seasons. That is way too much salary and time wrapped up into the same one-dimensional position.

Cutting bait with Sessions before the contract became an albatross was the way to go. And at the same time, they got rid of a horrible big man option by jettisoning Ryan Hollins. Hollins was another big man in this league that owed a big portion of his contract to Jason Kidd. He played with Kidd in Dallas for a portion of the ’08-’09 season and he looked much better than he actually is because of it. He wasn’t given a ridiculous three-year contract like Mikki Moore got with the Kings a couple of years ago after playing with Kidd but he still got a three-year contract that didn’t make any sense.

But now? The Wolves no longer have to worry about that.

They’ve been able to rid themselves of two contracts that don’t fit and don’t make sense. This is a key when rebuilding with some sense of fiscal responsibility. Being able to get rid of superfluous and unnecessary contracts before they become a burden is huge. It allows contracts like Darko’s signing and Luke Ridnour’s signing to be much easier to digest as a bitter fan base.

The Wolves have carved out even more cap space without sacrificing legitimate building blocks to do so. Even though I’m a firm believer that Kahn should be criticized for the majority of the decisions he’s made in his 14 months on the job, for once he’s making a move that makes short and long-term sense.

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