Let’s get down to it because there doesn’t need to be some cute introduction here.
It’s official. The Wolves have traded Derrick Williams to the Sacramento Kings for Luc Richard Mbah a Moute. No other pieces in the deal, just a straight-up swap of the two players. Let’s dive right into it and look at a few sides of this deal to figure out how we feel about it, shall we? Continue Reading…
This was a weird game. It’s a well-worn cliché that basketball is a game of runs — that when one team falls behind by double digits suddenly, it’s just a matter of time before the other team scores a bunch of unanswered point. But this game pushed that to extremes. The Clippers opened up the game with a 12-0 run, which was probably the easiest one to see, but look at the game flow from ESPN’s box score.
The whole first half was just runs back and forth. Here I’ve highlighted Clippers’ runs in yellow and Wolves’ runs in light green (just because the colors used for each team were red and blue) and you can see that aside from about a minute and a half in the first quarter where the score went from 12-0 to 16-4, the game was seesawing back and forth precipitously. Yet at the end of the first, the score was 24-24 and at the end of the half it was 46-46. Continue Reading…
I would like to preface this post with the fact that I have full confidence in Rick Adelman’s coaching abilities, fully believe in his philosophies when it comes to basketball, and think his offensive system is superb. I will never pretend to know as much about basketball theory or even half of the practical applications of said theories in comparison to Rick Adelman.
The offense of the Minnesota Timberwolves is crucial. This isn’t so much basketball theory as an expectation of what’s in store for us this season. I’m not breaking any ground in telling you that the Wolves have to be good on offense. This isn’t news to anybody reading this site. The Wolves need to score points and we expect that they’ll need to score a lot of points in order to neutralize whatever shortcomings are there on defense. We felt this way going into last season. Points wouldn’t be the problem; defense would.
Turns out that was backwards but mostly due to an injury rash that turned into an injury flesh-eating bacteria. Kevin Love went down. Ricky Rubio came back but missed significant time while needing a month or two to get back to where he needed to be. Brandon Roy never materialized. Chase Budinger went down for the middle of the season with love handles on each side of that middle. Nikola Pekovic and Andrei Kirilenko were sporadically banged up. The season fell apart before we could even see how it fit together.
And that’s why the offense of the Wolves is so crucial this year. I think we see frustration this early from Rick Adelman for two reasons: Continue Reading…
It's the "White Guy" award!! @APkrawczynski: Another from NBA GM survey: @kevinlove is player who makes most of 'limited natural ability.'
— Kevin Love (@kevinlove) October 22, 2013
The NBA’s annual GM Survey hit the stands on the internet today and the Wolves were prominently featured throughout the polling.
As you can see in the tweet above, Kevin Love won the award for doing the most with the most limited of natural ability. We’ll get into more of that later, but for now it’s interesting to see where the lay of the league is in the eyes of the general managers around the NBA. Here’s the full survey from John Schuhmann of NBA.com.
Let’s get into where the Wolves fall in some of these questions: Continue Reading…
Conservatively, 85% of the pictures of Rick Adelman on the Internet are of him doing this.
Head coach Rick Adelman was more than a little disappointed with his team’s showing in a 104-97 loss to the Toronto Raptors on Saturday. It hardly seemed to matter that it was the preseason. “We just didn’t come with it,” he said. “I don’t understand. It’s like I told them afterwards: we played two home games here and we’re just going through the motions. We’re not the San Antonio Spurs, we’re not Miami. We act like we have plenty of time.”
Consistency might have been the watchword for the Wolves through training camp and these first four games of preseason, but urgency can’t come too far behind. Whatever the reason — maybe an unusual exhibition season schedule that had them playing four games in six nights, including a back-to-back, and then nothing for nearly a week before three away games had something to do with it — the team, especially the starters, have looked like they’re still waiting for someone else to arrive on the court. Continue Reading…
This move Kevin Love worked on in the offseason isn’t great. (Getty)
I tried. I really tried to churn out some thoughts on the Wolves losing to CSKA Moscow on Monday night and just nothing appeared. The effort was there for me trying to write about what was an on-the-surface embarrassing loss to a really talented Euroleague team. But ultimately, I just didn’t care enough about the result or what we saw on the court from a team standpoint.
And really, that was the problem with the Wolves in that game as well. I’m not sure they cared enough about their opponent throughout the 53 minutes of action to really want to do what they were supposed to do. There were individual players like Derrick Williams, Othyus Jeffers, A.J. Price, and Ronny Turiaf that appeared to give a damn. They fought through as much as they could against CSKA Moscow and nearly walked away with a victory. But there were too many mental mistakes, too many lazy offensive sets, too many poor defensive rotations throughout the game to end up defeating a quality opponent.
Make no mistake about it either; CSKA Moscow was a quality opponent. They have six guys (seven if Sonny Weems is playing) that can play in the NBA right now. The rest of their team is full of solid players as well. It’s an opponent that even the third string of the Wolves should be able to close out, but you have to have a full game of effort in order to do that. The Wolves didn’t have that and it showed both in their play and in the way Rick Adelman discussed the game afterward.
That wasn’t the case Wednesday night against the Toronto Raptors. Continue Reading…
Ah, training camp. A time when the heady mix of a long-forgotten feeling merges with the barely-glimpsed ghost of actual on-court play to create its own admixture of hope and anxiety about the future. Take that, Deadspin.
But seriously: Practice ran long yesterday, resulting in a clutch of media perched by the front window of the Taylor Center on the lovely (no, seriously, the autumn colors were lovely) campus of Mankato State University and doing things like this: Continue Reading…
It makes sense that Derrick Williams’ weight over the last year has been fluctuating so much because he’s being treated like a prizefighter that can’t decide on a weight class.
The 2011 No. 2 pick has been trying to find his place on an NBA court since he entered the league and joined the Minnesota Timberwolves. With the team already employing the best power forward in the NBA, his place in the rotation has been spotty at best. He’s been fighting for minutes while reshaping his body to give him a better chance of being a versatile, multi-positional player that Rick Adelman can’t look past when he’s looking down the bench for the next substitution. Heading into camp last year, Williams had dropped some weight in hopes of becoming a small forward next to Love. That idea only lasted for a short while. Continue Reading…
Ricky Rubio, Kevin Martin, Corey Brewer, Kevin Love, and Nikola Pekovic were sporting the white side of the practice jerseys against a team of J.J. Barea, Alexey Shved, Robbie Hummel, Derrick Williams, and Dante Cunningham.
As media availability for the first practice of training camp began, the likely starting lineup for the Wolves to begin the regular season was actually losing to a second unit by a few points. With Jack Sikma reminding Nikola Pekovic that he was going to have to leave the key some time on offense to avoid a violation, the starting Wolves set up their offense. There was some motion across the lane and Pek found himself defended on the block by Cunningham. Because of his strength and size advantages, Pek had deep post position as he received the post-entry pass from Brewer. Immediately, Williams dropped down from the wing to double up on Pek.
Pekovic absorbed the double-team’s attention, kicked it right back out to Brewer, who was waiting on the left win above the break, and the Wolves had a spot-up 3-point attempt rip through the net. This was the first bit of training camp action that I got to see from the Wolves and it nearly knocked me deeper into my seat. Healthy players. Kick-out passes to shooters that resulted in points. This seemed like a pretty cool way to kill some time in Mankato Tuesday afternoon. Continue Reading…
On the surface, the question that is the headline of this post may seem preposterous to fans of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Ricky Rubio is one of the best facilitators in the NBA and someone that can turn any offensive weapon into an offensive weapon with an ability to score efficiently. Team him up with Kevin Love and you’ll get a deadly pick-and-pop or pick-and-roll game. You’ll get post-entry passes on point that don’t require Love to give up precious post position. Team him up with Nikola Pekovic and you have one of the better pick-and-roll combinations in the NBA, despite Pekovic not exactly being a threat to drop the hammer down with an alley-oop dunk on the play. And again, the post-entry passes are so choice.
Run one of those fancy pick-and-rolls with Rubio as the initiator while having Chase Budinger and Kevin Martin in the corners and the defense respecting Kevin Love’s ability to stretch the floor and the bulldozer rumbling down the lane that is Nikola Pekovic and it seems like the possibilities for points are endless. Even when you throw some of the bench guys in the game with Rubio and we know Derrick Williams scores better at the rim with Rubio on the court, Dante Cunningham is a great pick-and-pop option in the midrange, and the Corey Brewer-Ricky Rubio fast breaks could be quick and deadly. There’s a lot to love with these combinations.
So what’s with the question in the headline? Continue Reading…