Here’s a problem: You watch a game of basketball and you know something about basketball. You might know a little, or you might think you know a lot, or you might even be aware that the rather large amount you know pales in comparison to what everyone who’s directly involved in the game knows. And not in some “You can’t know unless you’ve played” way, but in the way that it’s nearly impossible for you to comprehend the volumetric gap in knowledge between whatever you know about the game — as vast as that amount might feel — and what, say, Rick Adelman knows after coaching 2,794 games. Two thousand seven hundred and ninety-four. Continue Reading…
Archives For Rick Adelman
Kevin Love had a pretty nasty spill last night against the Lakers with about 4 minutes to go in the fourth. Here’s a video of it and if you don’t enjoy the sound of the human body making hard contact with unyielding surfaces, you might want to mute your computer speakers right about now:
The myth of Narcissus concerns an impossibly beautiful young hunter who comes upon a pool of water in the forest and falls in love with his own reflection. Depending on the particular version of the story, Narcissus then commits suicide because he cannot possess his beloved, or maybe starves to death looking at his own image, or misses the playoffs. Basically, if Rick Adelman stumbled upon this youth in the woods entranced by his own image, he’d probably inform him that he hasn’t done anything yet.
Continue Reading…
Toronto Tourism ad: ‘White Vegas’ from The Basketball Jones on Vimeo.
I came away with three thoughts about the Wolves’ most recent loss, which was probably the one I’ve been the most accepting of (because I expected it) and the one that was simultaneously the most frustrating even though I had accepted their fate long before tip-off.
The first thought was about that acceptance of the loss, knowing it was coming while not trying to approach that submissive thought from a pessimistic origin. The Wolves simply don’t win in Toronto. After last night’s “effort”, they’ve dropped to 3-16 there all-time and they haven’t won there since 2004 when the Wolves last fielded a team that seemed to give a damn whilst being able to do something about it. This is the exact kind of “marriage to the old guard” I’ve been hoping people would divorce themselves of with a new regime and a very talented roster. And yet, here I am latching on to negativity of the past, simply because the nightlife of Toronto seems to call this organization.
This game seemed to go the exact same way most of these affairs in T Dot go. Seemingly poor execution met with malaise and a dash of “is this game over yet?” After the first quarter, I was hoping the bench would get extended minutes. After the bench got extended minutes, I was hoping the starters would have a fire lit under them. After that, I was hoping the bench would play a lot of minutes in the second half. And by the end, I was waiting for the Raptors to tell us they had to get up early and rush out the door for a waiting taxi. There was also a sick part of me that wanted the game to end in a loss of four points or less, but that’s just me losing my mind at the moment. Continue Reading…
Coaching is a dark art. I’ve long been wary of judging coaches based on what we can see of their job: how they are on the bench, how they use their timeouts, what plays they call out of timeouts and in late-game situations, who they play when. There’s just so much of the job that we have no access to, and even the stuff we can see is difficult to parse in the same manner as the advanced analytics we’ve come to expect for players. There are no on/off numbers for coaches. A head coach creates an entire environment for a team and everything that occurs for a team occurs within that environment. A head coach is the old fish swimming by asking, “How’s the water?” and we’re all the fish asking, “What’s water?”
With that said, I’ve begun to doubt Rick Adelman. Continue Reading…
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…