Game #58, Home Game #30: Utah 106, Minnesota 83
Game #59, Road Game #29: Boston 124, Minnesota 117 (2 OT)
What’s the Plan: Buck Up? Draw Straws? Haze the Rookies?
The past week has taught us that the Wolves can be casually blown out by a quality NBA team, with consecutive 26-point losses to Dallas and Utah standing as exhibits Y and Z. Today we discovered that the squad with the league’s second-worst record, the pitiful Boston Celtics, can come home to a noon start after an overtime road game the previous day, and outlast Minnesota in two overtimes while giving four guys aged 24 and under more than 30 minutes apiece of playing time.
The players who logged more than 30 minutes for the Wolves include a trio who are 6 months either side of age 31 (Mark Blount, Kevin Garnett, and, in his first start of the season, Troy Hudson), and 27-year old Ricky Davis. Top draft choice Randy Foye played a mere 5:49 out of 58 possible minutes (due to the two five-minute overtimes), and showed that even his bountiful self-confidence is not impervious to getting bounced from the starting lineup–he was tentative and committed two turnovers during his lone stint, the substitution-filled bridge between the first and second quarters. Last year’s top draft choice, Rashad McCants, went scoreless in 27 minutes of action that would have been at least cut in half if Trenton Hassell hadn’t been sidelined for the day after twisting his ankle on the first possession of the game. McCants, who received a whopping 3:09 of PT during the Utah drubbing, likewise is performing like self-doubt is raising havoc with his instincts and equilibrium. The other promising rookie, Craig Smith, joined the team-wide posse that got their rears whupped on the boards, becoming one of seven Wolves players to rack up more personal fouls than rebounds. Smith finished with one basket and grabbed one rebound (no assists, no blocks, four fouls) in 29:05 on the court.
To complete the tragicomedy, the Wolves telecast ran an interview with Jim Petersen and the team’s assistant general manager Rob Babcock, who proclaimed that the future was “bright” and specifically cited Foye, McCants and Smith as a core of young talent that has management excited. While Foye and McCants seem to exhibit very different temperaments, both have loads of raw talent and seem to be motivated by an internal swagger. One is a rookie trying to make the transition from college swingman to pro point guard–an enormous adjustment. The other is recovering from the dreaded microfracture surgery. Put simply, despite their tough demeanors, they are both in mentally fragile situations, and the worst thing you can do is play yo-yo with their minutes based on the inconsistency of their recent performances.
After the Utah embarrassment Friday night, I asked coach Randy Wittman if it was time to play the kids. What do you mean, he wanted to know, inferring that the promising young trio was earning sufficient exposure, when in fact they’d combined for 42:27, or an average of 14:09, in a no-contest game the fundamentally airtight Jazz led by 20 less than halfway through the second period.
Basketball 101 says if you are going to have a chance at making noise in the playoffs, you settle on a set rotation early, and establish individual roles and a team identity by New Year’s at the latest. If it is obvious to all but the most deluded observers that this isn’t your year, you nurture your young talent through a combination of putting them in a position to succeed and exercising patience and counseling when you challenge them outside their comfort level. The Wolves continue to scramble their roles and rotations, have never established an identity, have gone 6-13 after firing one coach for going 20-20, and are now playing head games with their most valuable young assets. Rather than disgrace themselves again by conjuring up some faux injury to Kevin Garnett and Ricky Davis while having their worst outside shooter jack up three-pointers in order to tank the final game of the season, they should sacrificing short-term gain by building for the future in a more noble and intelligent manner. But no; this franchise can’t even lose right.
2. Huddy’s Turn at the Point
The short-term dividends of turning to veteran Troy Hudson were apparent today, as the dude with the dreadlock pony tail went off for 26 points (9-15 FG, 3-6 from 3 pt) and 8 assists in 46:02. More specifically, Huddy teamed with Kevin Garnett for a steady diet of crisp, high-post pick and rolls, which served as the genesis for the vast majority of the Wolves’ half-court offense.
This is pure speculation on my part, but the insertion of Hudson seems like a sop to KG, who has always loved Hudson’s play beyond any reasonable evidence. Longtime Wolves fans couldn’t help but get a sense of deja vu, a pleasant vibe for Garnett as well, no doubt, as he and Huddy reverted back to the rhythms of what I consider perhaps KG’s finest season, 2002-03, a year before he took MVP honors. It was when KG, Huddy and Wally Szczerbiak accounted for nearly 60 percent of the Wolves’ offense with Garnett leading the team across the board–points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks–while Minnesota won more than 50 games and threw a scare into the Lakers during the playoffs. It was a team in which KG orchestrated a cornucopia of open jump shots as drawn up by Flip Saunders. Today, with the raw, tired and poorly coached Celtics as the opponent, and a motivated Ricky Davis as a better Szczerbiak (and Mark Blount pulling 4th wheel Rasho status), Garnett registered a triple-double 33-13-10, while Davis racked up 35 and Huddy chipped in 26, for the second-highest trio total in franchise history (the MV3 had two more, 96, in an overtime win versus Sacramento three years ago).
There is a rub, of course–more than one if you count the battery acid on Foye’s psyche–and that is Hudson’s defense. He was a horrible defender even before enduring all those knee, thigh, leg, and ankle injuries, and if anything, he is more horrible now. How bad? Well, his counterpart, Celtic point guard Delonte West, scored 31 points in 30:31 of playing time during the second half and two overtimes. Huddy defenders might want to point out that West scored 7 of those points in the three or four minutes Mike James was subbing in. But even if we grant that Hudson defends better than James–an analysis that can’t be undertaken without a flurry of cruel, snarky jokes, so we’ll bypass it for now–taking a stand on the evidence of a promising but still mediocre point guard torching you for 24 points in 26 minutes isn’t exactly winning the argument.
The best defender among the team’s three point guards is Randy Foye. The best possible on-ball defender of West available today was Marko Jaric, who had a pair of nice steals but couldn’t hit any of his four shots in 18:50 of play. But Randy Wittman wanted someone who could jump start the offense in the most basic fashion possible, and to that extent, Huddy delivered, picking and rolling the squad to 50 percent from the field, 43 percent from beyond the 3-point arc. Will Wittman allow Hudson to continue grooving the flow for KG Tuesday night against the Lakers? If Hassell’s ankle hasn’t healed enough for him to guard Kobe Bryant, it won’t matter.
3. Absurd Stats and Incomplete Links
Sometimes numbers really can tell you how badly a ballclub is performing. For example, a game after their most inaccurate shooting performance in franchise history and their lowest point total ever at home, the Wolves grabbed their fewest rebounds of the season, 25, against Utah and played such putrid defense in the second period that Utah first miss occurred five seconds before the halfway point. Going up against 6-9 Carlos Boozer, 7-1 Kevin Garnett preferred to shoot from outside and not go hard to rim, a preference for the perimeter that extended to the other end of the court and helped account for him grabbing just 4 boards, or half his previous season low.
Garnett partially atoned today in Boston, snaring 13 rebounds. Given the double overtime, that was less per-minute than his season average but positively Rodmanesque compared to his sorry teammates, who collectively grabbed 14 more. That’s 27 rebounds in all, in 58 minutes, and an incredible 30 fewer than the 57 Boston grabbed–the biggest differential in franchise history. That’s right: When the Celts missed a shot, they were more likely than Minnesota to get it back, outrebounding the Wolves 23-21. At the other end, when the Wolves shot, it was nearly always one and done, with Boston owning the glass 34-6. That, in a nutshell, is why the Wolves lost. I can’t find the final discrepancy in second-chance points, but shortly after halftime it was 13-0 in favor of the Celts. Officially, both teams attempted 88 shots, but that ignores all the times Boston snared an offensive rebound and forced a Minnesota foul on the ensuing putback. Boston doubled the Wolves’ free throw attempts, 46-23, and the 17-point margin in made free throws more than compensated for Minnesota’s higher field goal percentage. A couple games back I asked Wittman if, given Mark Blount’s proclivity for putting himself in early foul trouble (not to mention his indifferent defense and inability to effectively joust for rebounds), Minnesota was considering singing another big man to a 10-day contract. The coach said no, and that Mark Madsen was almost ready to return. So, we’ve got Mad Dog still waylaid and Eddie Griffin never coming back and the team has managed a collective 52 rebounds while yielding 96 in its past two games–and that doesn’t count getting outboarded 54-39 by Dallas a game before that. Today, Blount grabbed 3 rebounds in 36:10 before fouling out. And the team still claims, with a straight face, that it is in a playoff push. “We’ve got to keep fighting,” Wittman says. It is an oxymoronic statement.
Finally, a note of thanks to those who made themselves, and me, at home here at The Rake before I’d even posted anything. I’ve sincerely appreciated all the kind words on my behalf, but now it is time to reset the tone, which is my quick reminder that stupid, one-line, and excessively nasty or personal comments will get doinked. We talk hoops as intelligently as possible, and if someone strays too far from that mandate, even if it’s to flatter me, it won’t get aired. By contrast, it bears repeating one more time that I do this primarily because of the quality feedback I get from you folks–insights into the team and the game itself. Thanks. I will also be beefing up the links on the left–Stephen Litel’s blog and 10,000 Takes are just two local sites I want to publicize, and Bill Simmons at ESPN.com doesn’t need my paltry endorsement but I’m glad to have the chance to offer it. Now if I can only figure out the software….
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