Regular Season Game #75, Road Game #39, Minnesota 99, New York 94
Regular Season Game #76, Home Game #37, New Orleans 96, Minnesota 94
1. Hitting The Semi-sweet Spot
Timberwolves fans and management couldn’t have choreographed a better game than Saturday night’s entertaining loss to the Hornets. At this point in an already collapsed, disheartening season, where if the club falls out of the top ten picks in the draft it forfeits it to the Clippers via the terms of the Jaric trade, the unspoken goals in the remaining games are not to degrade yourself and the game by tanking, not to ruin your short-term chance at a quality collegian by winning, and to feel good about the way you are building for the future. That’s a convoluted, occasionally contradictory trifecta, especially for this team, whose better pieces to place around the superstar are kids. Improving the Foye-McCants-Smith axis with copious minutes, especially alongside KG, might also bag some inconvenient wins, and lose an another important building block that could otherwise entice Garnett not to opt out.
This situation puts Wolves partisans in the awkward position of rooting for a bevy of good and great individual plays that reveal promise, improvement, and hope for the future, all the while inwardly urging that they don’t add up to a victory. And Saturday, the game unfolded exactly along those terms.
The Wolves bomb home 14 treys in 23 attempts, deliver 27 assists on 35 baskets, put six players in double figures, with McCants and Foye 1-2 as scoring leaders, and wow the crowd with a fabulous second quarter in which the team goes 15-18 FG…and they still lose in the end. But not without a spirited attempt to snatch a victory. McCants and KG hit treys in the final 10 seconds, and Craig Smith’s prayer from 3/4 court clangs off the iron as the buzzer sounds. Perfect.
And necessary, because the previous night the Wolves beat the Knicks, pulling ahead of them record-wise, and thus behind them in the draft pick sweepstakes. With the Knicks losing to Milwaukee in the second half and the Wolves up by six at the half, things looked grim for those who count ping pong balls as they go to sleep and dream about Oden, Durant and the rest in white, green, and blue. When it was over, the Knicks had triumphed in overtime to the more obviously tanking Bucks, and the Wolves had eased back into a tie with NY by dint of their very elegant second half fade.
And how was that accomplished? Coach Randy Wittman did what many commentators-cum-tank-enablers in this space had urged him to do, and were perplexed that he wasn’t doing earlier: Playing Garnett fewer minutes. KG sat down with the squad down a point with 1:22 to play in the third. Even when Mark Madsen picked up his 4th and 5th fouls in the first 5 minutes of the 4th, KG stayed put–this after getting only 15:16 of burn in the first half. There were other subplots: Fox Sports had the bad timing to put an iso-camera on KG for the entire game, and his multi-year streak of consecutive games scoring in double figures was in jeopardy. When he finally checked in with but 5:42 to play, the Wolves were down 6, 80-86. It was barely enough.
2. Mike James, Human Sieve
No one can accuse Minnesota’s starting point guard of sabotaging the squad’s chance at bagging that draft pick. Mike James had a wonderfully energetic first quarter Saturday night, blowing up for 13 of the team’s 21 points via 5-9 FG (3-5 from trey land), and twirling up three dimes besides. In other words, James had a hand in all but two of Minnesota’s points in the game’s opening 12 minutes. This came on the heels of a 7-point first quarter versus the Knicks on Friday, when James helped propel the squad to a 14 point lead before sitting with a minute and a half to go in the first.
Yes, let’s keep starting Mike James. And then sit him down for the other three quarters. The guy’s defense is Troy Hudson terrible, and that, folks, is very bad. James doesn’t usually play in the second quarter, nor the fourth, properly ceding it to Randy Foye. But that third quarter….Friday night against the Knicks, Nate Robinson came out and just torched James for 15 points on 5-5 FG in 8:57 of play, the main reason why a 18-point halftime lead shrunk to 6 before Wittman mercifully subbed in Foye. For the remaining 15:03, Robinson scored 6 on 2-6 shooting.
Coincidence? On Saturday, Chris Paul was 5-5 FG in the 23:12 James played him, and 1-7 the rest of the time with Foye the primary opponent on D. In the past two third quarters, point guards have scored 25 points and shot 9-9 FGs in the 20:09 James was supposed to be guarding them, and the Wolves were -19 during that stretch. One way to look at it is that James’s nonexistent defense is costing his team a point for every third quarter minute he plays. It wasn’t too hard to figure out the main source of KG’s ire when he said after the Knicks game, “I don’t know how many first-teamers want to play defense out there, but I know I’m one of them.”
3. Silver Linings
A couple months back I openly wondered if Foye and McCants could juggle their egos well enough to coexist synergistically in the same backcourt. The answer in the past two weeks has been a resounding yes. Latest evidence: Saturday’s 36-point second quarter blitz that saw Shaddy and Foye each go off for a dozen on 9-11 FG (4-5 from 3), a combined 6 assists and 2 turnovers.
Nice to see Trenton Hassell at least somewhat escape the doghouse over the weekend with a pair of strong efforts. Hassell was the third leg in the triangle with Foye and McCants in the third period on Saturday, getting 10 points on 5-6 FG. He and McCants were tied with a team-high +16 for those two games. I wonder if Randy Wittman defenders will spin Hassell’s resurgence as a response to the coach’s discipline, specifically his sitting him for all of the Orlando game, 3/4 of the Miami game, and putting McCants ahead of him in the second-line rotation when the starters rest. If so, may I suggest Witt try it with Ricky Davis, who after blowing up for 36 points in a stirring victory in Orlando has gone -35 over the last three games, a span in which the Wolves as a whole are -10. That’s -35 in the 85:02 Davis played the past three, versus +25 the 58:58 Davis sat. But by all means, bench Trenton Hassell.
Finally, kudos to Garnett for stepping up big time and guarding centers when Wittman wisely goes to the younger, smaller roster at crunch time. His defense on Eddy Curry cinched the game and led to a bevy of Curry fouls and turnovers. His play on Marc Jackson and just his low-post shot-blocking presence in general on Saturday compensated for his scattershot offense.
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