Timberwolves post-mortem

Well another season of mediocrity for the Timberwolves, and frankly, looking back I can’t believe KG didn’t hurt anyone more than that guy in the stands he threw the ball at. That was kind of a sad but fitting commentary on their season. He couldn’t even get his frustration out without something going horribly wrong. I fully expect if we have another season like the last, that late in a game we have already lost he will start throwing haymakers at (insert instigator).


Well we missed Sam Cassell more than I thought we would, with injuries all over the place this year (Hassell, T-Hud the rapper formerly known as Troy Hudson, and Fred “The Mayor” Hoiberg) we really could have used his leadership. We also made that big trade which will either haunt us or be a big boon to us for the next few years. We did get rid of Wally, to every 15 year old Minnesota girl’s displeasure, so that is a plus, but I’m not sure we improved yet, and with the players we received, they will be under contract for some time. The Kandy man’s contract would have expired this year so that would have given us some cap space. We’ll just have to see about mid season next year where we are at. With Kevin and Ricky out for the last several games we got to see what out future could be like. It was very mixed. Reed looks like an average bench player at best. Blount looks like he could be pretty good someday, if he can just camp out underneath and rebound on both ends of the court, we might be OK there. By the way that goes for you too Eddie Griffin if you take any more threes, I swear to God I’ll, stick my head in my snowblower. You are 6 fotot 10. Even if you just stand with one foot in the paint, you will get 10 rebounds a game with just keeping your position. Ahhhhh! Ricky Davis has the talent to score in the NBA. On the other hand we have had plenty of scorers on the Timberwolves over the years from Tony Campbell to Gerald Glass, to J.R. (I care) Rider who either couldn’t do it consistently enough, or couldn’t do it on the defensive End (Wally). So far he’s getting about a C+ on defense. If he could get it up to a B+ we could be set there too. Which brings us to the point guard. As I mentioned in the coaches entry, we have definitely had our problems at this position over the years. Now we have 4 potential point guards. We will need either Marcus Banks to step up as a starter, or we will be back where we started again, with T-Hud and Banks sharing time with Jarich and adding Carter and McCants trying to get minutes at either guard position and it just seems like we have too many back-up guards and no starters. Banks and McCants look like they may be able to rise to the occasion in the next couple of years more often than not, but do you think they can compete with Kobe (Mamba), Nash, Billups or even Parker? Let’s just move on.

So that leaves us with:

Backcourt
Davis, McCants, Banks, maybe resurgence of Hassell and T-Hud but since they are not in contract years...so they will probably coincidentally struggle, Anthony Carter and Marko Jarich to fill in off the bench.


Frontcourt
Who else Kevin Garnett, and Eddie Griffin spotting him. Marc Blount, Justin Reed, and Mark Madsen. Random IASWAA (It’s a small world after all). Mark Madsen lives on the same block as one of my friends, probably the only guy on an NBA team that he is cooler than, well besides Brian Scalibrene, even I'm cooler than him.

One of the highlights was the cheerleader dunk contest at Houston late in the season. Yes that’s right, about five of the the Rockets Power Dancers were dunking during a time out. All right so it was off of a trampoline but just wait. The first couple were just routine two handed throw downs, then the next was a 180.

The next was two handed with a full Chinese splits, by this gal:





















Then the granddaddy was this girl with a FLIP, (not a 360, a freaking flip) two handed throwdown:




One positive is we did win the tie breaker with Boston for the fourth, ironic that we had the exact same record with the team we had the blockbuster trade with. You add a Joachim Noah to our roster and the frontcourt looks pretty good again. With a 53 in 1000 chance no less. Well we still have a ways to go to get back to the Western Conference Finals, but in the words of the great Celtic coach Rick Pitino “Kevin McHale is not walking through that door, and if you expect him to (he) will be old and gray”. Well maybe that’s where the problem lies, maybe we need some new blood in the front office (Notice I did not insult the basketball jesus Larry Bird, I carefully excluded him from that quote, therefore I did not in any way jinx the Timberwolves).