Minnesota Sports Forum

BizarroJerry wrote:

Volans19 wrote:http://goatdee.net/123620/watch-minnesota-timberwolves-vs-memphis-grizzlies

Payne has a headband - - - - I approve

I completely agree, we need a headband guy. Wow, 68 points. So no Jones or Miller? So Lavine is backup PG again?

Sam is experimenting. My guess is that he's looking for ways for Zach to get his offense going. One way to do that is to put the ball in his hands and allow him to attack.

Didn't work.

60WinTim wrote:Well, I'm not daunted. Rubio getting his feet wet is a good thing, but the lineup and rotations tonight were not representative of what we are likely to see in the regular season.

Although to show it's not all sunny skies in my world, I am concerned with Zach's and Wiggins' shooting thus far in the preseason...

I was a little disappointed that Wiggins allowed Tony Allen to beat him on cuts to the hoop on a couple of occasions. Wiggins makes some highlight reel plays on defense, but he gets caught flat-footed a little too often still. Once he cleans that stuff up he will take the next step forward defensively.

Frankly, Rudez's shooting annoyed me more than Zach's did. We are paying that dude to do one thing and one thing only - make 3's! He had some nice looks tonight and muffed them.

Q12543 wrote:

60WinTim wrote:Well, I'm not daunted. Rubio getting his feet wet is a good thing, but the lineup and rotations tonight were not representative of what we are likely to see in the regular season.

Although to show it's not all sunny skies in my world, I am concerned with Zach's and Wiggins' shooting thus far in the preseason...

I was a little disappointed that Wiggins allowed Tony Allen to beat him on cuts to the hoop on a couple of occasions. Wiggins makes some highlight reel plays on defense, but he gets caught flat-footed a little too often still. Once he cleans that stuff up he will take the next step forward defensively.

Frankly, Rudez's shooting annoyed me more than Zach's did. We are paying that dude to do one thing and one thing only - make 3's! He had some nice looks tonight and muffed them.

I see Rudez was a beast on the boards tonight though with 2 rebounds! I have to say they either like Rudez or they are trying to play him a lot for someone to bite on a trade or maybe both.

To be honest I haven't seen much preseason action so far. My only positive memory is Tyus in one game. But if you look strictly at the box scores, it is just plain ugly. I don't think we will, but we better not see Tayshaun Prince starting. That would serve absolutely no purpose.

The biggest thing tempering my enthusiasm heading into the season is the coaching staff. It truly is a joke.

CoolBreeze44 wrote:To be honest I haven't seen much preseason action so far. My only positive memory is Tyus in one game. But if you look strictly at the box scores, it is just plain ugly. I don't think we will, but we better not see Tayshaun Prince starting. That would serve absolutely no purpose.

The biggest thing tempering my enthusiasm heading into the season is the coaching staff. It truly is a joke.

It's a terrible joke though because it doesn't make me laugh.

I know it's too early to be worried, but I hope Sam and Co. don't treat this season like a rebuild, and use the excuse of being too young to compete, mixing up lineups every week, and not showing any committment to a strategy.

LloydBraun wrote:I know it's too early to be worried, but I hope Sam and Co. don't treat this season like a rebuild, and use the excuse of being too young to compete, mixing up lineups every week, and not showing any committment to a strategy.

The pre-season exists to test lineups to see which ones may work. Unfortunately Ricky has missed most of that time so we haven't got a good look at what's going to work and what won't work. We have the same problem when Pek comes back. Missing training camp and the pre-season is bad and it ends up costing regular season games to get the proper lineups figured out and to get guys back in game shape. Teams with continuity (pretty much everyone we've played to this point) don't need the preseason for much. We have next to no continuity because right now 4/5 spots will see new starters that weren't there for a majority of last year (Lavine started at PG but is now in a different role at the 2 so I count him like a new starter). That's why training camp and the pre-season are so much more important for us.

I'm not sure how long this Zach LaVine as a starter experiment will continue. I know Mitchell believes in his talent, as do I, but he's not producing or playing like a guy that deserves to start.

I'm not worried about Zach. We're still hearing that Zach is the best player in practice. Typically, young players who perform really well consistently in practice break through eventually and show their stuff in games. Add to that Zach's play the last month of last season and I don't see much cause for concern. Of course we can always start Martin, but I wouldn't want to see that happen unless Zach is playing no better than now 3 weeks into the regular season.

Like it or not, this is yet another developmental season for the Wolves - meaning the #1 goal should be the development of our young core, playing them a lot together so they can gain experience playing AND playing together - starting to develop some of that continuity we all lament not having with the Wolves. The West is simply too good to realistically expect the Wolves to make the playoffs. The key is for this team to improve significantly over last season in defense, 3-point shooting, offensive efficiency and wins. A significantly improved defense along with more threes, a better team shooting percentage and 32 wins or more would be a success in my book, especially if the team is playing better the second half of the season than the first half.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling we're in store for a pretty ugly 22-26 win season. If so, I'd attribute that to a poor coaching staff. The silver lining in that sort of outcome would hopefully be an awakening at the ownership and executive level that causes them to look outside the country club and actually hire a top head coaching prospect along with a truly NBA caliber coaching staff.

If Sam is serious about starting lavine at sg then I expect to see lavine start the last 2 pre season games with rubio/Wiggins/kg/towns.