It is Prince

[longstrangetrip [enjin:6600564]]

Personally I think these old dudes can play still. I bet that has more to do with Flip bringing them in than the mentoring angle. If they couldn't play (or he didn't think they could play) Flip wouldn't bring them in. It looks pretty clear to me Flip is looking to win some games and he has kept and brought in some vets to help that happen. As vets will those guys help in other ways? Yeah probably to some extent but who knows how much but it won't be measurable anyway.

I agree that the very good or great players will would be good almost no matter what but there are guys that could end up being above average players instead of just rotation guys or whatever if a couple things were added to help them out. Love is or could be an example of both to a certain extent. He became a very good player basically inspite of everything but I have always wondered if he may have been a little different if he had a vet on the team to truly connect with like KG had with Mitchell. There seemed to be something with Cardinal but he got moved in that epic deal for another upside talent deal.

If you told me this offseason we were going to get Towns, Tyus, Andre Miller and Prince I would have told you you were absolutely nuts and no way that happens. It's been a pretty damn good offseason IMO.

You nailed it in your first paragraph, monster. We talk a lot about the mentoring factor and have differences of opinion about its importance, but these pickups are about performance, not mentoring...mentoring is just an added, but less important, benefit. Flip is counting on these guys to perform, and if they help out our younger players to learn the NBA game too, all the better.

Anyone who thinks KG can't contribute at a high level for 20 minutes a game didn't watch him closely in the 5 games he played with us last year. And Miller will be a big upgrade over the guys who have backed up Ricky the past three years...we won't be tearing our hair out every time Ricky goes out. And Prince is a 14th-15th man. He's only going to see the court if Wiggins or Shabazz can't go, and Flip would rather have a veteran in that role than a young pup who might be disenchanted with no playing time.

[AbeVigodaLive]

Not fair. Being from Minneapolis, I thought "It is Prince" was going to be about someone entirely different.

Not a big fan of Hoopshype anymore. One of the rumors they printed from ihaveatwitteraccount.com suggested the Wolves might waive Shabazz to make room for Prince. But not before printing another "Rubio will definitely be traded" rumor/fantasy.

Cut Flip some slack here. KG can still be dominant for 20-24 mpg, and Miller/Prince each signed for the VetMin. I would question the whole "Torii as mentor" thing long before I would with these 3.

Please explain the part in bold...

[bleedspeed]

For me it is I just think Hummel is better then Prince at this stage of his career. He must have someother quality that Flip think this team needs more then Hummel can bring.

[Carlos Danger]

Sometimes Coaches/Managers bring in people they've worked well with before as support. Flip still needs to get this team to buy into his system - especially defensively. I can remember one specific instance when Payne of all people got caught on camera doing an eye roll when being instructed by Flip. It may have been an isolated incident - IDK. But nobody wants to have a David Blatt situation where the players appear to be tuning out the coach. By Flip bringing in KG and Prince, he knows he has two established guys who will back him up when trying to coach these younger guys and keep them in check. It's pretty much what every coach does....everywhere. You rarely see teams with just all young guys and zero older vets.

Zero vets? You're right. But 4 old vets? No. Blatt's difficulty getting LeBron's respect is one thing. Flip not getting respect from any of our young players - especially Payne - is entirely different. If Flip feels he has to bring in 3 old vets on top of an existing old vet (Martin) to get and hold the respect or attention of our very young players, then I'd say we have a serious coaching problem.

Well...I'm not sure I'd throw Martin into the "old vet" bucket. He was really an Adelman guy more than Flip and if he's healthy, he's probably still one of our top 5 players. And I think most people expected us to bring in a vet PG to replace Mo Williams. So when we say "old vets" we are only talking about KG and Prince. What do those two specific guys have in common? They both played under Flip on successful teams. They were also both effective defensive players in Flip's system. To say that we might have a serious coaching problem might not be completely crazy. We went from 40 wins under Adelman to 16 wins under Flip. Yes, we lost Love, had injuries and probably tanked. But several of the guys we are all counting on and excited about for this year contributed heavily to that 16 win season i.e. Wiggins, LaVine, Dieng, Muhammad as well as Payne/Bennett. If those guys are as good as we all seem to think they are, then they should have been a better team last year. So, yes - based on that, we do need some help driving these guys to perform at a higher level. If Flip feels he needs a couple guys i.e. KG and Prince to reinforce what he's trying to teach guys, then I think that's a good move. And as someone else wrote - I think both KG and Prince still have a little left to give on the court too. At the end of the day, we're still going to have a pretty young team.

[Monster]

For me it is I just think Hummel is better then Prince at this stage of his career. He must have someother quality that Flip think this team needs more then Hummel can bring.

I think Prince is probably better than Hummel still (and I am a big Hummel fan). My guess is that as long as there is some reasonable spot for Hummel next year he will end up on the team. I wanted Hummel back but it feels like there is too much uncertainty from a bunch of players (injury and performance) and if we ended up having to rely on him for more than 15mins a game that would be too much. I think Prince is a better fit for this year.

Hopefully this year some of the young guys get better and show what they can do and we can rely on them more. On this roster who can you truly rely on? It's nice to have a couple older vets that can likely plays a decent chunk of minutes and do what they do a lot of the guys under 30 you don't know what you will get (even Wiggins to a certain extent but we aren't worried about him) and that's a significant majority of the team.

[Monster]

Sometimes Coaches/Managers bring in people they've worked well with before as support. Flip still needs to get this team to buy into his system - especially defensively. I can remember one specific instance when Payne of all people got caught on camera doing an eye roll when being instructed by Flip. It may have been an isolated incident - IDK. But nobody wants to have a David Blatt situation where the players appear to be tuning out the coach. By Flip bringing in KG and Prince, he knows he has two established guys who will back him up when trying to coach these younger guys and keep them in check. It's pretty much what every coach does....everywhere. You rarely see teams with just all young guys and zero older vets.

Zero vets? You're right. But 4 old vets? No. Blatt's difficulty getting LeBron's respect is one thing. Flip not getting respect from any of our young players - especially Payne - is entirely different. If Flip feels he has to bring in 3 old vets on top of an existing old vet (Martin) to get and hold the respect or attention of our very young players, then I'd say we have a serious coaching problem.

Well...I'm not sure I'd throw Martin into the "old vet" bucket. He was really an Adelman guy more than Flip and if he's healthy, he's probably still one of our top 5 players. And I think most people expected us to bring in a vet PG to replace Mo Williams. So when we say "old vets" we are only talking about KG and Prince. What do those two specific guys have in common? They both played under Flip on successful teams. They were also both effective defensive players in Flip's system. To say that we might have a serious coaching problem might not be completely crazy. We went from 40 wins under Adelman to 16 wins under Flip. Yes, we lost Love, had injuries and probably tanked. But several of the guys we are all counting on and excited about for this year contributed heavily to that 16 win season i.e. Wiggins, LaVine, Dieng, Muhammad as well as Payne/Bennett. If those guys are as good as we all seem to think they are, then they should have been a better team last year. So, yes - based on that, we do need some help driving these guys to perform at a higher level. If Flip feels he needs a couple guys i.e. KG and Prince to reinforce what he's trying to teach guys, then I think that's a good move. And as someone else wrote - I think both KG and Prince still have a little left to give on the court too. At the end of the day, we're still going to have a pretty young team.

I would say Martin is a Flip guy since he says over and over and over again that he isn't trading him.

You make an interesting point about coaching and I tend to want to give Flip the benefit of the doubt all things considered except the defensive side was brutal. I don't want to defend Flip's coaching too much but basically you take away Love and Rubio and even Brewer from that 40 win season and don't replace them with anything to significant except Mo for less than half the season and a Rookie in Wiggins and that adds up to a lot of loses.

[Carlos Danger]

Monster, I'm not trying to say Flip is a terrible coach (although I'm sure some on here will - ha!). But...in effect, we traded Love for the #1 overall pick. And we had Dieng and Bazz returning for their second years to assume bigger roles. Then added: LaVine, Brewer, Thad Young and Mo Williams. That was some decent talent around Rubio, Pek and Martin. I mean...at the start of last year many were probably just as excited as we are now. And yes, it blew up quickly with injuries. But it concerns me a little that the guys we are counting on this year played so poorly together last year. That's not to say there wasn't improvement. Bazz looked real good until he got hurt. LaVine seemed to get better and looked great by year end. Wiggins seemed to steadily improve. But as you mentioned, the defense was still horrible. If KG and Prince can help in anyway improve that end of the game - it's worth it.

[alexftbl8181 [enjin:6648741]]

man I remember back when the Wolves were considering trading JJ and Bud for Prince and Tony Allen that people didn't want to do the deal because Prince was considered one of the worst players in the league at the time. Man how things change. Doesn't matter how much you suck if you can mentor somebody your shit is made of gold

[longstrangetrip [enjin:6600564]]

man I remember back when the Wolves were considering trading JJ and Bud for Prince and Tony Allen that people didn't want to do the deal because Prince was considered one of the worst players in the league at the time. Man how things change. Doesn't matter how much you suck if you can mentor somebody your shit is made of gold

Alex, if you go back and review that thread, several of us thought it was a good deal. My take was that it was too good to be true and that Memphis would have to be smoking crack to give up two great defenders for Bud and JJ, and it turned out Memphis never wanted the deal.

But keep in mind we were analyzing taking on Prince at $7 million per year, clearly more than he was worth. Now Flip has picked him up for the vet minimum...that's quite different.

[Monster]

Monster, I'm not trying to say Flip is a terrible coach (although I'm sure some on here will - ha!). But...in effect, we traded Love for the #1 overall pick. And we had Dieng and Bazz returning for their second years to assume bigger roles. Then added: LaVine, Brewer, Thad Young and Mo Williams. That was some decent talent around Rubio, Pek and Martin. I mean...at the start of last year many were probably just as excited as we are now. And yes, it blew up quickly with injuries. But it concerns me a little that the guys we are counting on this year played so poorly together last year. That's not to say there wasn't improvement. Bazz looked real good until he got hurt. LaVine seemed to get better and looked great by year end. Wiggins seemed to steadily improve. But as you mentioned, the defense was still horrible. If KG and Prince can help in anyway improve that end of the game - it's worth it.

I think this is a fun discussion so I will continue with some thoughts.

You said we added Brewer but he was on the roster the previous year.

It wasn't coaching that had Thad playing poorly heck Flip stuck by him and before we moved him it seemed like Thad was getting back to being an effective player. Dieng didn't seem to improve which was a disappointment.

You say it's disappointing that guys didn't play well together which added up to losses. Well guess what the only guys that played together or had the opportunity to do so most of the season were Wiggins, Dieng and Lavine. They were the only players to play 70 or more games on the entire team. Bud was next with 67 and shockingly Bennett was 5th on the team in games played at 57. 25 total players put in minutes for the team last year. That's unreal turnover for one year on the roster. Another way to put this in perspective: Lorenzo Brown a guy that wasn't on the team to start the year and signed a couple 10 day contracts before being signed for the rest of the year played 29 games. There were 12 other Wolves players that played fewer games than Brown.

All my points are that there were lots of pretty obvious reasons why we were bad last year. Coaching may not have helped either but it was a pretty brutal situation at times. There were a number of games we were a step above a d-league team or a SL team with a slew of new faces and few vets. After watching SL and the Pan Am games I can see why at times the Wolves probably were so poor defensively with a lot of new players and likely little time to instill a defense not unlike those teams and the Wolves were playing against teams that were more prepared. Like I have said it was so brutally bad defensively I can't give Flip and his staff a pass there and I have been pretty consist an in saying that's where I would like to see improvement from the coaching staff. I do think we need to remember the context of last year even on defense. There were a lot of factors making the season pretty rough.