Minnesota Sports Forum

AbeVigodaLive wrote:I think Love's defense is getting the easy, cursory bad rap. Especially when compared to Thad Young. Even when Young was "trying", he was as bad or worse than Love in many ways.

Love's defense made great strides last season overall, despite some obvious flaws.

As for watching and hoping for the young guys... Donyell Marshall, Gerald Glass, Steph Marbury, Will Avery, Ndudi Ebi, Louis Bullock, Paul Grant, Felton Spencer, et al...

That's where the apathy comes in for many. They've been down this road before. Again and again.

I have been quite underwhelmed with Thad. Maybe it is a system/fit issue but at least we can see he is not the answer moving forward at the 4.

AbeVigodaLive wrote:I think Love's defense is getting the easy, cursory bad rap. Especially when compared to Thad Young. Even when Young was "trying", he was as bad or worse than Love in many ways.

Love's defense made great strides last season overall, despite some obvious flaws.

As for watching and hoping for the young guys... Donyell Marshall, Gerald Glass, Steph Marbury, Will Avery, Ndudi Ebi, Louis Bullock, Paul Grant, Felton Spencer, et al...

That's where the apathy comes in for many. They've been down this road before. Again and again.

I'm trying to understand your point about the young guys, abe. Are you saying that you were as excited about that group of 8 guys as you are about Wiggins/LaVine/Bennett/Muhammad/Dieng? The only rookie I was excited about in that woeful gang of 8 was Marbury. The reason apathy hasn't sunk in for me is that we now have 5 rookies and second year guys with more promise than most of the draft picks of the past. They're painful to watch at times, but all five have had games this year that showed what the future may have in store for us. I had to turn the game off at halftime last night, but I am patiently waiting for the return of Rubio and Martin, as I expect the last half of the season to be as fun as the first four games were.

AbeVigodaLive wrote:

alexftbl8181 wrote:Wolves D at the rim is worse the last year. How does that happen even though we lost the black holes in Love and Pek and replaced them with the next Bill Russel in Dieng and Thad who everybody thought was way better then Love at defense?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I read that Thad Young gave up a higher percentage at the rim than Kevin Love last season.

And that was when he was trying.

Nope, you're correct...Thad was actually a little worse statistically in interior defense last year than Love. I think some expected Thad to be an improvement over Kevin in terms of perimeter and PnR defense and I believe he has been, but he never was going to help our inside defense.

I don't think anyone should be surprised that our rim protection is so awful this year. I attribute it to two main factors:

1) The inability of our PG's to prevent penetration since Rubio went down.

2) A roster where the second and third tallest healthy guys are Robbie Hummel and Corey Brewer, neither of whom is destined to enter the Hall of Fame as legendary interior defenders.

Interior defense, and defense in general, will improve when Rubio returns. But as long as we have only one healthy center, I don't expect us to get out of the bottom quartile in rim protection.

http://www.minnpost.com/sports/2014/12/how-bad-wolves-defense-historically-bad

After I posted my theories about the Wolves' dreadful defense this year, I came across Robson's latest depressing article...albeit with some positive words about Thad Young. Zach gets a beatdown though for his defense.

Hoping for some positive Ricky news this week...

Can I say something Thad is not the problem, in the games that the wolves have won he has been one of the main reasons why, yes his defense might be not the greatest, but the main problem is our pgs can't get through screens and can't stop dribble penetration.

I don't disagree, kekgeek...I think Thad on balance has been a great addition to the Wolves. But if watched last night's game, there was something off with him. I noticed it, Robson noticed it, and Flip clearly noticed it. Thad's not the kind of guy to dog it on the court, but he sure was last night. It's out of character, so maybe he caught Drew's virus.

Not a big deal because we weren't going to beat the Clippers anyway. I'm expecting a big night from Thad on Wednesday against his former team.

Hard to point the finger at any one player. It's a total team breakdown, starting with the coaching staff and down through every single player.

Regarding the thread title, I would be well past apathy at this point in the season if were not for all the young guys! In spite of horrid defense pretty much every single game, blowout or otherwise, one of the young kids steps up and restores hope in the future! It's exciting to think about what it'll be like in a couple years as they hopefully develop some consistency to their game and become the core along with Ricky!!!

Q12543 wrote:Hard to point the finger at any one player. It's a total team breakdown, starting with the coaching staff and down through every single player.

Q, I have a hard time calling this season a total team breakdown, or pinning much on the coaching staff. While we can find little things to pick at...like Flip's reluctance to encourage threes, Young's below average rebounding, etc...the failure of this season can be summed up in one word...injuries. We only got a chance to see a reasonably healthy roster for 4 1/2 games, and most of us on this board were quite happy with what we saw...2-2, with the only losses being to two of the elite teams in the NBA, and on our way to a 3rd win. And then Ricky went down, followed by 2 of our 3 centers, and finally by Kevin Martin. And just to put a cherry on the sh#t sundae, we lost Thad Young for 2 weeks for personal reasons, and frankly he hasn't been in physical or mental shape to contribute much since he has been back.

I don't think any team in the league could lose 1)it's leader, best facilitator and best defender, 2) its leading scorer and best shooter, 3) its second leading scorer and starting center, plus 1 of his two backups, and 4) its starting PF, and do much better than 4-12. Go ahead and project a similar 5-player loss onto any team in the NBA, and you'll come up with a similar horrible record. Even the great San Antonio Spurs wouldn't be .500 this year if they had played most of the season without Duncan, Ginobli, Parker and Splitter. The Wolves are essentially playing their second team against their opponent's starters every night, and the results are as expected. Let's reverse the situation, and imagine a healthy Wolves team against any other similarly depleted NBA team. I think Rubio, Martin, Wiggins, Young and Pek would blow out the league-leading Grizziies if they were starting Kosta Koufos, Jon Leuer, Tony Allen, Jordan Adams and Nick Calathes. A healthy Wolves team would beat the Clippers by 25 if they had Wolves-like injury losses and were forced to start Spencer Hawes, Glen Davis, Matt Barnes, Jamal Crawford, and Jordan Farmar.

When you apply the same type of personnel losses the Wolves have incurred onto other teams, you likely get the same kind of lopsided results...but this time in the Wolves favor. Perhaps it would be fair to rip Flip the PBO for assembling a roster of guys who have more than their share of injuries...Pek, Martin, Rubio, Bud, Turiaf and Hummel are all guys who have been in suits instead of sweats much more than the typical NBA player. But three of those guys we weren't counting on to be in the 9-man rotation, and I would argue that any NBA player would be missing 2 months after incurring what Ricky did. So much of it is bad luck.

I don't think it's fair to attribute much of the failure of this season to the coaches, and even though the young players we have been forced to rely on have been wildly inconsistent (as young players often are), for the most part they have played hard and, in many cases, exceeded my expectations for what they were going to provide us this year. Unfortunately, we really haven't gotten a chance to see what this team and this coaching staff can do. All we know for sure is that our second team is not good enough to compete with other team's starters.

longstrangetrip wrote:

AbeVigodaLive wrote:I think Love's defense is getting the easy, cursory bad rap. Especially when compared to Thad Young. Even when Young was "trying", he was as bad or worse than Love in many ways.

Love's defense made great strides last season overall, despite some obvious flaws.

As for watching and hoping for the young guys... Donyell Marshall, Gerald Glass, Steph Marbury, Will Avery, Ndudi Ebi, Louis Bullock, Paul Grant, Felton Spencer, et al...

That's where the apathy comes in for many. They've been down this road before. Again and again.

I'm trying to understand your point about the young guys, abe. Are you saying that you were as excited about that group of 8 guys as you are about Wiggins/LaVine/Bennett/Muhammad/Dieng? The only rookie I was excited about in that woeful gang of 8 was Marbury. The reason apathy hasn't sunk in for me is that we now have 5 rookies and second year guys with more promise than most of the draft picks of the past. They're painful to watch at times, but all five have had games this year that showed what the future may have in store for us. I had to turn the game off at halftime last night, but I am patiently waiting for the return of Rubio and Martin, as I expect the last half of the season to be as fun as the first four games were.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.