Minnesota Sports Forum

Feel free to use this thread to post your own crazy/head scratching stats. Here's mine:

We won only 16 out of 82 games last year. Of those 16 wins, all but 4 came in games Rubio played. And Rubio only played in 28 games. So:

12-16 (.429) record with Rubio
4-50 (.074) record without Rubio

Chew on that.

Let me see if I understand. Last year, we won 43% of the games Ricky played in (or 35 wins if he played 82 games). This year we add Towns, KG, Bjelica and Miller, and our rookies are prepared to take the second year leap, but ESPN projects us to win only 24 games?????

I can only conclude that losing Bud, Hamilton and Hummel is costing us 11 wins. Flip, bring these guys back!

That's not really a crazy stat, as some of us have been harping on how his impact goes well beyond the traditional box score stats (especially the focus on his shooting).

The only question I have is how many of those 12 wins had Pek in the lineup along with Rubio? I think the falloff from Pek to Dieng, especially on defense, was much more severe than anyone could have imagined.

longstrangetrip wrote:Let me see if I understand. Last year, we won 43% of the games Ricky played in (or 35 wins if he played 82 games). This year we add Towns, KG, Bjelica and Miller, and our rookies are prepared to take the second year leap, but ESPN projects us to win only 24 games?????

I can only conclude that losing Bud, Hamilton and Hummel is costing us 11 wins. Flip, bring these guys back!

You need to look at Center. If Pek can't play or is a shell of his former self, the Towns/Dieng combination is going to be a problem for us defensively and in team rebounding.

I think the biggest difference with Pek + Rubio is more on the defensive side of the floor. With those two you have a competent defense up the middle of the lineup. I realize that most folks don't regard Pek as a great defender, and he's not great. But he is solid which is miles better than anything else we had in the middle last year. He knows how to use his body and position himself in a way to bother shots and jostle opponents so that they don't get good, clean looks near the rim.

(by they way, Jeff Adrien was basically a poor man's version of Pek. It should come as no surprise that our defense was markedly better when he was in the game for us. He was the only guy other than Pek that couldn't be pushed around. And what did Flip do? Release him).

I bet a lot of those wins Martin was in the lineup also.

Q we both love Adrian but Adrian is a bit of a different defender because he is a shot blocker and made up for his lack of size by being mobile. I think the comparison of them being absolutely physically strong is worth noting and probably what you were getting at. The bottom line is if you have either guy healthy on defense you can do much much worse.

Isn't the record even better when Pek/Kmart/BlondeRicky all play together?

We won 40 games with Ricky/Love/Martin playing 68+ games each and Pek played 54 games. Our bench is better now, but our starting 5 is worse so I just don't see how this team wins more this year than that team won in an arguably weaker conference. When our top players haven't won more than 40 games together why is a better bench going to fix that? That to me says we're still missing the top level players needed to actually push us to the next level. The best teams ride their stars to wins and let their bench pick up the slack occasionally throughout the year. They don't count on their depth to win them 45 games. Ricky/Martin/Wiggins/KG/Towns isn't a good enough starting 5 yet to consistently outplay the other team's starting 5. Towns just flat out isn't coming in and dominating and there isn't a guaranteed star let alone 2 that most of the Western conference teams contending for a playoff spot have to carry them throughout the year.

While projecting the numbers is nice, bottom line is Rubio has only played 82 games once in his career. To expect him to go through a season healthy at this point isn't a good bet. We have to have a healthy Rubio to compete.