Scratching and Clawing

So once again I was lucky enough to sit courtside for what turned out to be not-a-trainwreck between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Timberwolves last night. The final score of 115-110 was much better than my predicted 110-80 and the swoon I kept expecting in the second half never happened. It seemed like the halftime score of 59-58 simply indicated that the Thunder hadn’t yet decided to play defense, but even when they tried to step on the Wolves’ throat at the beginning of the third, said throat proved rather resilient.

As Zach Harper pointed out, Barea and Westbrook couldn’t guard each other, with Barea ending up with 24 points and Westbrook 35. The Wolves’ best defender on Westbrook? Amazingly enough, it was Anthony Randolph, who managed to draw a charge late in the game that almost tipped things in the Wolves’ favor. Just prior to that play, Westbrook made a pretty thunderously dumb play. After Harden’s missed 3, Westbrook jumped up and literally grabbed Randolph’s arm as he was going for the rebound. Here’s the video:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yJ2ffZ4uxw]

And here’s a still of the actual moment when he grabbed Randolph. Of particular note is the clock.

The Thunder were up 7 points with 49.6 seconds left and Westbrook is clearly outnumbered going for this rebound with three Timberwolves packed into the paint around him. One of Westbrook’s greatest strengths is his engine, his intensity, but here it gets him into trouble. Instead of letting the rebound go and forcing the Wolves to run time off the clock setting up a play, he stops the clock with the foul and sends Randolph to the line where he cuts the lead to 5. Then, on the ensuing play, Randolph draws the charge:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV44-jjBXGw]

Although Westbrook at least takes some time off the clock, an iso play still doesn’t seem like the best option. You can see Kevin Durant set a screen, but Westbrook clearly sees the matchup against Randolph as a mismatch, but it doesn’t pay off. Michael Beasley’s layup on the next play cuts the lead to 5, but then immediately the Thunder take advantage of the Wolves not getting back and Durant gets an open lane to the basket for an emphatic dunk.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9qBGiZs9k8]

You can see the confusion that settles quickly over the Wolves after Beasley’s impressive layup. As Kendrick Perkins goes to inbound the ball Randolph and Barea are doubling Westbrook, but where is Beasley going?

Durant is wide open near the sideline and Beasley is badly out of position to stop him. One hesitation dribble and he’s off. Durant might not be a speed demon like Westbrook, but he uses his speed well. If he had just gone flat-out for the hoop, he probably would have made it, but that hesitation gets Beasley off balance and lets Durant fly.

That whole sequence was pretty indicative of the game as a whole. The Thunder played solidly if a little loosely while the Wolves kept fighting and clawing, eventually scratching themselves in the process.

Two last things, courtesy of former NBA player Trent Tucker, whom I got to sit next to. At one point in the third quarter, Tucker called out to referee Dan Crawford. They exchanged greetings and then Crawford said, “Every time I see you, I think, ‘We have to watch replays because of you,’” in reference to the Trent Tucker Rule, which the league enacted because of a play where Tucker, then playing for the Knicks, caught an inbounds pass from Mark Jackson and hoisted a shot that won the game with a tenth of a second left on the clock. Now there must be at least three-tenths of a second left on the clock in order for a player to secure possession and take a shot.

Tucker kept pointing out during the game that Nikola Pekovic was playing too far off his man when Westbrook ran the pick and roll, allowing Westbrook to get clear looks at the basket from midrange. I went to the videotape and, sure enough, he’s right. Here you can see four examples of Pekovic shading too low to guard Westbrook once he gets by the screen:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Obq5FWC9A4]

It seems to me this speaks to the looseness of the Wolves without anchors like Love and Rubio. Playing with lineups that they’re not used to, it seems like the Wolves’ players are less sure of their roles and what each of them should be doing at any given time. It’s no great time to give Westbrook the midrange jumper since he’s not a great jump shooter, but he’s also not Rajon Rondo; he can hit them. Plus, the Thunder rely so heavily on Durant and Westbrook, why not leave Kendrick Perkins and turn Westbrook into a passer? When the starters go down, it seems like the pieces don’t interlock as well, the rotations aren’t as crisp. The team as a whole looks a little more provisional, like they’ve just been thrown together. Kudos to them for showing some fight against the presumptive Western Conference champs, but it’s hard to know what to make of a game like that. The best Wolves fans can hope for is that this last batch of games gives the team a better idea of whom to keep and whom to let go this offseason.

—Steve McPherson

Everything’s Not Lost

Last night’s horrific loss to the visiting Phoenix Suns couldn’t have looked any further removed from the Timberwolves’ other nationally televised game, their 101-98 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers back on January 20. That was the game that shot the Wolves into the national consciousness, that ended with back-to-back threes by Ricky Rubio and Kevin Love. Here, in the dog days of the NBA, with teams tanking and jockeying for playoff seeds, the Wolves entered last night’s game limping from a five-game losing streak and a series of injuries that began with the loss of Rubio for the season and proceeded through lost games for Nikola Pekovic, Luke Ridnour, J.J. Barea, and Michael Beasley. And it was an atrocious game to watch.

The Suns are in the mix for the last playoff spot in the West, a spot that at one time was the Wolves’ to lose. And lose it they did. Now Phoenix is in a tussle with Utah, Denver, and Dallas for the right to lose to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round. And Wolves fans can’t help but look at that and say, “That was supposed to be our chance to lose in the first round.” For all the debate around the basketball Internet about tanking, tanking won’t even help the Wolves now since New Orleans owns the team’s first round pick. The best fans can hope for is Utah making the playoffs so the Wolves get theirs. Which isn’t much.

And so all that’s left is to play for pride, for some nebulous idea of finishing strong, of setting the tone for next year. It’s a familiar script for the Wolves’ faithful, a group that seems ready to throw the towel in pretty quick. Through March, Love put up historic numbers (leading the league in points, rebounds and three-pointers—something no other player has ever done) in an attempt to put the team on his back, but it’s become clear that most of the team’s heart just isn’t in it, and it’s affecting Love. He looks exhausted, frustrated. And so the rumblings have started about how dissatisfied he must be with the team, how he must look at the contract extension he signed and wonder how he even gave the Wolves three years to figure this out when the team is so terrible.

This is what you hear a lot, but is it really what Love is thinking? I wouldn’t blame him if he were, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s managing to take a longer view than the typical fan. When this team was firing on all cylinders this year, with Rubio controlling the point and Love and Pekovic destroying teams down low, they looked better than they have in years. When it was working, it was a little easier to overlook the startling weakness of the wings, to excuse Martell Webster’s often head-scratching play, to believe that all Anthony Randolph needed was Rubio to make him the player he always seemed like he could become. That team, the team from February and early March, looked like a solid foundation to build on.

The thing is, beneath the injuries, it’s still there. You can hardly lay Rubio’s injury at the feet of management—it’s just that that injury and the others have exposed management’s other missteps. Take Ridnour, for example. As the team’s starting PG, he was just all right. But put into the role of the secondary point guard on the floor and he put up quietly impressive numbers. There’s just no way you trot out J.J. Barea and Malcolm Lee in your backcourt and expect them to produce like Rubio and Ridnour. Any player needs to find a role that suits him and Barea needs to come off the bench and be a firecracker. Ask anything more and the whole thing starts falling apart. At times, Beasley even looked like maybe he had found his niche off the bench. But now that the discipline of the team has eroded, Beasley has looked lackadaisical. And of course there’s the problem of Wes Johnson, who seem to keep slipping further and further from being a useful basketball player.

So is Love pissed? Clearly and justifiably. But I sort of doubt he’s really throwing in the towel as readily as fans are ready to throw it in for him. With Rubio, he was changing the culture of the team but it didn’t get to marinate long enough to soak all the way down. Consider people who’ve been in a series of disappointing relationships. When they find someone they genuinely connect with, they go all in, shoving their chips into the middle of the table. They last three, maybe four months. And then when it ends through no fault of their own, through no fault of anyone’s but just through circumstance, it hurts a hundred times as much as when those more insubstantial relationships ended. Both the team and the fans went all in for the team they wanted to be, knew they could be. But a couple months of wins, the dubious milestone of reaching .500, none of this can truly change the bedrock insecurity and resignation of a fanbase and team so often beaten down. It’s going to take time.

There’s every reason to believe that Rubio comes back next year as good as ever. He might not be all the way back right away, but fortunately his game is predicated on vision, smarts, and length, not quickness and athleticism. It seems unlikely that Love or Pekovic will regress, and it’s likely that at least some of the players who’ve been disappointing towards the end of the season will be culled: if the Wolves don’t pick up any options, Beasley, Webster, Randolph and Tolliver won’t return. Brad Miller has announced his retirement.

There’s no denying that the Timberwolves are painful to watch right now, but I don’t see them as a fatally flawed team so much as one where the constituent parts are out of balance. Starters are hurt and playing too many or too few minutes in light of that; bench guys are playing out of position and playing too much. They’re like a five-piece rock band trying to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony right now. This season that started with so much promise actually lived up to it at times, and that’s a lot more than we can say for any of the last few seasons. This feeling right now is familiar: the feeling of things not working out, of being out of control. But the Timberwolves and the Wolves fans just need to get back out there next year and get something on the rebound. Luckily, we have one of the game’s best on the boards for at least three more years.

The Plight of the Common Fan & The Transgressions of Blake Griffin

Over at Hardwood Paroxysm, two things: A post about suffering with your team (particularly a propos for Wolves fans after last night) and a post about Blake Griffin’s borderline criminal throwdowns and why it’s good that they’re borderline criminal.

—Steve McPherson

Ricky Rubio’s Top Assists

Over at Hardwood Paroxysm, I went through all 336 of Ricky Rubio’s assists for the season and picked out a Top Five, plus looked at a bunch of other aspects of his game.

—Steve McPherson

To The Extremes

Last night, we welcomed back two ghosts from our collective past to the Target Center. One was a lanky teen from the South who rose to national prominence in the ‘90s, made millions and gained glory for one fleeting moment, but whose career more recently has been dogged by accusations of fake toughness and declining talent. The other is Vanilla Ice.

For all its sad pageantry—the smoke machine, the tiny stage, the pandering of wearing a Kevin Love jersey—there was something sort of comforting in Vanilla Ice’s performance at halftime. It’s hard to believe, after all, that all the people who packed in at the stairwells to gawk at Mr. Ice had been down with him since day one. If you were anywhere in teenage range when “Ice Ice Baby” was destroying the charts, you probably hated it publicly and yet knew all the words. It’s an undeniable slice of guilty pop pleasure on so many levels. For example, it rips off a far better song (Queen’s “Under Pressure”) in a totally simpleminded yet manically genius way. I mean, listen to him try to defend the sample as original work back in 1990 (starts at 1:40):

“The only part that sounds like ‘Under Pressure’ is the hook.” That’s all you have! That song is only hook! And furthermore, it’s not even the bassline that’s most bothersome: the essential quality of both “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby” is generated by the interaction between that bassline and those two piano chords. The insistence and steadiness of that two-note bassline stands in tension with the fragility of the chords and that’s pretty much the whole ballgame. But whatever: I still know all the words.

Part of your brain reviles Ice for his crass commercialism, his continuing scrabbling attempts to stay relevant, whether that means going all Cypress Hill, or going all kind of Marilyn Manson/Limp Bizkit, or going all Juggalo wrestler, or going all let’s-renovate-a-house-on-the-DIY-network, or even going back and embracing the pop image he once notoriously destroyed on MTV.

But another part of you just wants to stop, collaborate and listen. Last night, there was an acceptance of Vanilla Ice and all the rich contradictions he engenders. The reception was more mixed for the other ghost of popular conscious past (at least in Minnesota) from last night, Kevin Garnett. The matchup between Garnett and Love—the battle of the Kevins—was something people feasted on in the days leading up to the game. But it was never really a contest, with Love looking gassed and playing out of position at the 5, a position that Garnett has had a chance to embrace in Boston. The Wolves’ Kevin was held to something like half the numbers we’ve come to expect (22 and 11) while every Celtic starter not named Rajon Rondo had double digits in scoring. Oh and Rondo had 17 assists (more than the entire Timberwolves team) in the Celtics’ 100-79 win.

It wasn’t Garnett’s first return to the Target Center, but the lingering questions about Garnett’s exit from Minnesota, his distaste for the franchise, and his upcoming free agency all gave this particular reunion a certain piquancy. This wasn’t the first time seeing your ex after the breakup, nor even the second or third, but maybe that chance meeting at a class reunion—the one that’s sort of sneakily the most important, where you maybe get over the whole thing.

I mean, sure, he’s kind of crazy.

And yes, he’s kind of an asshole.

But he was our crazy asshole, and while he was on the Timberwolves, we were good together. His trademark intensity made him play like anything less than his best was a felony and this hand-wringing about how much he got paid and who he wanted to have signed and how he left is futile. But every time he comes to town, it gets dredged up again. Will it ever stop? I don’t know.

For now, we have Kevin Love, who in spite of historic numbers (he’s currently leading the league in points, rebounds, and 3-pointers made in March—something no one’s ever done over a month), still feels underappreciated. Maybe Wolves fans still feel a little burned by Garnett, by giving him that big contract. Maybe there are other reasons. But Love is ours now and he’s one of the top ten players in the league. Can’t we give ourselves one more chance? Why can’t we give Love one more chance?

—Steve McPherson

The Man Of Twists And Turns

My daughter Maggie is a month old and so far I’ve read her the first three books of The Odyssey. And she doesn’t seem to care very much. Not that I blame her, because things haven’t really started to get good yet. Antinous is being a total douche, young Telemachus has just arrived in Pylos looking for word of his father Odysseus, and King Nestor is acting like a witness on Law & Order (“No, I didn’t see anything unusual when we left Troy. Except …”). But it’s not really for her benefit as much as mine. Homer’s archetypal story of return feels good in your face; it leaves a rich, hearty taste in your mouth when read aloud. Kind of like running, it can feel awkward at first, but once you’ve put in some time on it, the feel it gives you—the rhythm, the forward pull of it, the compulsion to keep going—is unique.

So maybe all that reading was why, when I tuned into last night’s Timberwolves game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, I found myself thinking that Kevin Love was looking a little less like a caveman in the thicker beard he’d grown this season. With his hair long enough to start curling and his beard tamed a bit, he seemed a bit more heroic. “Kevin Love looking pretty Agamemnon-ish,” I tweeted.

The brother of wronged Menelaus, leader of the Achaean forces that laid siege to Troy: it seemed reasonable enough. Although maybe I was just thinking of Brian Cox playing the role in Troy. But as the game unfolded, as Love’s points climbed towards 30, then 40, and then further, even without the help of Ricky Rubio and Nikola Pekovic, another comparison came to mind.

Here, after all, was a man who’d been on the road a long time, who hadn’t seen home in two weeks and had, in that time, faced down opponents in exotic locales like Salt Lake City, Sacramento, and San Antonio. He and his men had escaped by the skin of their teeth from the Cyclops in Phoenix, clashed with Warriors in the Land of the Dead (aka East Oakland). He had known success and failure both, and along the way he’d lost comrades in arms, taken down by the cruel gods. When he won, it wasn’t because he was the strongest or fastest, but because of his wiley cunning, his innate sense of where a rebound would land, his ability to fake his way into the lane and draw fouls, his deadeye shooting from distance.

Forget Agamemnon. Kevin Love was going straight Odysseus in Oklahoma City.

Here he was, facing his final test before finally reaching home, against perhaps his greatest foe, the presumed first seed of the Western Conference. The Wolves have been beaten down physically, lacking not only Rubio, but also Pekovic and Michael Beasley. For much of the fourth quarter and both overtimes, they were running a unit consisting of Luke Ridnour, J.J. Barea, Anthony Tolliver, and Wayne Ellington. Barea certainly had himself a game (and the first Timberwolves triple double since Kevin Garnett did it in 2007) but that supporting cast hardly looked like world-destroyers. But as Love steered his team into the fourth quarter down six, skirting Kevin Durant on one side and Russell Westbrook on the other, it was like he was striding the decks, enjoining the team to step it up:

“Friends, we’re hardly strangers at meeting danger—
and this danger is no worse than what we faced
when Cyclops penned us up in his vaulted cave
with crushing force! But even from there my courage,
my presence of mind and tactics saved us all,
and we will live to remember this someday,
I have no doubt. Up now, follow my orders,
all of us work as one!”

The severely undersized Timberwolves chipped into the lead over the course of the quarter, somehow managing to send the Thunder to the line only 20 times the whole game and keeping it close until they tied it with 20 seconds left. Love had 39 points, had done everything he could to keep it close, but the Thunder had Kevin Durant, a basketball demon with “twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down / and six long-swaying necks, a hideous head on each, / each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset, / packed tight—and armed to the hilt with black death!” And with the game on the line, he did Kevin Durant things:

But down 3 with 3.9 seconds left, the Wolves inbounded the ball to Love. Closely guarded, he nonetheless turned and did some Love things:

That basket tied his season high at 42 and then with a pair of free throws in the first overtime he tied Kevin Garnett’s franchise-high 47 and surpassed it with 48. The game teetered back and forth through the first overtime, ending deadlocked again, but the game slipped away in the second overtime.

Zeus the son of Cronus mounted a thunderhead
above our hollow ship and the deep went black beneath it.
Nor did the craft scud on much longer. All of a sudden
killer-squalls attacked us, screaming out of the west,
a murderous blast shearing the two forestays off,
so the mast toppled backward, its running tackle spilling
into the bilge. The mast itself went crashing into the stern,
it struck the helmsman’s head and crushed his skull to pulp
and down from his deck the man flipped like a diver—
his hardy life spirit left his bones behind.

Then, then in the same breath Zeus hit the craft
with a lightning-bolt and thunder. Round she spun,
reeling under the impact, filled with reeking brimstone,
shipmates pitching out of her, bobbing round like seahawks
swept along by the whitecaps past the trim black hull—
and the god cut short their journey home forever.

With two more free throws after this turning point, Love got all the way up to 51 points, just the third 50-point game of the season. But it ultimately wasn’t enough to stave off defeat at the hands of Westbrook, who had a career high 45, and Durant, who had a career high 17 rebounds to go with 40 points. By the end of the 149-140 contest—likely one of the best games in the NBA this season—the Wolves, and Love in particular, looked absolutely gassed and who wouldn’t be after a two-week slog that’s no doubt felt like twenty years?

When the Wolves face Denver on Sunday it will finally be on home turf, back in good old Ithaca. Sure, Telemachus will still be out following ACL surgery, but Love will still be Love, the man of twists and turns, and he’ll be ready to string up his bow and drive the Nuggets from Target Center.

—Steve McPherson

The Part About The Treason

So this happened last night in the Timberwolves’ 115-99 loss to the Sacramento Kings:

There are plenty of reasons why teammates can get testy when they’re losing, and many of them have been outlined in fine fashion by Ben Polk over at A Wolf Among Wolves. There were turnovers and defensive lapses. There was laziness. I understand that the Wolves are missing Rubio’s assists, but it’s becoming clear that he brings so much more than that. Most concretely, he brings perimeter defensive and ball hawking instincts. Yes, he gambles and loses, but he also has the length to make it worth it and had (and hopefully has again) the lateral quickness to often compensate for those gambles. But he also brought a joyousness to the game that the Wolves are sorely lacking.

But this particular fracas actually grew from some very demonstrably bad play on the offensive end by J.J. Barea. Last night, Howlin’ T-Wolf opined that Barea is the most frustrating player on the roster, which I wasn’t immediately buying. Sure, Barea is maddening, but he at least plays to his strengths, I said, given that he’s a little guy who penetrates and creates havoc. Milicic and Johnson are more frustrating because they won’t even play their games—Milicic is a giant who refuses to expend the small amount of energy it would take to turn a soft finger roll into an emphatic dunk and Johnson continues to believe he’s a spot-up 3-point threat. But after watching the sequence of plays that led to that near donnybrook between Love and Barea, I’m inclined to agree with him.

The Timberwolves weren’t playing very well already, but it really seems to begin with this sequence:

Love sets a slip screen for Barea and then rolls wide open to the hoop, calling for the ball. He gets great post position which he then has to give up because Barea doesn’t get him the ball. Instead, the ball is swung to a not very wide open Ellington who bricks the three. Love fails to get back on defense (which is totally on him) and this leads to some beautiful ball rotation and an open 3 by Marcus Thornton.

By way of response, Barea charges back down the court and takes a heat-check 3 with 16 seconds left on the shot clock and Love is left to try and outrebound four-fifths of the Kings’ players. He fails:

This next play is where I think the testiness starts to bubble to the surface:

After the missed shot by the Kings, Barea grabs the rebound and I think you can see Love say something to Barea as he turns upcourt. You can also see that Barea doesn’t acknowledge whatever Love is saying, but instead charges into the lane, never looking for anyone to pass to, and putting up a heavily contest layup with 19 seconds on the shot clock. Love is once again the only Timberwolf who tried for the offensive rebound.

This is where Love really loses it:

Barea brings the ball up again and Love sets the screen for a curling Ellington. Love has decent if not great post position and calls for the ball but instead Ellington takes a screen from Derrick Williams. At this point, Love is completely open at the 3-point line for a spot-up jumper, but instead, Ellington takes the much harder pull-up 3 and airballs it. Love throws his arms up and then just stands there.

Now, this is not to say that Love doesn’t share his part of the blame. He often fails to get back on defense, and that’s on him. But Barea was just playing a particularly shitty brand of basketball right here, and it’s clear from his play and also Ellington’s just how much this team misses Rubio. One of the things that consistently impressed me about Rubio was the way he would bring the ball up the court, hand held aloft to call a play and in total control. He just exuded the feeling that he knew what he was doing. Barea, on the other hand, seems determined in this sequence to play “hero ball” of the worst kind. He jacks up a three and then doesn’t even call a play, just barrels into the paint and throws up a terrible layup. He deserved whatever tongue-lashing Love gave him, and probably more.

—Steve McPherson

David Kahn Managed Not to F*ck Anything Up

I’m not going to pretend that David Kahn has an easy job as GM of the Timberwolves. Never mind the fact that it’s pretty clear handing over the GM reins to a popular vote on Canis Hoopus would result in a more successful roster than the one the Wolves have currently. What I mean is that it’s not easy to actually be that guy who runs stuff, with people on one side telling you one thing and people on the other telling you the opposite and you sitting there having to make all those decisions. This year, for once, Kahn made the decision to stand pat at the trade deadline, rather than making the deal you know he so badly wanted to pull off.

This is part of what I mean by it being a tricky balancing act to be a GM: it sometimes seems like they can only screw up. When a team fails, it’s often blamed on the team’s architect, the GM. But when they succeed, they’re conveniently forgotten, as Kahn was in the light of the Timberwolves success this season. I’m not giving Kahn a pass, though: the guy’s been wrong more than he’s been right and I genuinely think he doesn’t know squat about actual basketball. Witness the way he’s been quick to say he knew all along that Ricky Rubio would be something special and then go back and look how he talked the exact same way about Jonny Flynn. You know that one about the broken clock, right?

But so Kahn has shown a predilection for trade deadline deals the last few years and there was every reason, with a lot of buzz about Beasley being moved, to expect him to do something again this year. His first deadline deal was getting Darko Milicic from the Knicks for Brian Cardinal and his second was shipping Corey Brewer off to the Knicks the next year for Anthony Randolph as part of the Carmelo deal (which I’m pretty sure actually involved every player in the league being traded for himself).

Looking at those deals—even with Milicic and Randolph both wallowing on the bench—the overriding reaction has to be, “Meh.” Milicic was supposed to be the soft-handed center, the key component that would make Rambis’ triangle unlumpy, the manna from heaven but instead he’s been just kind of okay. You know, an all right enough center who occasionally plays like a number two pick and mostly plays like number two. His lack of fire is dooming him just like it doomed the Neanderthals. (Actually, I think the Neanderthals did have fire, but it was such a good line I couldn’t let it go.) I expect him to play out the string, threaten again to go back home to Europe to play, and then be signed or traded to yet another team that will think he’s gotta be good for something. I’m looking at you, Bobcats.

And then there’s Randolph, who’s continued to show flashes of why teams keep thinking they can make something of him. Paired with Rubio, it looked like he might actually pull it together. But now he’s been stuck on the bench for weeks and it looks like the dream of the long-limbed, athletic big who can shoot the midrange jumper is dead once again. Randolph isn’t manifestly useless, especially in short spurts, but he—like Darko—is just all right.

And that’s what’s been particularly damning about Kahn’s deadline deals and why it’s good that he didn’t do anything this year. The deals for Milicic and Randolph weren’t really good or bad; it’s not like Corey Brewer is blowing up for Denver or that Brian Cardinal is killing it in Dallas. The real problem with them is that they were just hand-waving. Kahn could make those deals and then talk big about what they meant but they really meant nothing. They were smoke without fire.

I’d be curious to know how close the Wolves were to sending out Ridnour had Rubio not gone down with that ACL tear. Had they been able to pick up Jamal Crawford from the Blazers and only given up Michael Beasley, that would have been great. If they had given up Ridnour with Rubio healthy, that would have been all right, too. But if Rubio’s injury scared management away from any deals, that’s not a bad thing either. Beasley’s contract is up at the end of the year and along with the other expiring deals the Timberwolves have, they should have $18 – $20 million in space to work with and there are going to be players who fill their needs (O.J. Mayo for one, but also possibly Crawford if he opts out). So why give up something now when you can get it for a better deal later?

The way the season is going, the Wolves will contend for the eighth spot in the Western Conference. If they get it, they’re certain to be crushed into a fine powder by the Thunder, but it will be a good experience for the team. If they miss that spot, well, that’s not so bad. With smart moves in the offseason, there’s every reason to think the Wolves will be better next year than they were this year. And for once, it might be because Kahn didn’t do something. Sometimes you need to sit on your hands instead of waving them about.

—Steve McPherson

Wes Johnson and the Inevitability of Death’s Icy, Creeping Hand

Ryan O’Hanlon has a terrific piece on the Knicks’ Bill Walker over at The Classical, and it got me thinking about the Wolves’ Wes Johnson. One thing Johnson and Walker have in common is a general inability to dribble the ball. Another is being quite good at dunking. Johnson is supposed to be good from the arc (like Walker), but this clearly hasn’t been the case this season. Specifically, he has shot 89 of them and made 20, good for 23% shooting. Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where Johnson receiving the ball open on the wing feels like the part in “Speed” when they realize they have to jump the bus over a gap in the road. Only this time Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock die in a horrible fiery crash.

What really got me thinking about Johnson, though, was his assessment of what the average NBA swingman over the last ten years looks like:

You have: a gifted athlete with intermittently dazzling but generally under-developed on-court skills; a player who shows flashes of brilliance, but who also can’t help but play outside his ability when on the court for too long. This is a player who clearly spent much of his pre-NBA life being far better than most everyone else on the floor.

It made me think about what seem like the qualities that make for a good NBA basketball player and then what actually are the qualities that do. If you’ve played any amount of pickup basketball, you’re probably familiar with the guys who show up and are just flat out better than everyone else because of some combination of height, hops, and shooting. Maybe they’re not great shooters, but they’re good enough, and taller than everybody else so they get rebounds. They’re athletic enough to make everyone else look bad without really having to play smart. It strikes me that many, many shooting guards and small forwards in the NBA fall into this category of player.

The smallest guys—the point guards, the combo guards—need to be marksmen or savvy playmakers to get as far as the NBA. The biggest guys—power forwards and centers—have to be, well, bigger than everyone else. But those 6’6” or 6’7” guys with seven-foot wingspans have spent their whole lives being better than everyone else because of a chance collision between what passes for freakish size in the regular world and sheer athletic skill.

Coming into the draft, the upside on Johnson was that his game would translate easily into the pros. He was older than other players in the draft, having bounced around a bit before landing at Syracuse, and scouts liked his shot, his length, his finishing. But somehow, in his second season, he’s stalled completely. There’s reason to hope this is just a bump, but what if it’s not?

When I went to the Minneapolis College of Art & Design for a year to get a post-baccalaureate certificate in graphic design, I thought I knew something about what I was doing. I’d designed album artwork, posters, T-shirts, websites—all kinds of stuff. And everyone liked it. I thought I just needed to learn a bunch of technical things and then I’d be fine. But when I got there at the age of 27, I saw kids who were 19, 20, 21 doing amazing, incredible work. And I knew. I knew right then that although I might be a competent designer, capable of clean, well-laid out pages and the occasionally inspired poster, but that’s all. It was maybe the first time I so clearly saw and understood my limitations, but far from being dispiriting, it was freeing. It was, in essence, a recognition of mortality, a realization that you can’t do everything, and it gives what you can do, weirdly, greater meaning.

Oklahoma City Thunder power forward Nick Collison wrote a pretty incredibly great blog post for GQ about coming to terms with your limitations as an NBA player, and he put just the right spin what it takes to be successful as a contributor—not a star—in the NBA:

A lot of guys can’t or won’t do these things because they don’t see the value in it. Some people look at it as sacrificing your own game for the greater good. This is true to an extent, but you don’t just play this way because you are a nice guy and you are willing to let other guys shine. You do it because you want to win, to be a part of a championship team, and you do it because you want to create value for yourself (emphasis mine).

Collison is essentially saying that being that guy who does the little things—who hustles on defense, who goes after rebounds, who scraps for it in limited minutes—doesn’t mean being unselfish, it means being the right kind of selfish. It’s a mindset exemplified by role players like Bruce Bowen, Robert Horry, Derek Fisher—all those guys you can’t stand because they look so unbalanced, so incomplete and yet keep contributing in just the ways their team needs. A player like Wes Johnson has spent most of his comparatively brief basketball career as an all-around good player, as one of the longest, most athletic guys on the team. Now if he can just forget all that and do whatever he can to make himself indispensable on the court, he might just turn out all right.

—Steve McPherson

Martell Webster and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Play

When the Timberwolves fell in overtime to the Denver Nuggets last night, they did it in a very unique way. Over the course of the game, each team looked pretty bad—you can even tell that from the final score. When an OT game ends 103-101, you know things were rough. Regulation ended at 93-93 and nobody from either team could score for the first couple minutes of the OT. There were any number of sloppy or loose plays in this game, but the only one anyone’s going to remember is Martell Webster’s dunk.

Here are the basic facts of it: With 4.9 seconds left in OT and the Wolves trailing by three (102-99), the Nuggets were running a sideline out-of-bounds play. The Wolves defense really stepped up, with Martell Webster reaching up to intercept the pass from Julyan Stone. Webster went streaking down the court, appeared to hesitate at the three-point line, then drove straight to the hoop for the dunk, the two points, and the (inevitable) loss. If you watch the play here—

—you can see Ricky Rubio throwing his hands up back at the three-point line in disbelief. Now, of course, this play ignited a firestorm of tweets about what a boneheaded play it was. To his credit, in an interview after the game, Webster said, “I just wanted to be aggressive, get to the rim, possibly get a foul … Most people probably would have pulled up for the three-point shot. Yeah, I can see why they would. If I had to do it over again, I’d probably pull up for a three. Why not?”

So why didn’t he pull up for the three? The answer is as simple as adrenaline and as complicated as the sum total of the moves that have made the Timberwolves what they are this season. But let’s get a couple things out of the way: any game is a conglomeration of good and bad decisions, of lucky and unlucky breaks. This thing could have broken a bunch of different ways such that this play never even happened, so to pin it all on one play is shortsighted. Secondly, the Wolves played a tough division rival into overtime and had a chance right up until the end. Thirdly, their defense on the inbounds play was spectacular. Without that defense, Webster doesn’t even get the chance to be the hero or the goat. I find it very hard to believe they would have even been in a position to blow a close one to the Nuggets last season.

Let’s also dispense with trying to parse exactly what Webster was thinking. Even based on what he said after the fact, in the heat of the moment after a big steal with just a few seconds left in the game, there’s very little actual thought going on. Webster’s split second of hesitation at the three-point line shows he considered the three and decided to drive the rim and hope for contact. In almost every other situation in the flow of a normal game, this is a decision to be applauded. Almost any time Wes Johnson has pulled up for a three this season he would have been better off driving.

Which brings us to who the Wolves had out there. With Love at center, Beasley at the four, and Rubio and Ridnour at the guard positions, Webster was guarding Al Harrington, who is 6’9” and 250 lbs. Webster is 6’7” and 230; he gives away height and weight, but not nearly as much as the other options. Given his recent struggles, there’s no way you want Wes Johnson in there on Harrington. Although Webster is a worse shooter based on eFG% this season (.408 vs. .415—not a huge difference), he’s a much better defender. He almost doubles up Johnson’s steal percentage and block percentages and is three points better in defensive rating. That’s a whole lot of numbers, but it’s also easy to see just by watching that Webster, while no Bruce Bowen, is simply a more engaged defender than Johnson.

But you also don’t want Webster taking that last shot. Up until that point in the game, he was 1-6 from three-point range. For the season, he’s only shooting 28% on threes. That’s a pretty wide gap from the guy not on the floor who you’d probably want to take that shot: Wayne Ellington. Ellington is hitting three at a 36% clip. But last night, Ellington hadn’t played a minute and he’s also a much worse defender than Webster, especially if he’s tasked with guarding a player as big as Harrington.

And that right there is the crux of the problem with the Wolves roster right now. The guy you want in the game to steal the ball is not the guy you want shooting the ball. In the wake of David Brooks’ abysmally bad column on Jeremy Lin, I joked on Twitter that Thomas Friedman’s column on Rubio was going to say that the Wolves small forward rotation was hot, flat, and crowded, but it’s actually sort of true. Amongst Johnson, Webster, Michael Beasley and maybe Ellington if they’re going small, which can you honestly trust? Webster stepped up and did his job on defense but gambled on offense and lost.

As a team improves, the stakes get higher. The emergence of Love and Rubio (and now Nikola Pekovic) as the pillars of this team only serves to highlight how rickety some other parts of it are. A trade this season might help, but I’m also willing to take the longview. The Wolves are in games now, often down to the wire, and they’re going to win some and lose some. If they’re sitting around .500, that’s not so bad.

Now: about Webster’s hair.

—Steve McPherson