This afternoon the Timberwolves held their annual Media Day. The players dressed up in their game uniforms, posed for pictures, and took turns answering questions from the local media. Coach and President of Basketball Operations Flip Saunders worked the room, and gave his own presser to kick things off.
Tonight, at midnight, the Wolves put on their “Dunks After Dark” special to officially kick off the new season, in Mankato. While I cannot make the trek down to ‘Kato on a Monday night, I was able to get over to Target Center for a couple of hours to see and listen to the new squad.
Player interviews in this setting are notoriously replete with cliches and adages that dodge the question presented. (And, frankly, this is for good reason. See Thaddeus Young’s “26 and 12 never made the playoffs,” which was stupidly pulled from its context and used for click bait by Dime Magazine (and probably other publications)). In any event, the players did say a lot of things and this is my attempt at extracting some loosely-developed and very much subject-to-change opinions from my first sighting of the 2014-15 Minnesota Timberwolves. (Eds note: work obligations prevented me from seeing the final three pressers, including Ronny Turiaf/Corey Brewer, Gorgui Dieng, and Chase Budinger/Mo Williams. Based on what I read on Twitter, Williams was a bit of a revelation in terms of saying interesting basketball stuff.)
Coach Saunders
Flip was — predictably — oozing positivity and excitement from his seat in front of the media. I found two things he said to be worth mentioning here.
The first is, in my opinion, a good thing. That is that he is going to give Ricky Rubio a lot of responsibility. He said that he is “hard on point guards,” that they are “extensions of the coach” (cliche’ alert) and that Ricky will be “running the show.” I like hearing this because I believe Rubio is best when he has the ball and as much playmaking responsibility as possible. He needs to be the guy who passes to the shooter for the two obvious reasons that he’s so great at finding teammates in scoring position and that he is such a non-threatening chess piece when he’s standing without the ball. So I liked hearing this from Flip.
The second is, in my opinion, more of a question mark. Flip is going to emphasize “shot discipline” — “What is a good shot, and what isn’t a good shot?” I’m not saying that I want to see Zach LaVine and Andrew Wiggins developed into a future Nick Young-JR Smith combination, but I worry whenever coaches start speaking vaguely about shot selection. Flip specifically talked about the rookies shooting too many threes. That is exactly the sort of thing I hope they do; I want them to extend their range to that efficient zone as quickly as possible. So this point worried me a little bit.
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Punch-Drunk Wolves 