Monday Night Football is playing its opening-weekend double header. My hay fever is in full swing. If I had kids, they’d be just starting their school year.
It’s late summer, the NBA’s dead zone, and we’re a full three weeks away from the start of training camp. There isn’t a whole lot to kick around at Punch-Drunk Wolves.
But we’ll try our best.
Wolves Welcome Coach Bobby Jackson
The Timberwolves announced that former point guard, Bobby Jackson, was hired as a player development coach. Phil Ervin has the story at FSN. Local fans remember Jackson better as star Golden Gopher than reserve Timberwolf. He was the dynamic point guard on the erased-but-not-forgotten 1997 Gophers squad that won the Big Ten. Led by Jackson and Coach Clem Haskins, they also reached the Final Four; the first and only in school history. Had Eric Harris not gotten hurt, they may have cut down the nets.
Jackson gave a short, but interesting, interview to Mark Remme of timberwolves.com.
It’s a learning experience for me. How to draw up practices, how to draw up plays, how to run practices, how to manage players, watching [Rick Adelman] interact with players during game situations, everything’s a learning process. Working out with the guys, helping develop them. And also learning when not to work too hard, and when to shut it down a little bit. So everything’s a learning experience for me because, again, I’m young. I don’t know all the things yet. I kinda got an idea how to be a coach, but I still got a lot of things I gotta work on to become a great young coach.
That’s pretty candid, isn’t it?
Jackson played a dozen seasons in the NBA. Some of those were for the early-aughts Kings; one of the league’s best in the entire decade. He’s 40 years old. He’s already been an assistant coach for the Sacramento Kings. On one hand, I think he’s short changing himself. Clearly, he’s qualified to be an assistant coach at any level. On the other, it’s refreshingly humble when compared to recent retirees, like Mark Jackson and Jason Kidd, who immediately landed head-coaching gigs without a lick of coaching experience. Bobby Jackson, in that short interview anyway, seems geared up for a long career in coaching.
Punch-Drunk Wolves 