ESPN’s Daily Dime has posted their preview of the team, including a contribution from TWB’s Jon Marthaler.
This season should be an improvement. A healthy Foye and a healthy (or, at least, fully-rehabbed) McCants will mean quite a bit. Adding Miller for next-to-nothing will be huge for a team that had to hand minutes to Greg Buckner and Marko Jaric last season. Jefferson will only get better, Love will play well until he hits a Brian Wilson-in-1978-sized wall in February, and the offense will perk up.
Hardwood Paroxysm posts a few different takes on the team’s upcoming season.
On their present roster* (as of 10/21) , the Timberwolves sport five white players**. That’s 28 percent of their club, up 11 percent from ‘07, and above the league average of about 21 percent. A coincidence? It appears not. Of the NBA’s 28 American cities (eschewing Toronto; L.A. has two teams), Minneapolis has the 6th highest white population, according to numbers taken via the 2006 U.S. Census. The Borough of East Rutherford, New Jersey has the highest at 78 percent, although the Nets are set to move to the Borough of Brooklyn in 2010.
From Jay Weiner/MinnPost:
Leiweke, the energetic CEO and president of AEG, the nation’s most powerful facilities management firm, breezed into Minneapolis Tuesday and jump-started an effort to renovate 18-year-old and tired Target Center…
Leiweke, 51, met with Finance Director Patrick Born, Mayor R.T. Rybak and Timberwolves execs. He declared that he has a vision to refurbish the Target Center and to turn the deficit-laden building into a profitable enterprise.
The cost?
“Somewhere between zero and $100 million,” Leiweke said, adding, “It’s a fraction of what a new arena would cost.”
A South Dakota radio station is coordinating a trip to Minnepolis to see their “very own Chad Greenway and Mike Miller play for their respective professional teams.”