To help mark  Barack Obama ‘s inauguration as president Tuesday,  Jarron Collins  and his twin brother,  Jason , were trying to coordinate having every player on the Jazz and Timberwolves wear a suit to that night’s game.
Brett Pollakoff/Fanhouse on last night’s win at Phoenix:
Not only was Love a beast on the boards, but for a long stretch in that fourth quarter, he held his own defensively against O’Neal, doing a respectable job of stopping him without the assistance of a double team.

Wolves’ coach Kevin Mchale gushed about Love’s play afterwards, and said he had to remind himself that Love is only 20, because he’s rebounding at a much higher level.

“I’ve been telling people all along, for a 20-year-old kid, that guy rebounds the ball at such a high level it’s ridiculous,” McHale said. “I keep on forgetting he’s 20 at times. When he gets his endurance up — he’s still got that transformation going between young man and man, where your endurance picks up, everything gets stronger, and when he goes through that … I’ll tell you what, he’s good right now, he’s going to be tremendous. He’s been really good for us.”

 

Love’s statistical line Friday, while impressive, didn’t quantify one thing: How many plays he influenced by getting his hands on the ball. That helped the Wolves win for the sixth time in seven games and for the eighth time in their past 11.

“If you ever shake his hand or try to get a rebound from him, you’ll see Kevin Love has some really strong hands,” Foye said. “I’ve never seen anybody with hands like that. You get the rebound, and he’ll snatch it right out of your hands. He’s a blue-collar guy, as you can see by his play. He gets out there and rebounds. He does all the dirty work for us.”

McHale watches Love and can see the player he will be, say, eight years from now. Love, in the meantime, wants to be that player right now…

 

The Wolves played 16 games in their first 30 days under McHale. Currently, they are in the midst of an 11-day stretch that includes eight days off, ample time to synthesize.
“It’s meant a lot because we’ve gotten a couple of his sets in, couple of his defensive schemes,” Foye said. “It’s just time to watch film, break down things we’ve been struggling with and try to work on them.”
McHale said improvement is made daily.
“A season’s a long, long process,” he said. “The team is definitely still a work in progress. But the guys have been working really hard. They’ve been practicing hard. They’re concentrating hard. I said when I took over, nothing’s changed with this team.”

From Jerry Zgoda/Star Tribune:

STAR TRIBUNE’S STAR OF THE WEEK

Randy Foye, guard: If he keeps this up, he’ll replace Al Jefferson as the obvious pick here week after week. He led the team in scoring for the fourth time in six games against Miami on Tuesday, countering Dwyane Wade’s 31 points with 29 of his own. He scored 15 points Friday, including a 20-footer to put the Wolves up for good.

 

Sid Hartman on Randy Foye:
He is averaging 21.1 points in the Wolves’ 6-1 January, while shooting 49.0 percent from the floor.

“I’m just being really aggressive and playing off my teammates,” Foye said. “I’ve got to give a lot of credit to my teammates because they give me a lot of open shots. The main thing is just being aggressive out there.”

Foye has improved month by month. In November, he averaged 12.1 points per game while shooting 40.3 percent; in December, it was up to 16.6 and 41.6 percent.

“I hadn’t shot this well, but that’s just putting in all the extra work before and after practice,” he said. “That’s the type of results you get when you work hard.”

 

Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor says Kevin McHale’s coaching future with the team will be up to McHale.

“It will be up to Kevin to find out, is this something that he wants to do, and is he good at it,” Taylor said. “I didn’t make him the interim coach. He knows that his job is to coach. There are lots of factors — how this works out with his family — and I know Kevin well enough not to press him on those things until he does this for a while. He looks like he’s enjoying it.”

 

Sekou Smith/Atlanta Journal Constitution on Al Jefferson as an “under-the-radar players on losing teams who are having good seasons”:
Numbers of note: 22.2 points, 10.4 rebounds and 1.7 blocks
Why Jefferson? Line his numbers up with the elite big men around the league, and Jefferson would be a no-brainer. Yet any conversation about the best young big men in the West begins with the L.A. Lakers’ Andrew Bynum. Jefferson has the unenviable task of following Timberwolves legend Kevin Garnett in Minnesota, so he’ll likely always be underappreciated. But he hasn’t let that stunt his production. He’s averaging better than 20 points and 10 rebounds for the second straight season.

Why not? As good as he’s been, Jefferson’s team remains 20 games behind the Lakers in the Western Conference standings.
It would have been difficult for the Timberwolves to trade Garnett a year earlier than they did. His absence has proved that he held the franchise together, keeping it relevant even as the front office struggled to surround him with competent players. Trading him earlier, though, might have brought a better package in return, because Garnett would have been a year younger, a year closer to the spotlight of the Western Conference finals.

What we know now is that trading these stars before their free-agency expiration dates approached would have been unpopular, and wise.

 

Jerry Zgoda/Star Tribune on the 2008 draft class.
“And then there are guys like Anthony Randolph, J.J. Hickson and Kostas Koufos, who are going to be very good,” Love said of mid-first-round picks by Golden State, Cleveland and Utah. “There are going to be a lot of players who will pop out and people will say, ‘Man, they were in that draft class?’ This is going to be a pretty remarkable class.”

Part of that can be attributed to the new NBA rule that everyone had to attend a college for at least a season. So they all did, exactly for one season.

“That’s the craziest part, we’re all 20, 21,” Love said. “We’re young. That’s real young. Somebody was telling me the other day that Larry Bird came into the NBA his rookie season at 23. It’s going to be crazy to see how we develop and who grows still. Our bodies will change. Our minds will mature. It’ll be fun to see once we really start figuring it out.”