McHale said it’s a young team with some real positives in addition to all those draft picks, but that the biggest improvement still has to come from within.
“I’ve said this for 15 years,” he said. “If you think a rookie’s going to come in here and all of a sudden be the answer, that’s not going to (happen). Having these guys get better is the most important thing. Always has been. It’s Foye getting better, Al getting healthy, Corey getting healthy. And better, not just healthy. Al’s 23. Al’s got a long way to go. He just looks like he’s 50.”
At that, McHale smiled and added, “Sorry, Al.”
All kidding aside, Jefferson’s full recovery is as important for next season as his knee injury was to this one.
As owner Glen Taylor said more than a month ago, though, that wasn’t where the season was lost.
“To me, where we stumbled isn’t so much this Al thing,” he said. “Where we stumbled was the beginning of the season. I just anticipated us doing better than that.”
The Wolves and Grizzlies finished with 24-58 records, but the Wolves won the drawing conducted by NBA executive vice president Stu Jackson in New York City near the end of the league’s Board of Governors meeting.
The Wolves now have a 7.6 percent chance of winning the first pick in the June 25 draft, and Memphis has a 7.5 percent chance.
The teams tied with the same record last season, too, and the Wolves also won that drawing. They ended up drafting third and the Grizzlies fifth, but they swapped those picks anyway in the O.J. Mayo-Kevin Love trade.
But remember what happened two years ago: Portland won the draw with the Wolves and ended up winning the lottery and getting Greg Oden and the Wolves chose Corey Brewer seventh.
The Wolves own two other first-round picks–18 (from Miami) and 28 (from Boston)–and two in the second round: 45 (from Philadelphia via Miami) and 47 (from Miami).
Wolves radio analyst Kevin Lynch – the former Gophers star and radio guy who left that job to join the Wolves’ broadcast last fall — was one of nine employees laid off Thursday in cost-cutting moves that are another sign of these economic times…
Television sideline reporter and in-arena host Lea B. Olsen also was laid off the day after the team’s 20th anniversary season ended and the Wolves will end their Spanish radio broadcasts for selected home games.
Jonah Ballow and John Focke/Timberwolves site give their review of the team’s season in their weekly podcast.
Especially in their post-Jefferson phase, the team was desperate for someone to create instability, to throw the game off of its predictable axis. They needed a player with something like Baron Davis’s ecstatic unpredictability or even J.R. Smith’s audacious, barely credible self-belief. (The defensive, insecure Shaddy definitely does not count). What they didn’t need–and what they unfortunately got–was someone to swing the ball to Kevin Ollie with two seconds left on the shot clock. This is why I so appreciated Gomes and Telfair and Rodney Carney. Their unfeigned competitiveness, their appetite for disorder, made these games worth watching. Thanks fellas.
From Patrick Rogers/Minnesota Timberwolves Examiner: Minnesota Timberwolves 2008-2009 end of year awards