RealGM

OK, sorry to be posting a new topic again, but I have another question? What is wrong with the Wolves??

I hear we have talent, evryone was excited about Rambis and for a while we accumulated a lot of top 5-10 picks.

Is there a chance we can really improve next year and just compete even? Some of the things I hear are:

We have talent but are to young: is this true? do we not have enough talent?
The coaching sucks: Can a new coach make that much of a difference?
We need veterans: Any veteran or a starting veteran and at what position.

I know we like to throw around trade ideas, but what is really holding this team back? Thanks.

we were supposed to have a long athletic team that was going to get stops and turn it into fastbreak opportunities, thereby somewhat masking our halfcourt inefficiency. Preseason it looked like that might be the case, once the regular season rolled around it all fell apart. Worst defensive team in the NBA led to forced fastbreaks and halfcourt chucking from Rambis' non-triangle triangle.

Devilzsidewalk wrote:we were supposed to have a long athletic team that was going to get stops and turn it into fastbreak opportunities, thereby somewhat masking our halfcourt inefficiency. Preseason it looked like that might be the case, once the regular season rolled around it all fell apart. Worst defensive team in the NBA led to forced fastbreaks and halfcourt chucking from Rambis' non-triangle triangle.

Or as I call it, the Rambis Rhombus.

The makeup of the team is flawed, I don't care what system you run. The 2 things we need are perimeter speed and lateral quickness all around. We can't get by people and we can't stay in front of people. If this were the 80's and you could hand check the hell out of people, then we'd be the team to beat, but the way the NBA game is called today we don't stand a chance.

Krapinsky wrote:The makeup of the team is flawed, I don't care what system you run. The 2 things we need are perimeter speed and lateral quickness all around. We can't get by people and we can't stay in front of people. If this were the 80's and you could hand check the hell out of people, then we'd be the team to beat, but the way the NBA game is called today we don't stand a chance.

Can Rubio help with this?

Too young and zero defense

You can see that we have talent cause many other teams fans are asking about our players.
Coaching can be better, since we are trying adapt players to a scheme and not scheme to players. Anyway FO thinks that is a long term strategy, and once the scheme be mastered by the players it will work. The problem for them is find the missing pieces, specially a Center who can defend love's back and a SG that can be a go-to-guy.
Experience can be acquired in many ways,trade, FA, etc, and specially, playing. IF we find the missing pieces i can wait a couple of years with this core. If they think that this core will not work in long term, then they should be looking for experience players in other teams.

I still think we are a vet or two away from fighting to be a .500 team. Sure, that's not great...but at least it's improvement.

Having a vet or two would not only make us better in the short term (pleasing fans and making money), but would also provide more "on court" experience to the youngins', helping the long term. I think that is the critical thing here. In the last few years, I think the only guy we've had to was able to provide that "on court" stuff was Brian Cardinal. :s . Beasley was showing promise as a leader early last season, but it fizzled out with injures and how terrible we were. What we need is a good vet to can ask for improvement from a leadership role, but also be able to "walk the walk" somewhat, at least as a starter.

TexasGopher wrote:

Krapinsky wrote:The makeup of the team is flawed, I don't care what system you run. The 2 things we need are perimeter speed and lateral quickness all around. We can't get by people and we can't stay in front of people. If this were the 80's and you could hand check the hell out of people, then we'd be the team to beat, but the way the NBA game is called today we don't stand a chance.

Can Rubio help with this?

Yes, because with his passing/playmaking out of the pick n' roll we would be less reliant on needing players to create their own offense.

I blame Ray Finkle.

The problem starts with "R" and ends with "ambis"

It was a combination of things this season. Rambis wasn't great but having an average age of 22 and the average years of experience around 3, not to mention 9 new guys, it was never going to end well.

Of course it is a combination of all types of issues. A few that I think are most concerning:

We are really, really young, and that's a major issue when you don't have the caliber of a Kevin Durant. How many games within a possession or two in the last 2 minutes did we literally throw away? It was like a broken record after a while.

I don't think Rambis is the right kind of coach for a team this young. He kinda goes Phil Jackson on the bit, and I don't know if that strategy is very good for that.

Our defense, especially perimeter IMO, is severly lacking. We can't stop guards from walking into the lane, which I think puts our bigs in a bad place. I think a guy like Rubio could help in this regard, but we still need some better wing defenders. We are also so vulnerable to the three, whether it's strategy or the players, they just seem to miss the one rotation that leaves a guy open.

We need talent, but I refuse to believe that there is only 17 win talent on this team. We have an All-Star caliber guy in Love and another 20 point guy in Beasley. You'd think you could steal 25 wins with that alone, but we blew so many games late, it didn't matter. This next season is gonna be very interesting in how this all progresses, especially with the lockout issue looming.