In his second full season as the head man of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Kurt Rambis is confident that his team is heading in the right direction. The only remaining players from former GM Kevin McHale’s era are Kevin Love and Corey Brewer. There are now 9 new players on a team that has gotten progressively younger. On top of that and the trade of Al Jefferson to Utah has freed up nearly $14 million in salary cap that can be used to sign a player before the deadline
The team will rely heavily on new Gold Medal winner and Team USA player Kevin Love this season. In the FIBA Championships, Love averaged 5.7 ppg and 4.9 rpg in barely 9 minutes a game. To be sure, Coach Rambis is looking for a leader. "I'm only 22, but that can't be an excuse," he said. "Last year, I stepped away from that. I wasn't starting and I was getting less minutes. With this year, there's no excuse. It's different than my last couple years because now we really have a young team and we really need to start building from here, because if we can't do that, there's really no purpose."
The Minnesota Timberwolves have been living a meager existence since their star Kevin Garnett up and left for greener pastures and championships (Boston Celtic Green) and the franchise has yet to recover. After a string of first round exits in the playoffs, the Timberwolves are just looking to break into the playoffs. They have gone through three coaches in the last three seasons (Wittman, McHale and now Rambis) and this season, are struggling to stay out of the NBA Cellar with only the New Jersey Nets behind them. As of this writing, the Timberwolves are sitting on an 8-33 record.
NBA basketball came back to the city of Minnesota 29 years after the Minneapolis Lakers departed for the West Coast. So it was in 1989 that the NBA granted Minnesota one of four expansion teams that season. As expected of such teams, the Wolves struggled early but it would be only seven seasons before the Wolves were making their first appearance in the NBA Playoffs. The 1996/97 playoffs began a string of seven seasons where the first round was the exit point. It wouldn’t be until the 2003/04 NBA Playoffs where the Wolves would make it through to the Conference Finals but lose against the LA Lakers.
The 1995 draft saw the arrival of center/forward Kevin Garnett, a perennial All Star along with coach Flip Saunders and the following season, the Wolves were in the playoffs with a surprising 40-42 record. The team would make minor changes to its team and continued to supplement players in order to find the correct group that would get them past the 1st round. The franchise would give Head coach Flip Saunders nine seasons, through the middle of Garnett’s prime, to move the team forward but he never managed to do so. So it was midseason through the 2004/05 season that GM Kevin McHale replaced Saunders with himself. He coached them to a 19-12 record but went in search of a replacement after the end of the season. Next on the coaching block was Dwayne Casey who lasted two seasons (56-65), Randy Wittman, one plus seasons (38-105) Kevin McHale again (20-43) and finally former LA Lakers star Kurt Rambis.
The Timberwolves had 4 draft picks in the 2009 NBA Draft; Ricky Rubio with the 5th overall pick, from Syracuse, Johnny Flynn with the 6th overall pick, North Carolina’s Ty Lawson and Wayne Ellington with the 18th and 28th overall picks. Lawson was soon traded to the Denver Nuggets. The Timberwolves have retired one Jersey, #2 for Malik Sealy who was killed in a drunken driving accident in 2000.
NBA
Team Info Home
All Images, Content and Design © 2004-2010, NBATEAMINFO.com. All rights reserved. |
