Once in awhile my job affords me some pretty cool opportunities. Last night I got the chance to attend Asian-American night at the Timberwolves game against the Houston Rockets and Yao Ming. Some thoughts...
*First, I have to give it up for the halftime entertainment. A small Asian woman riding a 10-foot tall unicycle while balancing a large white bowl on her head. She then would take more bowls, starting with one and working her way eventually up to five bowls, balance them on one of her legs and then throw her leg up sending all the bowls flying upward and all landing inside of each other on top of her head. Amazing stuff! Major props to the unicycle-riding-bowl-juggling-lady.
*Rashad McCants is smooth! This guy has the offensive talent to be a superstar in this league if he can keep his head on the right way. Lucky for him you don't have to be able to play a lick of defense (ahem, Troy Hudson) to be a good player in the NBA. I'm telling you if he keeps his head right, learns to play some D and continues to hone his offensive game he is going to be fantastic to watch.
*When the Wolves offense catches up to the defense we might be able to topple some good teams and be pretty scary heading into the playoffs, but until that happens .500 ball is probably about all we can hope for.
McCants could explode down the stretch, but he's nowhere near ready to be the main, or even one of the main, scoring threats. He seems to want to play one-on-one, and not always stay within the offense. Wally looked like he was on the verge of a big season, but he can't quite seem to find his shot. T-Hud (note: Thud) simply is NOT the consistently deadly offensive player that we saw in the playoffs two years ago. Marko Jaric seems like he might have some potential to score from the point, but right now he's doing a serviceable job of moving the ball around and that's about what we should expect from him. Trenton Hassell is a defensive guy and is just not built to play offense as well as he defends. Olowokandi at least seems to be giving us about a quarter and a half of good basketball per game, and he did a nice job of playing Yao last night, but at best he's probably going to be a 10-point a night guy, which might be okay if we could count on anyone else to score. This leaves The Man. Unfortunately KG is our only hope. Fortunately, it's KG, so we've got a chance for everyone to rally around and learn to run the offense through him and take advantage of the looks that they get, but until that happens... yep, .500 ball.
*Troy Hudson (who I will now forever call Thud) might possibly be the single worst defensive player in the entire NBA.
*Dwayne Casey definitely has not settled on anything that even resembles a normal rotation. Last night all 12 guys saw playing time and 10 of those guys saw over 10 minutes. That's a lot of rotating to do for a team that is still looking for an identity. I understand that he is trying to find the group of guys that play best together. I also understand that guys 4 through 12 probably all look pretty similar from a coaching standpoint as far as production and talent. But pretty soon Casey is going to need to settle on a starting 5 and on a 7-9 man rotation. Constantly changing the line-ups, the combinations and the number of minutes played will not allow players to get into a rhythm during the season, and without a solid flow, we're going to be looking at... you guessed it... .500 ball.
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