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| Wednesday, January 16 Respect slow to come to Minnesota By David Aldridge Special to ESPN.com |
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They are feeling jilted. "Can't get no games on TNT," Kevin Garnett says, the same way that Karl Malone and Chris Webber used to.
The Minnesota Timberwolves are feeling dissed. They're in first place in the Midwest Division, they've overcome two years' worth of tragedy and their own lawbreaking, and they're winning with the same group that no one thought was good enough to get out of the first round: KG, the "Flamethrowers," Wally Szczerbiak and Anthony Peeler, and guys that nobody else seemed to want, such as Gary Trent and Joe Smith. Their character is finally catching up with their talent. "We're disappointed that we haven't won a playoff series," coach Flip Saunders says. "We haven't been favored yet. We haven't been good enough." That they stood pat while they weren't good enough is a testament to that most undervalued trait nowadays -- patience. What team do you know that could lose four straight times in the first round of the playoffs and not have wholesale changes? A new coach? GM? Superstar? There were any number of suitors this summer for Szczerbiak, and Terrell Brandon. And the Wolves were roundly criticized for taking back Joe Smith, after all the pain he caused the franchise. But they stayed the course. And despite injuries to Brandon and Smith, the Wolves have rolled on. Garnett is having an MVP season. Szczerbiak is on the short list for Most Improved Player. And one of these days, Saunders will get the Coach of the Year award he's deserved for a while. "I think right now, we're definitely a team that's playing with a lot of character," Garnett said. "When you have a lot of guys out, you start to wonder in the back of your mind, 'what do we have to do?' But you know what? I think the character of this team is coming out, saying to hell with it. This is reality. This is who we have; let's go out and play. So in essence, I think we're maturing. I think we're starting to establish some respect around the league." Everyone's made note of the fact that the Wolves moved Szczerbiak from small forward to shooting guard. And that's helped. But moving the 7-1 Garnett from power forward, where he was frequently outmuscled, to small forward, where he creates prohibitive matchup problems, has turned the Wolves from one of the league's smallest teams to one of the biggest. The reason they can do that is because Minnesota added both Smith and free agent Trent, who have stepped in and bulled their way around at power forward.
And a team that always has shot the ball pretty good is now top five in just about every offensive category, from field goal and free throw percentage (first) to three-point percentage (second) to points per game (third). "I have two inches on every two guard," the 6-7 Szczerbiak says. "Kevin has three inches on every three. Joe's a tall four. Rasho (center Radoslav Nesterovic) is a big five. You're going to outrebound teams when you have that kind of size advantage. That's a luxury we didn't have in the past. With me at the three and Kevin at the four, we were undersized." Garnett is being more vocal. For years, he's been the superstar least likely to cause a fuss. But this season he's gotten in his teammates' grills when they've played below par. And the Wolves have definitely taken advantage of the new rules. Saunders has mixed his team's defenses brilliantly this season, switching from man to zone -- often in the same possession.
"A team will go to the side and get into an iso or whatever," Saunders said, "and our guys yell out 'zone,' and we rotate right into a zone ... over the course of a game, in principles and how we're playing it, we're still playing a lot of zone. I think that's one of the main reasons that out of our man (defense) that we play a lot of zone principles, and we've been rebounding so well. You have three guys you end up zoning and we bring a big guy to the block. We have guys around the basket." "It's almost like a switching man," Szczerbiak says. "The beginning of the year, we took a lot more advantage of it, 'cause coaches weren't prepared on how to beat it. But now coaches are prepared and teams are aggressive. The key has been our man to man defense. We've just been buckling down." But the proof will be in the postseason pudding, of course. The Wolves have been one and done four straight years, because they kept running into the likes of the Lakers and Blazers in the first round. They know that avoidance of L.A., Sacramento and San Antonio until the second round is a must. "We want to win a championship," Saunders says. "But you have to take steps. The first step you have to do is win a playoff series. Well, I know the best chance you have to win a playoff series is to have home-court advantage. So it's pretty imperative that we try to find a way to try to finish in that top four. What we don't want is to be in a situation we've been the last four or five years, where we're seven or eight." The Wolves sleepwalked through most of last season, when the league lowered the boom on them for negotiating an illegal contract with Smith, stripping them of multiple first-round picks and requiring significant leave time from both owner Glen Taylor and president Kevin McHale. The players were still reeling from the offseason death of beloved teammate Malik Sealy. Now, time has healed some of those wounds. And the Wolves are up and running. And shooting. And boarding. "I've always used Utah as the example, and when Michael was in Chicago," Garnett says. "Having those guys and knowing their games, it's very similar here. It's very early from the potential standpoint but there's definitely light at the end of the tunnel."
Not Tough Enough? Afterward, Popovich declared his team had played "soft" five or six times this season. When Duncan was asked about that, he heaped visual scorn upon the questioner. "Whatever," Duncan said. "I just play."
But Pop isn't backing down. "I don't care about missed shots," he said. "Playing soft is inexcusable." The problem for San Antonio is that some of their tougher players are gone or injured (Bruce Bowen, out two months with a broken finger). Popovich is actually surprised that the team's record is so good, considering three new starters and a 19-year-old rookie at point guard in Tony Parker. They're happy with Parker and will be patient with his learning curve -- every time Popovich gets ready to erupt, assistant Hank Egan reminds him that Parker should be taking Freshman English this year, and Pop sits down. But the finesse tag hurts. The Spurs had to fight that for years, but when David Robinson and Friends broke through and captured the '99 title, soft seemed buried forever. After getting punked by the Lakers in the Western finals last June, though, the old words came back with their familiar sting. If the Spurs are going to be a factor this spring in the postseason, they have to shed the label. Of course they have some heft that they haven't yet used much, like Mark Bryant, who hopes to get more time as he becomes more familiar with the Spurs' big man system. Those who play, though, chafe at the soft label. "You try to rotate to block a shot, and a certain player holds your arm, and holds you up for a split second, and then (Popovich) cusses you out for being late," forward Malik Rose said. "What am I supposed to do?" "If they're not gonna call it, at times, maybe we should just knock the (expletive) down, make the game dirty sometimes," guard Terry Porter said. "If the referee thinks it's just incidental contact all the time, take care of it yourself. Let the game get out of control and see how they control it then. We drive and Tim may get pushed, and they don't call it. Every time you can't get the ball stripped away." There's still time to get it together. Even as they struggle, the Spurs are playing better than .700 ball. But they acknowledge they aren't in the Lakers' class right now. "We haven't been playing great basketball," Duncan says. "It's tough having a lot of new guys, but I don't think we're going to use that as an excuse. Everyone knows what we do. It's just a matter of executing and making sure we take care of the things we have to take care of."
Around the League
No doubt AI is a handful. No doubt he drives Brown nuts with his unwillingness to practice. No doubt his decision to delay his elbow surgery until training camp set the Sixers back weeks, if not months. But -- I hate to beat a dead horse here -- the reason the Sixers succeeded last season was that the other 11 guys on the team didn't mind when he hoisted up 35 rocks a night. They went out and played defense and got out of his way. And that group isn't here any more. It's just the coach and the player, griping again. "Those two are so much alike," sighed a member of the organization last week. But is it solely Iverson's fault the Sixers have holes in their pick and roll defense? That the fissures the Raptors exposed in the second round of the playoffs last season (when Antonio Davis shot jumper after jumper over an unwilling-to-come-out Dikembe Mutombo) have been further expanded this season? Solely his fault that the Sixers still haven't acquired anyone else who can hit a jumper? Solely his fault that the First Union Center crowd, which was one of the league's loudest and daffiest last season, has become a sit-on-the-hands bunch? (Couldn't be that Pat Croce, dismissed by everyone in SixerLand as unimportant when he left over the summer, had more impact than anyone in Philly wants to admit, could it?) This smells a lot like Brown's last year in Indiana, when he despaired of ever being able to reach a group that had achieved great heights earlier in his tenure there. That team finished 39-43 and Brown was soon off to Philadelphia after dallying with Boston. This year? Stay tuned...
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