I think it’s really pretty sweet how much appreciation and respect is rolling out for Bassy, Maddog, and Rhino. They’re all, in their way, classic Minnesota players—not the best, but used determination, energy, hard work, and never-say-die attitude to contribute anyways. The Twins are the typical exemplifiers of this, but we love our underdogs here.

I don’t think, though, that losing them for a d-bag, as you put it, is really going to make much of a difference in the grand scheme one way or another, and that includes to guys like Brewer and Love. The Twolves have been a bad team for 3 years now, and despite their contributions and loyalties to them, guys like Love and Al know that their lives and careers will be better if Kahn surrounds them with better players. Doesn’t mean you can’t remain friends with the departed, but winning is what this is ultimately all about and all these guys have been around highly competitive sports long enough to recognize that you want the best players on your team, and not necessarily your best friends.

The new faces of this franchise are also more popular already than the those we’ve traded away. People love Flynn—his media presence reminds me of Adrian Peterson, and he’s fared OK media and popularity-wise here. Love is becoming an ESPN darling and winning more and more local fans through his tweeting and exposure. Rubio will have a huge following once he gets here that’ll dwarf the following he already has. And I think two guys from Washington—Etan Thomas and Darius Songaila (assuming they stay)—will also develop a nice following here like the three players we just traded because they play hard and physical even though they’ll get beat more than they don’t.

I think the brutal truth is that the Twolves were a bad team talent-wise and management-wise for at least the last three seasons. Even if Al and Brewer were healthy last year, and McHale had coached them the entire year, would they have won 40 games? Do we really have confidence in that FO regime making the appropriate moves to get them into the playoffs consistently? I think the reasonable and realistic answer to both is no. It’s OK to blow up a bad team. It’s even better to do it while making positive draft decisions and positive cap decisions. Only time will tell, but when compared to the previous regime, the current strategy is clearly superior. If we need to argue with data and stats about the likelihood of last year’s team/regime to become a playoff team, well let’s do it. Perhaps in another post though. :)

Madsen wasn’t out there jacking up unprompted perimeter shots. Even if he had been the coaching staff and those above them pulling the strings would easily have bee able to take out the shepherd’s crook and remove him from the stage, Vaudeville Daffy Duck style.

This is about karma, not actual responsibility for that night.

….at first, but I was at the game and we had made our way down to near court side enough where we could hear everything that was being said on the court and it turned into a joke with the players very early on. He was clearly told to go out and do something and he did it…with great enjoyment. He may as well have been throwing shots up over his shoulder. It was awful. You are right, however, that the blame for that game should go much higher. It was, is and always will be a disgrace.

…say no to bad orders.

What other teams have tanked as much as that single game? The Celtics came close but even if you can come up with some sort of relativity-based morality concerning that game, there is still no way to say that it was a good thing. “Other people did it too” isn’t a good excuse…especially when the other people doing it didn’t do it nearly as bad.