Let's Settle This: Grade Kurt Rambis in his first year as the Wolves coach (with poll!)

He’s doing it with little talent and no one who’s played his system. He didn’t even get to pick his draft picks last year. This year was horrible but it says little about Rambis or his teams. The best thing I can say is he had his guys keeping the company line all the way through the season which says that they respect him and trust him. There was no mutiny when there certainly could have been. Al has been forced into 3 years of rebuilding ball. That’s gotta be tough. Once again, we’ll know more after next year.

I didn’t get to see any games live this year, so I have limited insight into how he is on the sideline, but I’m not impressed do far.

He may turn out to be good, given more talent to work with, but he doesn’t seem like head coach material. Also, I really, really don’t like the way AlJeff and Love have been handled. I think Love is far more valuable as a total player and the non-communication is very concerning. Nothing wrong with asking Love for more effort and pushing him, but when your best player is confused and feeling antipathy from the organization that is a bad sign.

Maybe it was a vote out of anger, but I can’t imagine how he could have done much worse. I still have hope, but I’m not optimistic.

This is the classic “can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear” scenario, however:

Criminal underuse of Ramon Sessions
Criminal overuse of Jonny Flynn

And very concerned about Love’s demeanour at the end.

I’ve give a D for this year but it’s also incomplete. He’s got some more years to turn it around.

It has nothing to do with the system he put in place. I do think they idd don’t really run it all that often and it’s not a bad thing they’re learning it without having ALL the pieces in place.

The problem is the minutes for K-Love. I think he got way too little. I’m ok with him running with the 2nd string a lot … but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t play with 1st string as well for parts. Too many other guys got minutes (Oly, Cardinal and Jawai … though that got partly corrected in the 2nd part of the season Love’s minutes didn’t improve).

That and the fact that he didn’t get the team to play defense.

Avoids F because his performance was so bad that it may provide evidence of some hidden motives that are genius but that I do not understand.

If I gave David Kahn an F, you better believe Kurt Rambis gets an F as well. If you could give an F-, I would. Here are some of the main reasons I believe Kurt Rambis deserved an F…

1) Incredible stubbornness when it comes to line-ups. Barely playing Love with Jefferson and NOT playing Sessions with Flynn being the two prime examples. He wouldn’t even play Sessions with Flynn against teams like NO (who played Collison with Thornton).

2) We were supposed to be a “leader in player development”, but I’m hard pressed to say anyone improved under Rambis (I attribute Corey Brewer’s “development” to David Thorpe). You could argue that both Love and Flynn regressed as the season went along.

3) He gave Ryan Hollins minutes in non blowouts. Borderline fireable offense in my opinion.

It’s hard to grade Rambis, without knowing all of the inside facts, like whether and when we were tanking. He had a roster without a single shooter in the starting lineup, which handicapped us quite a bit. He had a best player recovering from ACL surgery, and a prized draft selection playing in Barcelona. It wasn’t exactly a recipe for success. But, the 15-win season was atrocious, so he shouldn’t get any better than a C. I’m fine with people giving D’s or F’s. I just hope that the uptempo system and triangle schemes have a method to the madness that will shine through with sufficient talent, across the board.

Sid interviews Kevin McHale, who comments on

Flynn

“Yeah, kind of, I thought they’d do a little better,” McHale said. “Putting a lot of pressure on a guy like Johnny Flynn to come in and play. I thought that getting Ramon Sessions in would help take some of that pressure off of Johnny Flynn, but any time you’re putting the ball in a young guy’s hands, anything can happen.”

Love and Jefferson

McHale said he was surprised Al Jefferson and Kevin Love weren’t able to mesh a little bit better and pointed out they actually didn’t play that much together.

“It just seemed like that just wasn’t something that Kurt [Rambis] and the staff wanted to do,” he said.

Insults the team and talent
“Yeah, I’ve often said, with no talent at all if you just show up and play hard you can win 15 games in the NBA,” he said. “That’s like a minimum just by showing up and playing hard…. Unless you have major injuries and stuff like that, you should be able to do a little better than that. But it was a learning year for a lot of the guys, and hopefully next year they’ll be better.”

Lottery luck
They need a little luck. I’m doing the Tuesday night show down for TNT and the draft lottery show, and hopefully they get a little bit of luck and they can get a good, high pick and get the thing turned around.

I’ll come out and say it – Love needs to learn to shut up and make his case on the court. He needs to listen to his coaches and not be a diva about every little thing. As long as KG is giving advice to players someone should send Love a montage of KG’s career highlighting how KG became the type of player he is by always playing hard, each and every minute no matter the score, no matter the record, and as his team’s undisputed best player.

Now, does this mean that Rambis sometimes should have given Love more minutes? Ya, he should have. But I don’t see any reason why I should cut Love some slack and vilify Rambis for a 20 or 21 year old’s immaturity and inability to go all out on the court ALL of the time, especially when his physical and athletic shortcomings demand it. Love is no where near the caliber player that any NBA coach should defer to.

For the record, I voted incomplete as I don’t think Rambis was trying to win this year. Agree with it or don’t, but I have no idea how good of a coach he is when I can’t tell when he was actually trying to win and when he was tinkering and putting guys in situations to see how they respond. It’s the same vote I gave Kahn as to me nothing he has done thus far has created a coherent product on the floor. I’m not going to penalize him for that unnecessarily either because (thus far) the moves are clearly a prelude to something else this summer. I think I’m with SnP in that Kahn has until the trading deadline next season. If nothing happens until then (same with Rambis), then we will have a large enough sample size to clue us into what we know. Until then, though, there’s simply too much in both that strongly suggests ulterior motives other than winning.

If the team’s struggles were due to learning a system that will lead them to a higher potential, it will have paid off. In his defense, he and the players have talked about how they’re trying to get the players to improve their weaknesses and not just exploit their strengths, probably because they realize that none of them can thrive off of where they’re at now. The next two seasons will tell the tale more than this one. Not teaming Flynn/Sessions and Jefferson/Love was a strike against him, but who he plays will be more important when roster filler like Wilkins and Hollins aren’t required to play minutes. He gets points for getting his team to win close road games against good teams like Dallas and Utah.

A complete and utter failure is the only grade possible. Rambo’s stubbornness in sticking with a lineup that didn’t work, along with a system that didn’t work, showed a lack of an ability to adjust. His players were confused, and he didn’t make any adjustments for that. When the Wolves won, sometimes they played amazingly well. Rambo admitted at the time he had no idea how to get them to play that way all the time. He abandoned the pick and roll, Flynn’s strength. He gave minutes to players that had no future with us, such as Sasha, and limited minutes for our best young player in Love. All in all a terrible job and a terrible season.