Comedy Central (Raise Your Hands!)

So there it is. 17 wins. The Wolves have now lost 132 games in the past two seasons. This places them in the following company:

WORST TWO YEAR RECORDS IN NBA HISTORY
140 -- Dallas        1992-93 (71) and 1993-94 (69)
135 -- Vancouver     1995-96 (67) and 1996-97 (68)
135 -- L.A. Clippers 1986-87 (70) and 1987-88 (65)
132 -- Minnesota            2009-10 (67) and 2010-11 (65)
132 -- Chicago       1999-00 (65) and 2000-01 (67)
132 -- Denver        1996-97 (61) and 1997-98 (71)
131 -- Vancouver     1996-97 (68) and 1997-98 (63)
131 -- Dallas        1991-92 (60) and 1992-93 (71)
131 -- Miami         1988-89 (67) and 1989-90 (64)
130 -- Minnesota     1991-92 (67) and 1992-93 (63)
130 -- Philadelphia  1972-73 (73) and 1973-74 (57)

Over the course of the 2010/11 season the Wolves managed to find themselves looking upwards at a team that rattled off the worst losing streak in league history. They won a total of 4 games against teams with a winning record (4-44, .083), with two of them coming against a team they inexplicably match up well against, the Hornets. They were 1-15 in their own division and 7-44 against the Western Conference.

In two-possession games, Minny finished the season with a 4-20 record, good for worst in the league by a wide margin.

Over the course of the Rambis/Kahn reign of error, the Wolves have won a total of 4 division games with only 1 coming against a team not named Utah. Rambis and Kahn are 0-San Antonio, 0-Lakers, 0-OKC, 0-Portland, 1-6 against Dallas, 1-7 against Denver, 1-7 against Memphis, and 2-5 against NOLA. Those are your Western Conference playoff teams.

The Wolves are now 19-89 (.180) with Darko Milicic on the roster.

Kurt Rambis is now only the 3rd coach in NBA history to have consecutive sub-20 win seasons. The other two are Tim Floyd and Ron Rothstein.

Ugh.

Much more below the fold.

Let’s take a quick peak at the season preview:

2. What are the team’s biggest strengths?

In theory, this team should control the boards on both ends of the court, play decent defense on the wings, shoot well from beyond the arc, and win 10-15 games simply by showing up and shooting the rock at a general percentage unseen in the post-KG era. In practice, I'll believe it when I see it. I like what I've seen so far this preseason, but the current mixture of this club is volatile and could go south in a hurry. Martell Webster and Wes Johnson are not known as good shot creators off of the dribble, Michael Beasley hasn't proven he can be a solid gunner, Jonny Flynn is suffering through the 2nd-year Wolves curse, this coaching staff has shown exactly nothing so far, and [insert your own possible blunder here]. When this team is winning games (or losing in a competitive manner) Kahn's "plan" will seem like it is headed down the right track, as we should see lots of hustle, athleticism, length, passing (especially from the bigs) and good shooting. When this squad is losing games, it will certainly be pitched by the team as a work in progress (and, to be fair, it is), but it will also still be the result of a long-running tradition of horrific front office decisions (both pre and during the Era of Kahn). At the end of the day, this is still a 15 win franchise with an under-performing coaching staff and front office that passed on the BPA with a top 5 pick and was unable to turn additional (and multiple) 1st round draft picks into anything other than Martell Webster. The one thing they have going in their favor is that anything approaching average will be greeted by us die-hards as honest-to-Pete manna from heaven. The soft bigotry of low expectations finally has a home at 600 First Avenue.

3. What are the team’s biggest weaknesses?

They haven't proven anything. Period. As hard as it is to predict the strengths of a group of guys that do not have a lot of shared court time together, it is equally hard to tell what they do not do well together. They should turn the ball over a lot. They should have trouble creating their own shots in a 1/2 court setting. As many assets as they have poured into the point guard position over the past 2 years, it is still a largely unsettled part of the roster that saw Wayne Ellington get minutes at the spot during the pre-season (seriously, how crazy is it that after two top 10 picks and 2 free agents that the team had to play Ellington at the point?!). Their coaching staff has not shown itself to be able to improve a roster. Their front office staff has not shown itself to be able to make an above average roster. At this point, and with their track record, the question is what aren't their weaknesses?

4. What are the goals for this team?

Not perpetrating fraud upon the paying public. I know it's kind of harsh, but last year was an unmitigated disaster that was not only one of the two or three worst seasons in franchise history, but was also an 82-game washout that became (according to team legend) a testing ground for the long term plans of Coach Rambis and POBO Kahn. I'm sure all of you who paid for a ticket are happy to hear that.

I want competitive and entertaining action on a night-in/night-out basis. This probably means that we'll need to see some solid coaching and player development. For better or worse (most likely for the sake of addiction), I appear to be the type of fan that is in this thing for the long haul. My goal this year is to not feel like a dupe for following this team. Again, congratulations Timberwolves--low expectations have garnered you another victory.

Have they once again perpetrated fraud on the paying public? Well, I have to say that this season certainly has changed the way I look at the franchise. My main take away is that they are no longer entertaining because of basketball. They are only entertaining as a comedy act. They are a massive, real-time sitcom that seemingly writes itself. In this sense, I cannot view them as a fraud. They are a world class comedic organization. David Kahn is a super star of cringe-inducing Office-esque proportions.

I don’t feel like a dupe. It is not because the Wolves were competitive and entertaining; rather, it is because I have finally reached a point of fandom with this team where what I thought would be apathy has morphed into a curiosity of wondering just how bad it can possibly get. We are witnesses to something truly unique and amazing.

At first I was opposed to this line of thinking. Tim brought it up earlier this year in a thread and I thought it was kind of a silly position to take. After all, the few remaining die hard fans of this team have spent thousands of dollars and hours on this club. It’s something of an entertainment investment and I would like to know that my money and time are being well spent on an organization that is committed to things like quality, professionalism, modern analytical methodology, and best practices. The problem the Wolves have is that most people tend to associate the word "basketball" with their desire to see these things, when, in fact, they simply need to think about them in relation to the following word: "comedy".

Am I serious about this position? Is it possible to be serious about anything Wolves-related? I believe it is simply too embarrassing, at this point in time, to be a serious Wolves fan. Either you take it seriously and get burned out or you treat it for what it is: an ongoing circus/test lab for buffoonery led by Glen Taylor, Rob Moor, and whatever coach and GM they allow to occupy the center ring for a few years at a time.

At numerous times before and during the season, I mentioned that I did not know how to write about this club. My thinking was that they were so comically and obviously inept that anyone not paying close attention would view what I believed to be realistic claims as nothing other than wildly negative and needlessly repetitive rants. How is it possible that a professional basketball franchise could hire an intelligent guy who knows absolutely nothing about professional basketball to run its basketball operations? How is it possible that a well-liked former role player who sat on the bench next to one of the greatest coaches in NBA history could not know how to coach professional basketball?

In terms of this site, the writing was even more directionless when you placed it in the context of asking yourself how a bunch of people who play rec league basketball and who do not have access to practices and behind the scenes action could make such broad determinations about the coach and GM of their favorite team. How can something so big and so obvious go unnoticed by the owner of the team? How can something so big and obvious not show up in the local press? Isn't whiffing on the overall issues of the past two seasons in real time the press equivalent of the vast majority of economists missing the economic collapse before it was too late? Do the last two years of Wolves coverage amount to something of a failure on behalf of the local press?

My personal theory on why this is the case has nothing to do with media access or competency. I don’t think that is it at all. I am a big subscriber to the idea that the best explanations are the simplest ones and I think that this franchise’s overall boobery is so large, and so long-standing, that it was simply too hard to fit into a workable day-to-day format of a beat reporter. If you took what this franchise was doing seriously, and on a level above and beyond simply what was happening on-court, you inevitably had to veer into commentary and opinion, and even history, as we shall see below with the main problem of the franchise--its owner. It’s not like you can ask David Kahn, in real time, a probing question about his draft philosophy and get a real answer. This team fails in epic and thematic fashion. Its wrongs cannot be covered in a day-by-day game wrap. It is an ongoing narrative that permeates every basketball-related inch of the entire operation (the folks in ticketing, marketing, press, radio, TV, and online do a fantastic job with what they are given to work with by the basketball ops folks. It is a shame that someone like Jonah Ballow doesn't have better material to work with.). We can come up with all the best questions in the world and even if we had the chance to ask them, the answers are already a given: "I believe in this roster. We will continue to get longer and more athletic. We are young and full of promise." Wash, rinse, repeat. Now imagine yourself in a position where you have to watch the same failures over and over and over again for 82 games a year and then write about each game as if it were a singular detached event instead of the outcome of some very specific, obvious, and omnipresent organizational failures. I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject of newspaper editing but I am unsure how broad memes, narratives, and themes should be inserted into 82 articles about very specific and singular events. People read the paper for game wraps and they go to fan sites for opinion and fandom. I don’t pretend to do detailed play-by-play game wraps any more than the local beat reporters pretend to do broad opinionated (and, admittedly, repetitive) narratives. The bar analogy doesn’t work for the Strib or PiPress and I don’t expect it to.

That being said, and before I completely slip into non-serious fandom once and for all, what are the Wolves’ basketball-related sins? They are too many to mention, but here are the top three:

1- The inexplicable failure to throw the majority of their resources into creating and maintaining a state-of-the-art draft operation.

Smaller market teams like the Wolves absolutely have to be built through the draft. The Wolves continue to employ the same methods of talent evaluation that netted them Jonny Flynn and Wes Johnson as they did Ndudi Ebi and Randy Foye. I am in no way kidding when I say that Glen Taylor should simply hire 2 statisticians and purchase a yearly subscription to a data collection service instead of continuing to pay people like David Kahn and Tony Ronzone to make disastrous draft day decisions. Another positive outcome of this approach: It’s hard for the public to get upset with a mathematical formula.

2- The obsession with "best possible outcome" > "most likely outcome", especially in regard to physical appearances and post-season performances.

Listen to anyone on the Wolves’ coaching staff and front office talk about the roster for five minutes and you will inevitably hear terms like "potential" and "lots of room for improvement". Now, I fully admit and understand that these words, and others like them, are commonly used by general managers and coaches throughout the sporting world as ways to get people excited about buying their product. However, not too many people use these concepts as core principles to actual player selection.

Past production matters. A lot. It matters so much that you can look at the records of current college players and compare them to the records of past college players while looking for data trends that appear to be strong indicators of NBA success. There are lots of long and athletic players who look really strong and bouncy, but, more often than not, the chances of understanding why Wes Johnson will not turn out to be a better pro than, say, Landry Fields are most likely found via an excel spreadsheet rather than a scout's eyeball. Ditto for Jonny Flynn and Ty Lawson.

The issue here isn’t avoiding failure; it is minimizing it while producing a reproducible draft system that favors statistically probable traits over subjective physical observations. Short of landing at the top of a draft with a single The Guy, the Wolves’ single approach to player evaluation should be geared around strict, repeatable processes that minimize failure while searching for players who are most likely to be good pros. In any other normal organization, I would suggest that the best approach for such a quest would be to combine stats and scouts, but not with the Wolves. They have been burned by the eyeball test one too many times for me to believe that they are in any way salvageable on the scouting front. This franchise learned so much from overvaluing Randy Foye’s post-season heroics that it turned right around and did the same thing with Jonny Flynn. Kahn and Ronzone talk about players' physicality in almost creepy language: Long, athletic, bouncy, young, tall, springy, good smile, has an energy around him, and so on and so forth. This type of wording inevitably leads to a situation where undue weight is given to items and characteristics that have very little to do with the predictive value of future success. Character, athleticism and physical appearances should only be viewed as baseline necessities. Once a player clears the baseline, any discussion about said player should become all about their past production as an indicator of their future success. The Wolves are incapable of this basic operating principle.

3- Glen Taylor is a terrible owner.

It’s the big elephant in the room. He saved the team from moving down the Mississippi and he continues to pump dollars into our favorite franchise, but there is a single constant in the long history of Wolves suckitude: Papa Glen. Glen Taylor likes firm handshakes, loyalty, and local bankers. While these things seem to be useful in building a Mankato-based printing empire, they do not appear to be conducive to winning professional basketball. Short of hitting the lotto with a game-changing historical talent (see Garnett, Kevin), this franchise has rightly earned the derisive term "Country Club". They are a closed epistemic loop that has been slowly atrophying vis-a-vis the rest of the league for a long, long time. When new voices do happen to make their way inside (or think about making their way inside), there are three possible outcomes:

Assimilation (Kahn): They quickly realize how internal business is conducted and they add to the madness.

Dissension (Casey): They realize the place is a madhouse and they set about to change things. They don’t last long.

Running for the Hills (Lindsey): They realize the place is a madhouse and they run away as fast as they can.

I fully realize that I am telling a billionaire how to spend his hard-earned money, but we’re well beyond the point where it is obvious that Glen needs to make a large one-time outlay to clear the deck and bring in a completely new and outside regime...or sell the team. Not only is this franchise a sitcom, but it is in syndication. David Kahn has added a bit of spice to the mix in terms of how he frames the same old mistakes, but he’s simply the latest guest star on the newest season of a show that has been on auto-pilot for a long, long time.




Yesterday, David Kahn gave an epic year-end press conference. If you haven’t seen it yet, you are missing out. Serbian forest walks, raise your hands, we’re ahead of schedule, the league loves our talent, young, long, athletic, calling out former players, throwing Rambis under the bus, forced labor, multiple "our league" references, screw the Twins, the proof is in the pudding, injuries, we just need some fine tuning....it was amazing.

Aside from essentially walking up to a podium and saying that the shopping has been fantastic (the league envies our talent) while the cooking has been awful (he all but said Rambis will be fired as soon as the CBA business is cleared up), and saying that the status quo (which he created) cannot continue, Kahn made a number of claims that need to be addressed in a season review:

1- This franchise is in better shape now than when I got here/we’re more talented now than we were back then.

The Randy Wittman/Kevin McHale led Wolves won 24 games in the year before Kahn’s arrival. They had a roster with expiring (or soon to be expiring) contracts that was built around Kevin Love, Al Jefferson, Corey Brewer, and, arguably, Randy Foye. Currently, the Wolves have a roster with a lower payroll (although, when you consider what the team will have to pay Love and Beasley, and what the new CBA will allow for, this is kind of deceiving) that is built around Love, Michael Beasley, Wes Johnson, and Jonny Flynn (yes, I know he’s as good as gone, but they spent a 6th pick on him and I think that counts for being a core player). Is a core of Love, Jefferson, Brewer, and Foye better than one with Love, Beasley, Johnson, and Flynn? I think it’s a wash, at best.

Let’s take a look at PERs for each team (McHale/Kahn):

1- Al Jefferson (23.1)/Love (24.3)
2- Kevin Love (18.3)/Anthony Randolph (18.5)
3- Craig Smith (16.9)/Michael Beasley (15.3)
4- Shelden Williams (16)/Luke Ridnour (15.1)
5- Mike Miller (13.8)/Anthony Tolliver (13.6)
6- Randy Foye (13.7)/Martell Webster (12.3)
7- Ryan Gomes (12.5)/Darko Milicic (12.2)
8- Rodney Carney (12.1)/Nikola Pekovic (11.1)
9- Corey Brewer (11.2)/Lazar Hayward (10.7)
10- Bassy (10.8)/Bassy (10.5)

In case you’re wondering #4 pick Wes Johnson has a 10.1 PER, good for 13th on the team. #6 pick Jonny Flynn is 16th, with a 7.1 PER.

Slice it up with win shares, WS/48, offensive and defensive efficiencies, whatever, it is fairly striking how flimsy of an argument it is to say that this year’s team is more "talented" than what we saw back in the days of Witt and McHale. They certainly don’t have more wins. They certainly don’t have any more above-average performers.

Now tell yourself that for all of the suffering endured while supporting a 24 win team, the draft/cap space related payoff for the suckitude was ¼ of the franchise’s all time first round picks being wasted without finding an above-average starter, $20 mil in cap space being used on Darko/Pek/Webster/Ridnour, and a player who cannot possibly live up to the hype (inflate the Rubio Bubble!). Clippergeddon is about to hit and the team appears to have regressed from where it was before Kahn made it to town. I’m not sure how that alone isn’t a fireable offense. It was his job to soften the blow of Clippergeddon and he failed, in miserable and mind-blowing fashion. 

2- The roster is mostly complete.

This is a horrifying thing to think about, let alone take seriously. This team has put together the 4th worst two year stretch in league history. Its four best players (Love, Tolliver, Beasley, and Randolph) are all power forwards. It has no functional wing players and a single competent guard (Ridnour, who should be a backup). If you think this roster just needs to be finely tuned (even "significantly fine tuned" to borrow Kahn's ridiculous phrasing), then you know absolutely nothing about basketball. Nothing. In fact, a case could be made that the Wolves are nothing more than a single somewhat historic season from Kevin Love surrounded by one of the worst supporting casts in league history. I think Anthony Tolliver and Luke Ridnour are good rotation players (Tolliver is a Creighton Jay, so that makes him a winner from the get-go) and Beasley and Randolph both have redeeming qualities, so I wouldn’t go as far as Arturo, but this roster can really be boiled down to a single Kevin McHale pick and everybody else. Kahn tried, with a straight face, to claim otherwise. 

3-  The team is improving.

I don’t see how this is possibly the case. Remember what was being said last year at this time: Last year didn’t count because it was all about business. It was all about setting the table for future success, cap flexibility, and so on and so forth. The team then went about signing multiple free agents, added another top lotto pick, and entered the season with a bunch of optimism. They ended up with 2 more wins. 2.

Lets take a look at a few key categories while comparing the two seasons (10/11):

Point differential: -9.6/-6.4

The caveat here is that in relation to the league, the Wolves dramatically increased their ppg (moving from 20th to 10th) while falling from 29th to 30th in the league in opponent’s ppg. The team’s efficiency differential per 100 points was -9.9/-6.7, with a relative ranking of 29/28 compared to 24/27. In other words, the Wolves are attempting to bridge the Mississippi by putting a 2x4 on each side of the river and calling it progress. Their improvement also probably has a little something to do with league-wide trends. At the end of the day, they’re still very near the bottom of the league and they are a long way from being a serious winning ball club in terms of point differential. Either way, they’re well behind the -4.9 point differential and -5.3 efficiency differential put up during the last year of McHale...for a team that ended 24th and 25th in the league in OE/DE.

SRS: -9.06/-5.84
Expected W-L: (17-65)/(24-57)

If David Kahn has a case to make about why Rambis alone needs to walk the plank, it is the rather large number of wins this team has left on the table. This team shouldn’t be a 17 win team. They have a league worst record in 2 possession games. They run a weird fast-paced offense that maximizes, rather than minimizes, its players’ weaknesses.

That being said, the team’s "improvement" must be viewed through the lens of what we were repeatedly told about last season: it didn’t count. This franchise tanked last year and the only reason why there is even the smallest amount of tangible improvement is because we’re comparing it to a fraud. Shouldn’t the real comp be to the last year of McHale? This team can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that they’ve improved in comparison to a year that they said didn’t count. Here's the real comp:

Point diff: -4.9/-6.4
SRS: -4.74/-5.84
Expected W-L: 27-55 (underperforming by 3)/24-57 (underperforming by 7)

This team has regressed on a surprising number of levels since the end of the McHale era. That is amazing and completely unacceptable.

4- Defense is the real problem.  

Ummmmm...about those turnovers on the other side of the ball. Again, the OE and DE of this team are both problematic. They play too fast and turn it over too much. Do they suck at defense? Yes, but their offense puts their defense in ridiculous spots. Every time Luke Ridnour jacks up a 3 pointer with 21 seconds on the 24 second shot clock, it puts the Wolves’ defense on the spot. Imagine how crazy bad their defense would be without the rebounding of Kevin Love. How many more possessions would the team’s defense have to make up for if that were the case? This team plays bad defense. It plays bad offense. If Kahn wanted to make a statement about this team’s style of play, pace should be at the top of the list. (Remember that Kahn was the guy who said the young team needed to play faster in the first place. He then continued to add more youth.)

OK, what is there to be excited about? Let’s take another peak at the season preview:

Second, Love is one of the best possession-by-possession finishers in the NBA. The ultimate goal of any player is to end as many possessions in his team's favor as possible at both ends of the court. Love is not only the best offensive and defensive rebounder on his team, but he is top-5 in the entire league. The guy has the ability to grab nearly 30% of available rebounds on the defensive side of the court. He gets his mitts on roughly 15% of available rebounds on offense. That's a single player positively ending nearly 30% of any miss by the opposing team while extending the possession of 15% of his own team's misses at the other end of the court. It is pretty hard to overstate just how important this is for a team that doesn't shoot the ball well.

Moving beyond rebounds, Love does not turn the ball over at a high rate. Last year he had the 3rd highest Ast% on the team while carrying the 4th lowest TO%. This year he will have the opportunity to put these numbers through the roof. One of the most striking things about the first two preseason games is that Minny bigs are going to have lots of opportunities to hand the ball off to guys who can but the ball in the bucket from long range. If Webster and Johnson are hitting their jumpers, Love could have an even more absurdly efficient season.

Rounding things out, the guy gets to the line at a higher clip than anyone else on the team. Rebounding, free throws, decent shooter, not a lot of turnovers...you really can't ask for too much more from the guy. He could have a break-out season this year that puts him at a level where talking about All Star status isn't such a ridiculous proposition. Love is far and away (at least for me) the number one reason to follow this club.

Kevin Love remains the #1 reason to watch this team. He is simply an astounding basketball player. Amazingly, he was jerked around by the team over the course of the past year and it took a 31/31 game to get him the minutes he deserves.

Anthony Tolliver is reason #2 to watch this team. He is a pro’s pro who seemed to be the only player near the end of the year who seemed genuinely bothered about what was taking place on the court. The guy brings it each and every single night, he is a solid rotation player, and did I mention he’s a Creighton Jay?

Alan Horton is reason #3 to watch listen to this team. If you haven’t listened to the Wolves radio broadcast, you are missing out. Horton holds down the fort all by his lonesome. He covers the games with excellent, catch-phrase-free, impeccably toned, and appropriately disgusted/impressed language. If Horton were paired with J-Pete, the Wolves would have the best play-by-play combo in the league. I really believe that.

J-Pete is reason #4 to watch this team. Since taking on coaching responsibilities with the Lynx, J-Pete has really come into his own as a color commentator. He gives fantastic insights into the game that both casual and diehard fans can relate to and he provides a much-needed counter-balance to the always-homerish (sometimes with a wink-wink) Hanny. This season, J-Pete has increased the amount of advanced stats he incorporates into the broadcast and this has been an invaluable development. Concepts like percentage or possession-based stats-keeping are vastly superior to net numbers and J-Pete has led the way with their introduction to casual Wolves fans. He also has increased the usage of twitter and social media on the broadcast, which further engages the team’s remaining (and modern) fan base.

Mike Rylander is reason #5 to watch this team. The Wolves are really going to miss the guy who many fans know only as "Fake Wally" (which he had to be tired of) or "the guy from the Doritos commercial". Mike, along with his excellent cohort Natalie Kane, are both leaving their duties as in-house announcers after last night’s game. I have no idea how Mike (and Natalie) did it. From Klondike bar contests to countless Best Buy basketball tosses, he (and she) was our Wolves game show host and were as big of a part of the post-KG era as the action on the court. Seriously. If you went to at least a single game over the past few years, admit it: you will miss them. For those of you who cannot live without your Mike Rylander fix, you can follow his trip out to LA by subscribing to his twitter feed: @mikerylander (Natalie will be going to the WCCO morning show and her twitter feed is at @natalie_kane)

The awesome black uniforms are reason #6 to watch this team. Seriously, they’re awesome.

Tim’s game previews are reason #7 to watch this team. Here they are all in one spot. I’ll work on putting them on a dedicated page. What was your favorite one? Mine was David Kahn’s Windows of Opportunity.

The awesome number of excellent on-line coverage is reason #8 to watch this team. A Wolf Among Wolves, Howlin T-Wolf, TWolvesBlog, and Howl at the Moon all provide massive amounts of smart commentary about Our Beloved Puppies. Forums like Timberwolves Central, Real GM, and Rube Chat add a more open source of discussion. Add in national sites like True Hoop, SB Nation (and its many team blogs, especially Blazer’s Edge), Ball Don’t Lie, and TBJ; and stat sites like 82 Games, Doug’s Stats, HoopData, and Basketball Value, and it’s a good time to be a modern NBA fan. You can learn a lot about the NBA by spending a few minutes of time on line.

I’d like to know what you guys think are the best reasons to (continue to) watch this team. At this point, and besides watching Love and Tolliver, I’m in it for the train wreck/cringe/comedy aspect. I’m slowly working my way into writing about this team as a sitcom rather than a basketball squad. For the longest time I viewed them as something of a puzzle that could be solved with analytics and the data collection. It can’t. The only point of using advanced stats with this team is to point out the depths to which this team has sunk and that will just ruin the jokes.

Despite all of this, the Wolves have an amazing and active online fan community. They do things like this:




And this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

This fan base deserves better than what is currently being sold to them by Kahn, Rambis, Moor, and Taylor. The players deserve better than what is currently being provided to them by Kahn, Rambis, Moor, and Taylor. If nothing changes, the only fans remaining next year at this time will be these guys:

Which is pretty much what this little virtual bar has become over the past year or so. Thanks for being a part of it and for making Canis Hoopus the best place for Wolves fans to gather on the internet.

PS: Throw a few positive thoughts in the direction of Sacramento tonight
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