HOLY SH*T!!! ADELMAN TO INTERVIEW WITH WOLVES!!! (Part 2)

good.

but I really wish I could rec this 3 times – we may have a new tagline

chicken and waffles is a dinner special. It’s not something I can/want to eat often.

My wife and I go out for a quick dinner without the kids most every Sunday, and get stuck in patterns (ruts?) easily. So we’ve been to Hubbard Avenue Diner and Bluephies many, many times. I still like the Food Fight places better than the national chain alternatives, though I suppose there are other local places that are at least as good. We seem to be coming to the end of a long Bluephies run, but I don’t know what will replace it.

Mickies, my wife reports, has very good pancakes. She thinks of herself as a connoisseur.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9KJDRXXrB8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0

I don’t think the TC press has an efficient guy right now. Actually, that’s not true. I like Jon K a lot. He is a pro’s pro.

and it helps to keep in mind what audience is intended for each type of story. A blog’s different from a column in the print paper, which is different from Shooter’s notes…. Sometimes I don’t think the writers keep those roles sorted out particularly well, themselves.

that’s the scuttlebutt of Taylor being more involved in the hiring process. Kahn stays on as the legal/contracts/FO grunt role, Ronzone stays on as primary scout, but Adelman comes in as coach and FO leader? Something like that? Let’s remember too that Kahn is entering his last year here. Assuming they can get Adelman one can imagine a pretty smooth transition to this FO being led by RA and Ronzone, with Kahn simply being unsigned after his contract expires.

Kind of a raw deal for Kahn, actually, but maybe that was the gig – come in and do a lot of the dirty work that needed to be done with this roster, don’t sign anybody to huge albatross contracts, and try to accumulate some good, young talent. Done, done, and done. Now the team is set for a real FO and a real coach. Who knows. Makes a little sense. We were all afraid that the hiring of Kahn was simply prep for potentially selling the team. Maybe it was simply a stop gap move to cut costs and position the team for success later, especially with the lockout looming (even years ago people knew it was coming).

I know I’m rambling now, but I find this line of thinking remarkably persuasive, if not for the problem of not believing Taylor capable of this kind of foresight and planning. It seems, though, that the team is remarkably well positioned for the lockout – traded a bunch of picks to accumulate cash to pay off Rambis (whether they’ll admit they did that or not, that’s the reality); they have a bunch of young players on cheap contracts that they control at least through the lockout; they have no expensive superstar players who are missing a year of their primes during the lockout; shoot – they don’t even have a coaching staff they have to pay through the lockout right now. Think about it – let’s say you’re paying a coaching staff $6 million a year in salary. In the two months since firing Rambis with not having a new coaching staff during the lockout, that’s $1 million saved!

I hate to think that this organization at the top decided to use 2-3 seasons as one big reset, and perhaps this all simply started with the team wanting to cut costs and get younger because they recognized they could win 15 games with a cheap roster versus 25 games with an expensive roster (that is, they weren’t going to be making money any time soon so…). But what else ties all this together?

I’ll take a coach ranks 9th all time in NBA win percentage amongst coaches with more than 500 games coached (and ahead of Jerry Sloan). Dude may be an offensive coach, but he’s also an excellent head coach which means he understands how to delegate and manage his weaknesses.

…that if the Wolves had taken Rubio, DeMar DeRozan, Darren Collison and Marcus Thornton in the 1st round, yall would be a lot happier today.

Then again, who knows? Maybe none of those guys develop as they did in their various spots up to this point too.

but wouldn’t that roster be about $100 Million north of any salary cap?

and I think that is why there is so much disagreement on his overall value. I think my take on him (roughly a Top-25 player in the league) is in-between what I consider to be the extremes that either focus too much on his individual stats or too much on his team’s record and lack of athleticism.

Gasol, for what it’s worth, was a franchise cornerstone-type of player on some pretty decent Grizzlies teams with a suspect cast of supporting players. He wasn’t winning titles, but he was winning way more than the non-KG Wolves teams ever have.

His low post game can become more polished by adding some fakes and fancy footwork. His court vision and passing are about as good as they’re likely to get – although he will definitely benefit from improvement by his supporting cast (which will make his statistics improve without his play actually improving). He could improve his three point shooting by a few points and his free throw shooting by about 5 points at most. He’s not likely to be able to develop any ability to create his own shot from the perimeter. He’s also not likely to increase the number of free throw attempts he gets by more than 0.5 per game or so.
On the defensive end is where he has the most room for improvement. By most accounts he’s a decent one-on-one post up defender. He struggles mightily to guard stretch fours because of his lack of athleticism. He’s often about a half-step slow on his rotations, which is one thing I think he will improve on – though making defensive rotations is really a team activity and his improvement won’t make much of a difference if everyone else doesn’t improve as well. He doesn’t block many shots, but with improved timing he could probably increase his bpg by 0.2-0.3.
Realistically, Love’s statistics are pretty phenomenal already and the only one that is likely to improve significantly over the course of his career is his winning percentage.

but, could it be that Adelman takes the HC position with the caveat that he will be able to move into the GM spot in, say, 3 years (counting this lockout year as a season). He can establish the system as coach and then have the power to name his successor. Wouldn’t be a bad incentive…