Next Year Can't Come Quickly Enough

Being the hopeless homer optimist that I am when it comes to Minnesota sports teams, I wrote a piece about the possible excitement and buzz that this Timberwolves team could create this year. Sure, they were not going to be a legitimate title contender. But I felt that it would at the bare minimum be a season with young talent on the court. I though we would be able to watch them slowly begin to gel and get a better feel for what it takes to be a winner as a professional basketball player. I thought at the very least an entertaining product would be put on the court day in and day out.

I was wrong.

Watching a Timberwolves game is like watching animal planet. You watch the gazelle try to cross the river. You know that isn’t a log, but rather a crocodile. You yell at your TV, and try to warn the gazelle. You plead with the gazelle to listen to your cries. A part of you truly thinks the gazelle will evade the savvy and patient croc’s awaiting jaws. But, in the end the crocodile does get a meal, and the wolves do lose the game.

The 4-23 record of the fighting Al Jefferson’s is disheartening unto itself, however other factors are rubbing salt in my wounds. First of all I would like to officially declare unto the world a list of players we could still have and if we had a GM that did not get a secret lobotomy (it’s my new theory), probably would still have. I have taken the liberty of placing the player that was kept/received instead in parenthesis. Please bear with me, I know this is painful, but it’s for the good of all…the first step is acceptance.
Ray Allen (Stephon Marbury)
Chauncey Billups (the corpse of Troy Hudson)
Kevin Garnett (Al Jefferson, Ryan Gomes, and others who must not be named)
Josh Howard (Ndudi Ebi)
Brandon Roy (Randy Foye and 1 million dollars no doubt used on hard alcohol to “stop the hurt”)
O.J. Mayo, Marko Jaric’s bloated contract (3 very white guys)
5 first round draft picks (Joe Smith and a shady “1 year contract”)

Look at all the talent that has slipped through our collective fingers… I feel like all the Wolves fans should band together for a huge A.A.-like meeting to nurse our 20 years of frustrations.

“Hi I’m Jake…and I’ve been a T-Wolves fan for about 20 years now… and I am still haunted by Tom Gugliotta’s barbed wire tattoo
“We’re here for you Jake”

A second, even more melancholy note is that the wolves play a more disheveled game than that most high school teams. Rashad McCants keeps getting significant minutes despite mistaking basketball for a game of hot potato. “I don’t want the ball, I’ll just throw it at the rim 11 times then go home to the lesser Kardashian sister”. There are batting averages higher than McCants and Seabass Telfair’s FG% (.344 and .307 respectively) Joe Mauer should not be able to hit 87 mph sliders more efficiently

than these chuckers can hit a jump shot. By the way, has the barbed wire ever been in style? I'm leaning towards no.

But, the single most appalling, egregious, outrageous (insert Johnny Cochrane adjective here) aspect of the Wolves is that we still insist on allowing people like Brian Cardinal, Mark Madsen, and Kevin Ollie to log significant minutes. These men would not be getting minutes for the Golden Gophers right now, so why let them play with the big boys? Nobody is paying hard earned money to see a Kevin Ollie pull up jumper in traffic, so let’s just quietly buy out their contracts and forget they ever happened…agree? (Please, if there is a god agree)

join me in counting down the days till the draft, where we can see how the Wolves will blow it this time around.

Give'em a wolves uniform too, what's the worst that could happen?