The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Game #70, Home Game #36: Minnesota 90, Oklahoma City 97

Season Record: 20-50

1. Nobody Likes A Quitter

Well, we know the limits of the Wolves' endurance. They fought hard for awhile after Al Jefferson went down, but these last four games have been pretty much unwatchable. I'm only going to talk about Sunday's tilt against OKC, and then only because I thought it would provide an interesting snapshot against a team similar in record, who Minnesota smoked by 42 last time they came through the Target Center, but who have steadily improved by adding parts and playing promising kids along the way. I know the Wolves were in the New Orleans game down to the last shot, but the Hornets played horribly and were without 40 percent of their starting lineup. The San Antonio game was openly insulting--Spurs coach Gregg Popovich rested Tim Duncan to get his most valuable player ready for the playoffs, an act of belittlement that should have appealed to some professional pride among the troops in Glen Taylor's franchise. Nope. The Houston game was blissfully blacked out, but afterwards, Rocket players were discussing the contest as a perfunctory W, not even a potential bump in the road.

Everyone knows the Wolves have very little heart left, and are undeserving of respect.

Sunday against the Thunder, the game began in slapstick, with both teams launching airballs and iron-grazers from in-close--there were 15 rebounds in the first 4:40 alone, a pace that, if continued, would have garnered both squads about 75 boards apiece--that put the score at 7-6. Then the Thunder stopped missing while the Wolves kept misfiring and the rout was on. OKC outscored Minnesota by 10 in the first, 8 in the second, and 13 in the third. That's right, the precise egg laid was 84-53 playing at home against an opponent with a record of 19-50. Not a single member of the starting lineup played competently, collectively shooting 30.2% (13-43 FG), 25% from 3pt territory (2-8) and had an assist to turnover ratio of 9/12.

If you want to focus on Minnesota's 37-13 comeback in the 4th period, knock yourself out. The Thunder played old, out-of-shape Malik Rose for 10:50 until he fouled out (he had two fouls in 5:59 before the period started, then four in the fourth). They had a 31 point lead and they are a callow squad that gave most of it away, but they could afford to--they'd allowed Minnesota 2 fast-break points and 10 assists through three periods and 12 fast break points and 8 assists in the 4th quarter alone. They shot 50.8% through three and 22.2% in the 4th. They knew they had the game won and allowed the fearsome fivesome of Bobby Brown, Kevin Ollie, Rodney Carney, Shelden Williams and the combo of Kevin Love (for 9:37) and Craig Smith (2:23) to romp for awhile before subbing Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and the boys again to quiet the uprising. Afterward, coach McHale said his players looked glassy-eyed and seemed mentally tired and guessed he should start subbing folks in earlier. Good luck with that.

2. In The Poor House

What was striking today about the two rebuilding teams was how much taller and quicker the Thunder seemed. Part of that has to do with two players Oklahoma City has acquired since the season began: Seven-foot center Nenad Krstic and 6-7 off guard Thabo Sefolosha. Both have been integral to the team's relatively sterling success of late--the Thunder at 7-9 when Krstic starts and 6-6 when Sefolosha starts. Krstic was signed to an offer sheet of $15.8 over the next three years, very close to all of the mid-level exception. According to the shamsports.com salary charts, the Thunder will be paying Krstic about the same amount the Wolves are paying on the buy-out to Juwan Howard's contract for this year, and about a million less than the Wolves are paying Jason Collins. It's about as much as the combined salaries of Mark Madsen and Craig Smith, and about as much as the Wolves are paying this year on the buy-out of Troy Hudson's deal. You get the idea.

That's all spilt, soured milk, of course, that has been wiped up and thrown away, although it continues to stink when you watch Krstic go out and do his thing. He's hardly a godsend, but he is a guy who can stick the midrange jumper, and rebound and defend in a mediocre manner--in other words, better than any center the Wolves have on the roster. Should the Wolves have tried to sign him? Well, probably not, for the Hudson/Howard/Smith-Madsen/Collins reasons stated above, and because attendance is rotten at the Target Center while Oklahoma City is in the first pangs of an NBA franchise relationship--under similar circumstances, the Wolves set a league attendance record at the Metrodome.

While we give the Minnesota braintrust a mulligan on Krstic (if only because their past screwups poisoned the salary well too thoroughly), the Thunder's acquisition of Sefolosha is exactly the sort of bold stroke that would behoove Jim Stack--who used to work for the Bulls, Sefolosha's former employer--and the crew to execute. As announced, the deal was for the Thunder to give the Bulls the worst of their boatload of draft picks this summer, which turns out to be San Antonio with the 26th overall pick. Now the Wolves likewise will have three or four picks, and have publicly said they can't keep all of them, would in fact like to package one or two for another commodity. Well, how about a 6-7 defensive specialist in the backcourt? Since the Bulls were more interested in shedding Sefolosha's salary than in securing a quality player in return --they'd just acquired John Salmons, Tim Thomas and Brad Miller--they probably would have taken the Celtics' first-rounder owed the Wolves (high 20s, higher than San Antonio's), especially if a contingency was that they'd get the Utah pick in the low 20s if the Jazz played well enough to make it transferable to Minnesota this year (it is top 22 protected).

Again according to the shamsports.com website, Sefolosha makes $1.9 M this year, $2.8M next year and a $3.8M qualifying offer the year after that. None of these would put the Wolves over the luxury cap. (The closest would be this year.) One might argue that Sefolosha is little more than a Rodney Carney clone with a longer contract. The two are both listed at 6-7, 215, and are a month apart in age. But Sefolosha happens to be much more consistent as a defender, is a higher-percentage shooter (albeit not from three-point range) and is a superior passer and rebounder. Bottom line, Sefolosha is simply a more mature player. Okay, but what about Corey Brewer? Yes, there may be some redundancy there. But it remains to be seen if the 6-9 Brewer can return from a significant knee injury well enough to play the off-guard slot, where his string-bean 188-pound frame is less apt to get beat-up, but which requires the kind of quickness that is no longer guaranteed--and which Sefolosha already possesses.

I'm sure there are smart cap people who will continue to counsel that the Wolves braintrust should keep its powder dry. But if the draft of all drafts comes and goes and the Wolves can't leverage the maximum value from their wealth of first-rounders, remember Sefolosha as one who got away.

3. The Shortness of Foye

I apologize for what has become a relentlessly negative trey--at least I haven't bitched about Mike Miller. But it needs to be said that perhaps the biggest cause for concern the past few weeks has been the regression of Randy Foye. During the halycon days of January, when the Wolves were spurting to a 10-2 mark, there was a legitimate question of whether the Wolves' best player was Jefferson or Foye. Freed from his point guard duties, Foye had truly blossomed, confounding defenses by hitting long-range jumpers with regularity and then defying the close-outs with penetration that results in layups for either himself or a teammate. Okay, we all thought, so he isn't a point guard, but if you let him settle into a rhythm, he is a dynamic playmaker out of the backcourt and an ideal complement to Jefferson.

Then scouts began to suss out Foye's marvelous array of attributes and correctly noted that the best corrective was to thwart him with size. As a 6-4 off-guard, he suddenly had to contend with the Mike Dunleavys, Joe Johnsons, Brandon Roys, Shane Battiers, Rasual Butlers and Thabo Sefoloshas of the world. In other words. a lot of teams regularly deploy a two-guard who is at least 2-3 inches taller than Foye and surmounting them has taken a toll, as has Jefferson's absence, which has waylaid Foye's complementary game more than anyone on the roster but Kevin Love. Paired with a small backcourt mate in Telfair, and a generally tiny frontcourt with the "6-10" Love in the pivot and smaller folks at the forwards, the Wolves can be ground down in the half court, yet aren't so athletic that it is automatically to their advantage to run uptempo. The Wolves in general and Foye in particular seem to do best with playing a controlled running game, exploiting mistakes for their transition points.

But whether it is fatigue, or injury (he was recently sidelined with a bad hip that McHale says is still bothering him), or the psychological sapping of losing, Randy Foye has regressed, significantly enough to compel questions about whether that January dazzle was a flash in the pan, the outlier in an otherwise desultory season.

The make-or-break miss that ended the New Orleans game was the latest in a series of frustrations for Foye. While he still ranks 23rd in the NBA for 4th quarter points with average of  5.2, it is due as much to the volume of his shots as ice water in his veins--his shooting percentage for the quarter is 41.3%, just a titch better than his 40.7% season mark (and needless to say, neither figure is exactly deadeye shooting). His most accurate quarter is the second, where he cans 42.3% of his shots, often after getting a rest early in the period. As I mentioned last post, Foye also gets his shot blocked a higher percentage of time on his inside drives to the hoop than any player in the NBA--19%. Consequently, he's most productive from three point territory, with 4.5 points per game outside on 30% of his FGA, versus 4.6 ppg on midrange two-pointers which comprise 41% of his FGA and just 4 ppg on the 29% of his field goal attempts that result in inside drives to the hoop.

All this points to the fact that Foye needs to stroke the trey and be reliable enough scoring and setting people up in other ways to justify steady minutes at off-guard--because his defense of taller foes can't justify it. This isn't meant to denigrate or write off Foye--after going hot and mostly cold on him for his first two years, his December-January bloom, and the altered notion that he wasn't getting the point-guard duties rammed down his, and thus our, throat, enabled me to appreciate his athleticism, which rivals Carney as the best on the team. There are plays where Foye will sky for a rebound that drops your jaw with the elevation he creates. Yet Foye's slow but sure diminishment in the six weeks since Jefferson's injury demonstrates that he remains a complementary player--a piece to a successful puzzle if the combinations are right, but not the cornerstone Wolves' fans had dared to imagine during the winning streak. Foye will be 26 when he enters his 4th NBA training camp next fall. He'll come in as an intriguing, potentially beguiling player, one capable of teasing at stardom. But bottom line, he'll continue to have a lot to prove, even as the sand keeps draining from his hourglass.