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_{Photo copyright 2009 NBAE (Photo by Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images)}

Game #78, Road Game #39, Los Angeles Clippers 77, Minnesota 87

Game #79, Road Game #40, Golden State 97, Minnesota 105

Season Record: 24-55

1. Showing Up

It has long been a philosophy of Kevin McHale's that a team can snatch anywhere from 6 to 10 wins per season simply by showing up being ready to play on a consistent basis, despite the circumstances, and exploiting the fact that the opponent is flat. It happened twice on the road this week, Tuesday in L.A. against the leprous Clippers and then Wednesday in the Bay Area against the wacky, undisciplined Warriors.

Because all of these ballclubs are in the lottery, injuries have been allowed to strip mine all of their rosters. What remains are a motley assortment of tired kids, veteran professionals, and hangers-on in various stages of hope and denial. More than talent, what separated the Wolves from the Clips and the Nelsons the past two nights was cohesion and desire, in that order. It is a small pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless to watch a gutted, moldering ballclub stitch it together and summon the fun of the game, deciding to play as a team, for a semblance of pride.

Wednesday in Oakland was the epitome of a team victory. Nine players logged between 22:39 and 31:34 worth of playing time. The most effective player on the floor was Shelden Williams, a career bust thus far who was the butt of a crack I made in the previous trey about not knowing what country he would play in next year. Granted, the competition was perpetually half-cocked, but Williams has been making strides for about three or four games now, and this one belongs in his scrapbook, or on his video resume when he seeks a contract next season. Part of the improvement is simply that he seems to have worked himself into shape, a left-handed (low-bellied?) compliment if there ever was one.

Or maybe it is the cold reality of looming free agency, or being a father, or finally getting a whiff of some regular burn. Whatever the cause(s), Williams is playing with great intelligence and self-control, not only in his shot selection but in regulating his personal rhythm to that of the game's. It is always odd, but a bit of a thrill, to see someone who was clumsy and clueless in the very recent past suddenly rotate over in time to bushwack penetration and create a steal, or scramble down the floor quickly enough to pick up an opponent in transition, or move toward the hoop ready and able to catch and finish, or suss out the carom on the rebound. Williams did all of these things on Wednesday. His line wasn't spectacular, which is actually a good thing; it was solid, less flukey, and something to build upon.

Williams was the "9th man" both in terms of when he entered the game and his total minutes (he was the 22:39). But he played the final, and decisive, 14:43 of the game and demonstrated how valuable a player can be without scoring a point. His 11 rebounds were the 4th time this season he'd hit double-digits, but the previous three were obviously garbage-time grabs, as his team lost by more than 20 points each time. His three assists were a season high. and he also had a pair of steals and a block, without a single turnover. His five points were all registered on his first stint. Last but not least, he was a game-high plus +14, with Kevin Ollie's plus +9 and Bassy Telfair's plus +8 the next best totals. I doubt very much he'll stick with the Wolves and frankly don't know where he'll end up, but he gave the Wolves a committed, well-rounded performance on a road back-to-back when there was no reason to suspect anything noteworthy out of this team. I appreciated it.

Other kudos for the Warriors game go to Telfair, whose confidence and shot selection continue to improve even as his temper and his handle are less even-keel; Kevin Ollie, who may be the bard of "showing up" in terms of generating ball movement and trying to stay out of everyone's way (except on defense, of course); and Kevin Love, who actually had a subpar game, as his jumper wasn't falling and he seemed more out-of-sorts than against the Clips, yet he still managed to get to the line 10 times and make all of them.

The Clippers game was less enjoyable to watch. The lesser squad was LA is an aggressively bad team, playing with no discernible purpose and no attempt at synergy. Eric Gordon can shoot the lights out and doesn't seem mentally affected by the toxic environment in which he's operating and Brian Skinner is the Kevin Ollie of power forwards, but the rest of the crew is in sorry shape. After banging the gong for DeAndre Jordan one of the last times these two teams met, lamenting the Wolves not taking him or Chalmers with their second second-rounder, I watched in horror as the big galoot was housed and housed again at both ends of the court Tuesday, often courtesy of Kevin Love, who outrebounded him, and pretty much embarrassed him--or, better put, helped him embarrass himself. Yeah, I'd still take Jordan in the second round, but nearly a full season of Clipperdom has done him no favors whatsoever in terms of his development.

2. Very Good Coach Should Step Down

As much as any Timberwolves player, the wins Tuesday and Wednesday belong to coach Kevin McHale. The guy is never going to dazzle you with Xs and Os (although have you noticed the growing frequency of successful baseline cuts executed by this team the past couple of weeks?), but when it comes to player motivation, McHale is right up there with Bill Musselman as the best in franchise history. Of course we aren't privvy to front office confabs, so we don't know how much or little personnel veep had to do with the team's shameful tanking performances down the stretch at various points over the past few years--Dwane Casey was the fall guy when Mark Madsen was jacking up treys to bag a draft pick three years ago, which, as karma would have it, turned out to be Brandon Roy before McHale and company chucked it away, Madsen-like, for Randy Foye.

But I digress. Look at the general vibe surrounding the Clippers under Dunleavey and the Warriors under Nelson and see if you can't palpably feel the confusion, frustration, and divergence of attitude. Compare that to the Wolves, where even a guy with a legitimate beef, like Bassy Telfair being compelled to come off the bench while the aged journeyman Kevin Ollie starts,  not only doesn't rock the boat but tries to blend and synergize with the minutes he is allotted on the floor. Or check out how Ryan Gomes--dominant in the Clippers game, and the clearcut go-to guy in the wake of Jefferson's injury even before Foye, who spit the bit, went down--doesn't cause a fuss when he sits the final 15 minutes of a nip-and-tuck contest.

Yes, in the realm of player development, it is aggravating to watch Telfair and Love get only 8:45 of court time together, barely a third of their total PT, or to never see Love and a suddenly thriving Williams paired together in the frontcourt. But it's  plain to see that the players have bought into whatever McHale deems the rotation to be, and that the Wolves are winning. Guiding a relatively happy and overachieving team down the home stretch of a lost season after their top two players are lost to injury is simply good coaching. It wouldn't surprise me if the Wolves, winners of three straight on the road, pulled off another "showing up" victory Friday at home versus Phoenix, stung from being bounced from the playoffs. And as for the folks who advocate tanking for more ping pong balls, well, recent history has demonstrated that basketball teams have about as much control as the general public in trying to play the lottery--precious little.

The last thing I want to say right now in praise of McHale is that he doesn't deliver a load of bull to the assembled media after a game. The times when the team has seemingly quit on him, or simply been outgunned by the prevailing talent on the other side, he hasn't tried to spin it,  and he rarely insults our intelligence by saying something that pretty obviously isn't true (an exception will be noted in the next point of this trey). He knows the game well, and breaks down what did and didn't happen for his team in a lively, succinct manner.

Okay, here's the part where I stick the shiv between his ribs. Almost from the day he demoted McHale out of the front office and put him on the sidelines, Wolves owner Glen Taylor has followed a parallel track, which, if continued into his refashioning of the ballclub at the end of this season--which means beginning next week--could have disastrous consequences for the future. Specifically, Taylor has said that he hopes McHale returns as coach, that he McHale has done a good job as coach and that it is up to McHale whether or not he returns as coach. Taylor has also said that he wants to have one person in charge of personnel decisions, that he's interviewed a variety of candidates both in house and outside the organization, and that he's close to making a decision.

Wolves fans have to hope that, contrary to all reports and appearances, that McHale has already signalled that he'll be leaving the ballclub at the end of the season. Otherwise, Taylor is creating an untenable situation for any new "man in charge," and any executive bright enough to have other options would almost certainly turn the owner down. Now Glen Taylor is a billionaire and thus a pretty fair business manager. So show me a precedent in the business world where prospective CEOs are being told in interviews that they will be compelled to accept on his team the former CEO of  the past dozen years, a man who also happens to be a good friend, trusted confidante and willing scapegoat (as in the Joe Smith debacle) of the owner's, and that that former CEO will occupy a position that is absolutely crucial, arguably the key linchpin, in the development and implementation of the new policies, plans and philosophy brought forth by the new CEO. How many qualified CEOs accept the job under those neutered conditions?

Kevin McHale has performed yeoman duty over these past 60 games. But his warranty on charting the future of the Timberwolves, in any direct way, shape or form, should expire next Wednesday. And if it doesn't, Taylor and his minority partners have no one but themselves to blame for the dysfunction that is almost certain to ensue.

3. Pete and Mike

I'm enough of a rube to get a little tickle hearing my name called out on television, as happened near the end of the first half of the Clippers game, courtesy of Wolves color commentator Jim Petersen. Pete and I are both hoop freaks, of course, and although he knows more about the game than I do (or perhaps because of that), he's always fun to lock horns with, which doesn't happen nearly enough because we so rarely see each other. Anyway, Pete referenced a point I made in a previous trey, in which I compared Rodney Carney and Kirk Snyder as players performing well down the garbage-time stretch of the season and thus tempting the Wolves' brass to re-sign them. Minnesota resisted that temptation with Snyder, and since then his life has fallen into disrepair, with an arrest and jail and psychiatric evaluations occuring in the past few weeks. In my trey, I clearly stipulated that the comparison between Carney and Snyder had nothing to do with these potential "character issues" and rested solely on whether circumstances made the player more tempting to retain than reality might dictate. And to his credit, Petersen did not misrepresent my position on the character stuff.

Pete did say, however, that he felt a comparison of Carney and Snyder was inapplicable because Carney is "more established" as a player than Snyder. Well, as of right now, Carney has 201 games and 3315 career minutes to his credit, versus Snyder's career totals of 211 games and 3539 minutes. Carney has career averages of 6.4 points, 2 rebounds, .4 assists, .6 steals and .6 turnovers per game. Snyder's career averages are 8.4 points, 2.3 rebounds, 1.1 assists, 1 steal and 1 turnover per game. I would argue that Snyder is the slightly better, more consistent defender. Again, by all accounts, Carney is a great kid, easily coached, who evidences none of the temper issues that plagued Snyder throughout his checkered NBA career. But it is pretty obvious that neither of these players is "more established" than the other.

The reason for this long, narcissistic prelude is that minutes before Pete mentioned my name, I had angrily written down in my notebook rebuttals to his effusive praise of Mike Miller's leadership. Miller, interviewed before the game on the state of the Timberwolves, is now being portrayed as this stablizing hand on the rudder, this savvy vet doing things to help the team win. That was the line Pete was peddling and it was picked up in this morning's Strib by Jerry Zgoda, who quotes McHale at length: "At times you'd like to see him just rise up and shoot it. The majority of time, he makes the right plays. Mike makes a ton of plays. He rebounds. He plays hard. He does everything you ask him. I couldn't be happier with Mike. There are times I look out there and say, 'I'd rather see you force a couple bad shots than the shots we're taking.' But he's going it [sic] the right way.

"He has played very well for us. I have absolutely no complaints with Mike at all."

Okay, here's the deal: I'll stop bitching about Mike Miller's passive-aggressive selfishness and corrosive impact on the team's performance if folks like Petersen and McHale stop insulting our intelligence by praising and rewarding this style of play. You can pretty much pick any game at random, roll the tape, and I can find at least five or six occasions when Miller has a wide-open look, in rhythm, at the basket. Some of them are drives where he is 4-6 feet away from the hoop with room to shoot; others he has received the ball wide open on the perimeter. Does anybody dispute that Miller deservedly has the reputation as one of the game's most accurate marksmen? So why is he continually and willfully passing up good shots? Not bad shots, or forced shots, but very logical shots that you want and you watch the likes of Gomes, Foye, Jefferson, etc etc, shooting almost automatically whenever the opportunity presents itself.

The only quote from Miller in Zgoda's article is this one: "I don't think scoring has been a problem for us, to be quite honest with you. You look at every one of our games, we're in the 100s. When you take bad shots, it hurts your defense."

Ah, perhaps we've hit upon the problem here: Mike Miller is an idiot. Scoring is problematical enough for the Wolves to be ranked 21st out of the NBA's 30 teams in points per game, at 97.94. Yes, that average is under 100. And yes, if you look at "every one of our games" you will notice that the Wolves hit or eclipse the century mark in 36 of the 79 they've played thus far. I will agree with Miller that taking bad shots hurts your defense, which is why I wonder how he reconciles shooting less frequently per minute played than any of his teammates who have logged at least 1000 minutes this season, despite being much more accurate than those composite teammates. Specifically, Miller is shooting 48.2% from the field, including 36.5% from beyond the arc, while the Wolves as a team are shooting 44.2% from the field and 35.2% from three-point land. By Miller's own logic, shouldn't he, as the more accurate shooting, be chucking it up more so that the team's defense isn't hurt so much?

The bottom line is that Miller is shooting more accurately than his career average yet is putting up a mere 9.7 points per game, the lowest total of his 9-year career, for a ballclub that is without its top two scorers and has a record of 24-55. If Miller and McHale and Petersen want to peddle this as astute veteran leadership and somehow good for the team, take it to someone more gullible. I'm sick of reading about Miller's savvy and I'm sick of having to point out how inaccurate that rendering has been this season. Suffice to say that "I could be happier" with the performance of #33.