As promised and/or predicted, here is Brandon with the follow-up to Roughkat’s Game 8 post. Actually, both of those fine gentlemen appear in this post. It’s cute how they just pass the laptop back and forth. Neat! OK, guys:

Suddenly, the Thrill is Gone

Brandon: I knew this couldn’t last. After three spirited, long-winded write-ups to kick off the T-Wolves season, I’ve already realized there are only so many ways for my mushy brain to state the obvious: this is a bad basketball team.

Saturday’s game against the streaking Denver Nuggets posed an even bigger challenge – not only were the Wolves predictably, boringly beaten by a superior squad, but my date and I were in a zombie-like state due to our recent return from The Vegas via red-eye. We stared at the court while wordlessly sharing a bag of peanuts and diet soda while secretly wishing that instead of watching Chauncey Billups run the floor with ease, instead of scratching our heads at the Wittman substitutions, we were at home, fast asleep. It was one of those nights.

Obviously, I don’t have much to say. So, I’ll take this time to discuss with Roughkat, who was also at the game.

B: What would you like to tell the millions of RandBall readers about Saturday’s Timberwolves game?

RK: It was exciting to see Kevin Love get so much playing time. I’m not expecting him to be an All-star but I would take an 18 and 12 game from him every night. I’m still 100% behind trading Mayo to get him. Speaking of that trade, how would you grade Mike Miller’s performance and also his Geico caveman photo that was shown 53 times during the game?

B: It’s just too bad Caveman Miller had such a terrible game during his own special night. He must’ve gotten flustered seeing the tens of people sitting in the stands. Agreed about Love, though I don’t see him as much more than a role player his whole career. His downfall is both simple and damning: he can’t jump. Sadly, as a 6’8” forward, that is kind of a big deal.

Who can I blame for pretty much every point guard having career games against us? Foye? Telfair? Wittman? Please say Wittman.

RK: I blame Wittless for pretty much everything. I opened up my maths calculator and found there are 792 possible lineup combinations using the 12 man roster. I can only assume that Coach is trying to fill out his bingo card with all of them.

That being said, if you check out 82 Games, which does all the math for you, you’ll see that Ollie is statistically the best at defending opponents PGs. Foye and Telfair are both terrible at guarding the PG. Foye’s PER is also 16.0 when playing SG and 10.6 when he’s running the show. They have stats for these things. I’m not sure Wittless knows that or else you’d think he might use them. Which once again proves your theory that he’s to blame. So there you go.

I checked the gamelogs and it was, indeed, the Birdman playing for the Nuggets. I think the Wolves’ real problem is that the players don’t have enough nicknames. We should make some up.

B: Agreed. Caveman and Wittless are good starts, as is Craig Smith as The Rhino. Let’s make it our mission throughout this sure-to-be-bland season to devise some great nicknames. We also need to direct our collective creative juice towards devising some decent in-game entertainment. Because the stuff they’ve got going right now, the strange jumbotron races, the “hold up your US Bank card” giveaways and the likes are not cutting it.

But like I mentioned, my brain is mush right now. This’ll have to wait.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Row X, Section 203, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.