This is becoming one of our favorite features. Brandon?

The scene: Target Center visitors’ locker room, Saturday, 30 minutes before tipoff.

“OK, everyone gather ‘round. Gather ‘round I say!” exclaimed Trailblazers head coach Nate McMillan. “Now let’s go over the game plan here. As you all know, the Timberwolves have been voted Least Successful Pick & Roll Defenders in history, which is quite an accomplishment after just a handful of games. This one is ours for the taking, boys.”

The players cooed in anticipation of a blowout. Brandon Roy and Rudy Fernandez exchanged daps. Sergio Rodriguez slapped the floor with his palms and clapped his hands together in his familiar juvenile high-energy fashion.

“Hold on now. Hold on,” continued McMillan. “The game plan is this: no pick & rolls tonight. None.” The players immediately began whining about this idea. The excitement had been sapped out of the room. Rodriguez screamed “why not!” at the top of his lungs, causing teammates to lean over and whisper in his ear to ask if maybe he’d like to calm down just a little bit for once.

“Well, I want to try something here,” McMillan said. “Here’s the thing: these guys are bad. Really, really bad. I know you all know that, but I promise you: they’re worse than you think. So what I want to do is prove that we can win this game with no offensive game plan whatsoever. What we’re going to do here [McMillan pulls out clipboard] is, everyone just run up the floor and stand around. Pass the rock around at the top of the key until there are 10 seconds left on the shot clock, and whoever has the ball at that point, we’ll run an iso for him. Simple as that. The point is this: we are going to win this game by doing three things: (1) lots of walking up the court and standing around, (2) isolation-only offensive schemes, and (3) letting the Wolves blow the game on their own volition.”

“But coach,” said Oden, who had aged three years during the five-minute speech, “these Wolves can’t be that bad. They’ve got Jefferson, Miller, Foye, Gomes – they’ll figure out a way to score! I don’t know, I just think that maybe—“

“Let me cut you off right there, Grandpa,” said McMillan. “Here’s the thing: the Wolves will keep it close. They always do. They’ll show flashes of competence, even holding down a daunting 15-point first half lead. But, just you see: Wittman will continue to play Jefferson with an undersized 4, and we’ll murder them in the paint. He’ll play Shaddy McCants, who is being paid by the shot attempt, and give the majority of point guard minutes to an ineffective Randy Foye, who isn’t even a point guard! I tell you, Wittman is a fool.”

LaMarcus Aldridge stood up, unsure how long this strained literary device was going to continue, and mentioned, “I can just tell, coach, this no-game-plan scheme is going to result in this being a super close game. How do we know they won’t somehow pull it out?”

To this everyone on the coaching staff let out a huge laugh. “Don’t you worry, Marc,” said a guffawing McMillan while wiping a tear from his eye, “these are the Timberwolves. They’ll find a way to lose. Fans in the stands will gaze at the scoreboard during a tie game, with four minutes left, and remark to their guests there is no way the Wolves win. They know just as I know: these are the Wolves, and the Wolves are allergic to close victories. Now let’s get out there and play some crappy, boring basketball and leave with a victory!”

And so it was.

Our ongoing 41-part series continues with Brandon’s first Wolves game as part of our season ticket triumvirate. As you’ll notice, things didn’t quite go according to plan. Brandon is a longtime commenter and is the proprietor of World of B, a site dedicated to unicorns. Brandon?

Being a proud first-time season ticket holder, it didn’t take long for the reality of the Timberwolves’ low-end status to slap me across the face. Wondering if the Wolves had arrived on the scene, possibly turned a corner, rekindled a spark of excitement from the general populace? That’d be a no, as far as I’m concerned.

It started when my game one Guest of Honor canceled on me a few hours before tip-off. It was time to scramble for a new attendee willing to join me in the upper desk to scout the local roundball squad. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Friend one considered joining me, until he remembered he’d scheduled a haircut. Friend two was still sick from the previous night’s celebration and placed himself on the PUP list. Friend three didn’t even bother returning my call. A scroll through my cell phone contacts unearthed lost cause after lost cause; the few of my friends who passed the first test by liking basketball were soon disqualified due to an undeniable possession of a “life.”

With no accompaniment to the game, my disappointing fate was clear: eat the tickets, skip the game and watch from the couch. I am a season ticket-holder. I did not attend my first game. Awesome. Still, I had a duty to recap the goings-on, so I parked myself on the davenport and got to analyzing. Here is what transpired.

A back-and-forth contest ended up going to San Antone, 129-125 in double overtime. An ugly first half from both teams — missed shot after missed shot — gave way to an action-packed fourth quarter and overtimes, each team trading buckets and going on mini-runs until the dust cleared. Tony Parker turned in 55 points, Tim Duncan led the game with 18 uncalled molestations (right at his season average), and Jefferson led the T-Pups with 30.

Notes:

- This was a winnable game. The Spurs are beatable, currently featuring a roster of Duncan, Parker and what appears to be rented players from a local JV high school squad. Nice defense on Parker, by the way, who scored the easiest 55 points in NBA history (it’s true; I looked it up), which was so fun to watch I broke out into an anger-sweat and flung a pillow across my living room.

- I’m driving the Fire Randy Wittman bus and will accept all interested travelers. The Witt couldn’t figure out how to defend a team that played most of the game with three inept offensive players on the court. The T-Wolves ran around on the defensive end acting as if they’d never seen a pick-&-roll before. ‘Twas ugly.

- Why is Mike Miller driving and trying to create his own shot? I love the guy, but he may have to be put on a three-dribble quota, like in Team Handball. Anything more, and it’s a dollar fine.

- Guys, I’ve been working on an impression. Tell me what you think. Here’s me being Randy Foye. [Brandon dribbles a basketball across half-court, passes to nearest teammate on the perimeter, stands in place until possession is over.] Gawd, what a breathtaking playmaker.

- The starting five — Jefferson, Brewer, Gomes, Miller and Foye — are painful to watch together. On offense, it’s four guys standing around trying to get the ball to Jefferson, occasionally spelled by Mike Miller and Corey Brewer taking turns playing the crowd-favorite “Hey guys, watch me drive the lane!” game that always ends in a gorgeous off-balanced brick.

- Here’s your best lineup, as far as I’m concerned: Bassy, Miller, Love, Jefferson and I-don’t-care-who (here is where we all sigh deeply for having no options at center). Those four bring quality play to the table; with them, I see shades of hope. Jefferson does what he does, Love is a joy to watch, Bassy is lightning-quick and Miller can catch fire at any time. They’re legitimately exciting.

Perhaps I’ll even get to see them in person sometime.

Terrific seats to a sporting event can cause someone to exclaim, if only figuratively, that they could “reach out and touch the athletes.” In stark contrast, our season tickets to the Timberwolves games (shared with Brandon and Roughkat) could be described as “literally allowing us to reach out and touch the back of the wall in the upper deck.” Yes, we are in the last row, X, in section 203, which is almost directly behind the hoop the Wolves shoot at in the first half. That is not a complaint — actually, we are able to follow the action quite well from that vantage point; rather, we just want to set the scene. For our first game of the season (and the Wolves’ second home game), we treated the RBBH to her first-ever NBA game and saw the Wolves take on the Dallas Mavericks. We parked for free at a meter, paid $6 total for our tickets and bought one item at the concession stand, an icy cold cola, for $3.75. Thus a “family of two” was able to attend a pro sporting event for less than $10. The question: did we receive $10 worth of entertainment? Absolutely, though the night could have been better. Here are some thoughts from a 95-85 loss:

1) Kevin Love didn’t get into the game until the second quarter. Even as he ran in place during every timeout in the first quarter, practically yelling at Randy Wittman to put him in, Love remained firmly planted on the bench next to the likes of Brian Cardinal and Calvin Booth. Just listen to the song that played over the PA system during the game: All You Need is Love!

2) Randy Foye could do absolutely nothing against Jason Kidd, once a premier point guard and now one of the worst defensive players in the league.

3) Al Jefferson looked lost, confused and scared. Also, we barely saw the vaunted double post threat of Big Al and the Love-man together. High-post, low-post! Let’s go!

4) No unicycle bowl-kicking.

5) Whenever we yelled about any of problems 1-3, or complained about a general lack of cohesiveness, the RBBH mocked us by muttering in a fake voice, “Um, we spent $3 on these tickets and we expect some quality!”

6) The crowd could best be described as “sparse” or “nearly-comatose.”

For all 41 home games this year, we are requiring the bearer of the Wolves season tickets — whether it’s us, Roughkat, Brandon or someone who received the outstanding Row X seats as a gift for being awesome — to write a game recap. Game 1 falls to Roughkat’s special lady friend, whom he refers to as SELF (we think that’s special engaged lady friend but we can never be sure). Here are her impressions:

Apparently I agreed to write a recap of the Wolves game for this blog today when I went to the game last night without Roughkat. He was busy fighting a losing battle on his own basketball court, along with Joker. My friend and I were late for the game due to some personal trauma on the part of my friend (she’s from Iowa, it’s not entirely her fault) but arrived in the middle of the second quarter. Things I learned at this game:

- The wolves are terrible at free throws.

- The cheerleaders celebrated Halloween a little early. I never knew that firefighters wore bikinis, or that Snow White rocked hot pants and a tube top. Good to know.

- The wolves are hard up for half time entertainment. Last night, it consisted of a woman on a tall unicycle flipping plates and bowls from her foot onto her head. The grand finale was a successful flipping of a stack of 5 bowls to land on the bowls already on her head. Throughout the entire performance, my friend kept whispering that she hoped the woman would knock herself out with a poorly executed flip. This is a person who is an ER nurse, by the way. [Proprietor note: we LOVE the unicycle bowl-flipper and are furious we missed this game. Seriously].

- They don’t sell beer during the fourth quarter. No one had ever told me that before.

- I know the names of several of the Timberwolves players. This was exciting to me!

I think, in order to continue this winning streak, all of the remaining tickets should be signed over to me. We don’t want to mess with a good thing, after all.