There’s a new double-double guy in town.

I’m talking about Oleksiy Pecherov, of course.

To steal the old Christian Laettner line…the guy who’s not a center but played one on TV last night (good one to have on FSN) delivered a 20-10 game that led six Wolves in double figures on a night when the Wolves trailed 12-2 before you knew it and then led by as many as 15 points in the fourth quarter.

Afterward, I asked Corey Brewer (who led all Wolves with 21)  to explain — other than the opponent, obviously — about such disparate efforts and outcomes from Tuesday in Denver to Thursday in Detroit, where the Wolves finally showed some signs of playing together like Kurt Rambis envisions they will.

He attributed it basically to getting over the shock factor of playing without both Al Jefferson and Kevin Love Tuesday (it doesn’t hurt than these new Pistons certainly aren’t the Nuggets).

A few things about the game:

* The Wolves got active offensive play out of both Pecherov, who looks like he’s finding a bit of a groove now that he’s been back he has been back for five games from that broken wrist, and Ryan Hollins. Pecherov looks like he could be an interesting outside-inside mix with Big Al, but about three inches taller than KLove. It’ll be interesting to see how hard David Kahn thinks about picking up that $2.4 million contract option for 2010-11 he has to make on Pecherov by Halloween night.

* Rambis let Jonny Flynn stretch out to regular-season starting minutes for a point guard with 34 and Flynn responded with 18 points, six assists, a couple of steals and delivered a long, lovely bounce pass to Damien Wilkins in the third quarter that demonstrated his court vision.

* On the other hand, Ramon Sessions played just 14 minutes. Flynn and Sessions again did not play together. There’s just not enough minutes in a 48-minute game to keep both players happy big picture if you won’t, or can’t, play them together.

* Sasha Pavlovic played nine minutes (all in the first half) because he felt ill as the game went on, Rambis said.

*Wayne Ellington played nearly 16 minutes, went 3-for-4 on threes and is now shooting 53.3 (8-15) on threes. Nobody else is shooting better from that range than Brewer’s 38.9 percent.

* Brewer has led the Wolves in both games they’ve played without Jefferson and Love and he’s leading them in scoring in the seven preseason games with a 15.3 ppg average, ahead of Flynn’s 14.4 average.

Afterward, assistant coach Bill Laimbeer stopped in the press room on his way out of the arena where he played for the Pistons and coached the WNBA Shock all those seasons and said, “That was fun to watch.”

The Wolves finish their preseason schedule tonight in Sioux Falls, S.D., against a Toronto team that ran away from them in the first quarter at Target Center two weeks ago.

The season opener is just  five days away.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 1:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.