Up next: Brandon and the Bucks Friday night at Target Center

Posted on November 5th, 2009 – 10:27 PM
By Jerry Zgoda

The 1-4 Wolves worked out for about two hours today at Target Center the afternoon after Wednesday’s late loss to the Celtics.

A couple topics of interest today:

* The Wolves have hired former Wolves guard Darrick Martin for that player-personnel coach job that’s part of David Kahn’s plan to make the Wolves the league leaders in player development.

Martin was one of several candidates auditioned — former Wolves Tony Campbell and Chris Carr were among that group — and it’s probably no coincidence that the team ultimately chose a former point guard. Make sense with so much invested in Jonny Flynn, Ramon Sessions and Ricky Rubio.

The other part of that player development equation is the Dallas-based clinical psychologist Kahn has hired. Dr. Yolanda Brooks has been around the team quite a bit to observe its dynamics. Kahn hired her as a resource to help players with any off-court issues they might have.

* Rookie point guard Brandon Jennings comes to town tomorrow night in a meeting with Flynn, two of the top 10 players taken in last summer’s draft. They’ve already met twice in the preseason. Jennings’ regular season start has been, well, impressive. A work colleague and admitted Bucks fans texted me the other night after watching Jennings play Detroit and the essence of the text was “OMG.”

Here’s a point I’ve been thinking about: Kahn waited until August — more than six weeks after the draft and nearly three months after he was hired — to hire a coach because he said he wanted to be sure he wanted to be absolutely sure he was making the right call with such an important decision.

Isn’t a little incongruous that he took two point guards with those fifth and sixth picks and then hired a coach who runs an offense that, well, doesn’t minimize the point guard but certainly doesn’t entrust the ball in their hands and rely upon them to create.

I asked Sessions after practice today the difference between playing point guard for the Bucks’ system  and the Wolves and he basically said Scott Skiles was a point guard, Rambis was a big guy.

I’ve got a feeling some folks in time might start making comparisons between Jennings and Flynn simply using stats.

The comparison is obvious because they were four picks apart in the same draft class, but if there’s a discrepancy –and so far there has been — it might well be attributed to systems of play.

You look at all those Lakers and Bulls title teams that ran the triangle and none of them had a dynamic point guard. Can one thrive in such an offense?

Who’s not to say Flynn wouldn’t be putting up the same kind of numbers as Jennings — 22 points, 5.3 assists, 1.7 assists in three games — if he was playing in Skiles’ point-guard oriented offense rather than the triangle.

Your thoughts?

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