minnesota sports teams got some bad injury voodoo...heard that Webster is going to be available to play tomorrow, don't know if thats been confirmed though

Anyone else think Beasley is going to **** things up when he comes back?

Defense?!?!?!?

Due to the lack of one inarguable solid defensive statistic, it usually takes two seasons or more to recognize a typical improvement in a player's defense. However, from where he was two seasons ago, Kevin Love's defensive improvement has been anything but typical. He has gone from defensive atrocity to defensive asset. That's right, not just a hide-able entity, but an actual asset. It doesn't matter what metric you want to use, he's gotten better. Synergy Sports' PPP? He's given up .78 PPP, including .65 in the post (good for top 20 post defender in the league). Opponents' PER? When covering C's he overcomes the typical 2 or 3 inch differential in height to give up a 12.1 PER (league average is 15). When covering PF's he gives up a mere 10.5 PER Last year he gave up 12.4 to C's and 16 to PF's. Defensive Rating? He's gone from giving up career numbers of 109, 109, and 108 to a very solid 99 this season. Due to Darko's decreased minutes Kevin Love has had a lot more responsibility as a post defender this season as well. Darko has recently had memorable performances against Blake Griffin and Lamar Odom, but for the most part Love has been manning the opposition's best post scorer. If you disagree with statistical evidence of defensive improvement, you can watch the game and probably reach the same conclusion. He has greatly stepped up his help defense as well and raised his effort a ton. He'll never be a guy who racks up blocks, but he has challenged a lot more shots (both inside and outside) this season than last. He has some improvement to do on the perimeter against stretch 4's, but he has not been burned badly yet this season in a place on the court where he was burned semi-nightly last year. In fact, due to his solid shut-down ability this year combined with a still excellent (although lower) DRB% and high minutes, Kevin Love is actually in the top 10 of defensive win shares this season with 1.1. It's early, but he's tied with LeBron so that's pretty cool (Ricky has 1.0... it's cool when your two best offensive players are also two good defensive players). Love's defensive improvement more than makes up for any drop in rebounding numbers.

http://www.canishoopus.com/2012/1/27...to-more-better

In addition to all that, I've seen him switch onto some pretty good guards during some possessions and stay in front of them/contest missed shots.

lol

That's even more impressive than I assumed from watching. But yeah, obviously he is miles ahead of where he was last year or the year before. The whole team is defensively especially at his position and Rubio's they're much better. I think if Webster can play heavy minutes the SG spot will suddenly improve a bunch defensively too.

I'm not sure if Webster is primarily going to be a SG or a SF, but he will be a huge improvement at either if he plays as well as he did before surgery.

I was trying to think about how the national media tards could put an "LA spin" on the Love contract situation had he signed for five years.

My assumption was it would be 'suggested' that Love wanted to play elsewhere but stayed since the Wolves were offering such a gargantuian amount of money and years.

And since when the eff is $60M guaranteed a "minny" deal? THEY PAID HIM THE MAX AMOUNT OF MONEY.

cha,

your homerism is ridiculous if you seriously want people to credit Love with being a capable defender. He's just not, he has value as a NBA player and the contract is fair, his D is a pretty glaring negative though. With Love, the team is completely unable to hide a bad wing defender and opposing guards in aggregate are nearly always more effective than usual. I'm not hating, it's a fact that Love is a horrific help defender. He's undersized and slow with poor footwork and willingness on rotations, which make up a huge % of getting a stop.

It's not a coincidence that Darko gets stuck on various 4s from time to time, and it's not like Darko is some fleet-footed jump-machine like Josh Smith.

Citing DRtg and counterpart stats and defensive winshares is completely assinine. I'm surprised you didn't break out David Berri's insanely awful metric, can't remember what its called. Last year they called Love the most valuable player in the league without batting an eye while we were on the way to about 22 pythag wins and 17 actual wins. From memory they credited the entirety of a defensive stop to the person who got the dreb which may or may not be hilarious.

Love can't create vs double teams and certain matchups, rebounds at an incredible rate, is extremely intelligent at creating space to shoot jumpers and 3s, and plays no (help) D. Without taking it too far, history suggests that package of traits as a NBA player don't help the team win all that many games (17 out of 82, in fact). There's no way Chris Bosh with last year's squad don't get us to 25-35ish wins so colour me sceptical of claims of Love being a t10 player.

J.J. Barea 2012-01-19 sprained left ankle is out indefinitely
Michael Beasley 2012-01-07 sprained right foot is out indefinitely
Wesley Johnson 2012-01-25 illness played Wednesday against Dallas
Malcolm Lee 2011-12-30 left knee surgery is expected to miss six weeks
Brad Miller 2011-12-10 left knee surgery is out indefinitely
Luke Ridnour 2012-01-25 sore left knee missed Wednesday’s game against Dallas
Anthony Tolliver 2012-01-25 sore wrist played Wednesday against Dallas
Martell Webster 2011-12-09 back surgery is out indefinitely

should offer all these guys for Dirk, same impact apparently

We get it, you don't think Love is that good.

Not many support points for your argumentation here just fyi. Quite a bit of hand-waving. Which is fine - this is a casual message board forum. But to call out Cha's points as assinine and that his homerism is what's leading him to his view of K-Love is contradictory to your approach to this issue.

My view (based on the authority of my opinion, which is as important as you want it to be) is that K-Love is not as good at D as that article ends up claiming, not is he as bad as you seem to think. However, he's *much* closer to the article's claim than the claim you seem to be making.

Out of curiosity, how many starting 4s (or throw in backups too but that seems like too much work to ask you to do if you really think K-Love sucks at D as much as it seems you do) in the league would you rank above K-Love at defense?

Rubio to Love oop was actually Rubio's greatest pass of the year. Not sure if I'll watch the rest of the game or just keep rewatching that play

Was gonna say Beasely looks terrific but then he just had a horrible cross-court turnover/ lose man for open 3 on D sequence so...

Clearly Pek reads this thread btw.

What a good game. Great game from Ricky and Pek. Good team effort from most everyone else.

I don't see much in Randolph. And Beasley can piss off.

edit: Pek giving a postgame interview right now.

wow at holding one of the better offensive teams to 79 points and beating the spurs and mavs twice already is also pretty awesome...team probably hadn't won 4 four total games against those two in the past 3 or 4 years

pretty well written imo. You could easily see his improvement in the Bucks game(vs bogut) and the Nawlins game(vs Emeka). Obv those two are not offensive juggernauts, but he held his own and played very good defense vs them.

Pretty cool that advanced stats also support this as well. Adelman obv has helped also.

Great win imo. Pek was awesome, Darko had one of his best games of the year (see what i did there?). Rubio was just spectacular; he's so good, 18pts 10 assists and 2 turnovers.

Beasely, some good, lots of bad.
Webster good to see out there.

Adelmen with a great game too. I thought it was a little bit questionable to have Wes on the floor in crunch time but then he came up with that huge block on Duncan.

ETA that Williams is starting to look like he's gonna be a superstar.

P.P.S. Sid Hartman is just embarrassing himself at this point

this game was great. Wes played agressive again(not that well, but ok at least). Pec played well offensively and defensively.

Derrick Williams took advantage of bonner on him. I think that was the difference down the stretch.

Rubio is amazing. Just great at finding the open man on the offensive end and he played fairly good defense on parker(parker was great in the 4th quarter).

Love was meh by his standards.

Beasley I thought was playing great for 2 minutes but then he completely lost it. He tried to take over the game every time it was swung his way and he looked like an idiot. The thing that made me hate him the most was the fact that when the Spurs called a timeout(with under a minute left in the game) the wolves had just scored a bucket and were exchanging high fives and congrats etc. He just sat on the sidelines and kind of pouted like a bitch. Just bugs me that he has a bad game and when we do something we havent done in 12 years(beat the spurs 2x in a season) he sulks.

That would be real sucky of Beasley if that's what happened. I just rewatched on DVR because I didn't remember seeing what you reported.

Frankly, it didn't happen at all like you say it did.

Webster came out and gave Love a jumping chest bump. Then in succession, Tolliver, someone in a suit, and Beasley gave Love high fives out on the court. Beasley was then in the circle with the rest of the bench players during the timeout, and then was standing with everyone else on the bench as time wound down.

I've no clue what you were watching.

wow, awesome!

Having 7/15 of you team unable to play is not the same thing as having your superstar unavailable, and suggesting we could trade 7 scrubs for one superstar is just a stupid suggestion. We had to play short handed - we had one PG and one (bad ball handling) SG and zero SFs available for the whole game, and we smoked the world champs on their home court. It was a great win imo.

Ask any GM in the league who they'd rather have right now - Bosh or Love. I think suggesting Bosh is better than Love is pretty ridiculous.

I think your opinion is based on seeing things that Love did prior to this year. Either that, or you've not seen enough of him, or you're clearly biased against him for some reason. I am a homer, but I have watched every minute of every game he's played this year. He is not currently who you say he is.

Good post.
Yeah, the weight loss and the new coach have helped his game immensely. It must be a weight off his shoulders to not have to worry about getting benched at any time for no apparent reason - FU Rambis!!

%%%I'm sure last year's coaching had nothing to do with us winning 17 games/sarcasm%%%

There's no way anyone will ever know definitively, but if Bosh is on the Wolves last season instead of Love, I doubt we win as many as 17.




Beasley just sucks. I love the fact Adelman didnt start him or let him finish the game, but I think he played too many minutes. I'd like to see Webster get some of Beasley's minutes.




Pek!

We hadnt beat SA twice in a row in a season since 2000

loldarko hehe

I was thinking the same thing about Sid

yup - Beasley sucks. Love - SA didnt want him to score - they were making that tough for him. One key play he made a great play on, when we were up by (2 or 4?) late in the game, throwing the ball in bounds with 4 on the shot clock, Love gets it, drives around Splitter and shoots a hook shot over Duncan's attempted block - swish!

Parker is really good. Rubio played great D on him.

nice!

We had 25 losses by the time we got our 9th win last season.

anyway, great win tonight, Rubio is a stud. lol euroball for burying his talents.

smh on darko, bro scared the crap out of blake, wanted no part of the serbian gangster.

Anyway, of all starting 4s itl, I can't really think of a worse one on help D. DeJuan Blair is similar size and athletically but he's learned to rotate more effectively. Love's at least average on defending post-ups and his dreb has value of course so you can definitely hide him if we can get a really active defensive 5. Unfortunately since we have no picks in this draft that doesn't look too likely. You'd have to be literally blind to not see Love's inability on help D and rotations tho.

this is such an incredible gif