GH And Petey's Timberwolves Blog

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Sniff, Sniff

While it's not 100% official yet, it looks like my roommate, best friend, and co-blogger will soon be leaving me for a job in sunny California. On the plus side for all of our readers, they have internet out there as well, so it won't affect any of you too much. As a result, I'll probably provide most of the Timberwolves specific content, while Petey will likely give you more general NBA content.

The reason you haven't heard from him for a while is that he's been living out there in a hotel and been extremely busy with work and deciding whether or not to take the job out there. This is also the reason he was never able to finish up his previews of the different conferences. However, for those of you who would like an interesting an entertaining preview of the East and West conferences, you should check out what Bill Simmons has to say. He has a few surprises in store.

  1. The Lakers at #3 in the West. For those of you who have been reading, we have been discussing the Lakers and how they'll likely be better than people thought. However, I think Simmons might be going a bit overboard here. However, he does pick them to lose in the first round of the playoffs.
  2. The Kings and Rockets miss the playoffs. He has the Kings all the way down at #10. I'm not quite ready to count the Kings out yet, but they certainly have an uphill climb. They've started out horribly, losing again to Seattle by 30 last night. They're probably the second most disfunctional team in the league, behind the Blazers.
  3. He's giving Charlotte 9 wins on the season. As I've said before, the Bobcats will be bad, but they won't be that bad. They've already won one game, and have been embarrassed in none. Not the characteristics of a 9-73 team. However, we'll see how they respond when they start losing to the Western Conference powerhouses by 40 points.
  4. Cleveland takes third in the East. They certainly haven't looked that good yet (though they had a very impressive comeback on national TV last night) and I think they're still a bit young. Of course, if Ziggy can keep shooting like he did last night, they'll go a long way.

Of course, there are other interesting things in there as well, but these are the biggest ones I found. I recommend reading the whole thing for those of you who are interested.

From the T-Wolves camp, they had another tough and disappointing loss against the Pacers the other night. The Pacers just completely dominated the game for the first 3 quarters until it looked like they finally realized that there was a basketball game going on and had a chance to win it at the buzzer, but came up just short. On the plus side, the Wolves were almost able to overcome being outrebounded 47-30, and a terrible free throw shooting night by KG (6-14) to almost get the W. On the minus side, the Pacers blew us out for most of the game without Ron "Rap Star" Artest or Reggie Miller. This is the same Pacers team that lost to the Clippers the subsequent night at home by a score of 102-68. For those of you who've never heard of the Clippers, they're currently the third best professional basketball team residing in the city of Los Angeles (behind the Lakers and the Sparks).

I'm gonna play the denial card here, and say that the reason they lost so badly was because they used up everything they had in the tank to beat Minnesota the previous night. A boy can dream, can't he?