GH And Petey's Timberwolves Blog

Monday, January 02, 2006

Losing it

The games. Two brutal losses.

After singing EG's praises after the Sonics game, he seemed to revert to his old three-point-hucking self against the Magic. I think he just got too much confidence after that game and decided it was OK for him to take bad shots again. But I think Casey may have had a talk with him because he did a better job against Miami.

Speaking of Miami. The Wolves played really well--for about one-and-a-half quarters. After taking a 7-point lead into the second quarter, I was worried that the Wolves bench was going to get manhandled by a superior Heat bench. But they didn't, and actually played quite well.

The Wolves actually had a chance to take a huge lead in the first quarter, but they missed a good deal of easy shots. KG and Wally both seemingly had about 3 or 4 shots rim out, and there were a handful of missed layups. Yet despite this, the Wolves took a 3 point lead into halftime.

Then, the second half started. The Wolves did an alright job at first, but their bad luck in shooting seemed to continue. Then, as the Heat took the lead and started to pull away, the Wolves seemed to go into panic mode. It was like some of those games early in the season where they seemed to forget that KG was even alive. As the Heat pulled away, the Wolves shot selection got worse and worse. It was kind of a snowball effect.

Casey cannot let this happen. So we blow a huge lead (that might have been an even huger lead) and are now down by 10. That's fine. Call timeout, regroup the team and run a play for KG. So it's not the situation we had hoped for, but the game is far from over. Just get the team together and make sure everyone knows what they're doing. Instead, the Wolves looked disorganized on the court, and nobody seemed interested in getting the best shot possible. Everyone just kind of took whatever shot was there (except KG, who rarely touched the ball).

McCants recent performances have been truly awful. In the second half of the Miami game, he tried to run a break 1-on-3, then jumped about two inches in the air, flung the ball in the air, and almost hit the underside of the rim. At this point, I screamed out "What the hell?", even though nobody else was around to hear it. I'm not sure what his deal is, but he seems to be pretty good at getting to the rim, but once he's there, he has no idea how to finish. If he can't do this, then he's pretty useless to the team. We don't need another jump shooter (not that he's particularly good at that either). The reason the Wolves drafted him was because they needed someone who can slash to the basket. I'm not giving up on him yet, because seeing how well he can get to the basket is promising. He just needs to figure out how to get the ball past the 7-footers.