The Minnesota Timberwolves won last night in overtime against the Utah Jazz. The Jazz were winners of 7 of their last 9 and were desperately trying to get people to believe in a ‘late season’ run, which doesn’t seem to be panning out. Now Flip Saunders is mad about the Utah Jazz commentators.
According to Jerry Zgoda of the Star Tribune:
Instead of being in a celebratory mood, he was incensed after he returned to a joyous locker room and found what he said were 25 text messages informing him of comments made by Utah’s television broadcast earlier in the game. …
Jazz announcers said, to paraphrase, that teams purposely losing games to improve draft lottery odds by dressing only seven available players is bad for the league, bad for fans who pay good MONEY to see Kevin Garnett and the league needs to do something about it. …
“That’s totally irresponsible, we’re not tanking games,” Saunders said. “If that’s so, then [Utah] got beat by a team who was tanking. … We’re playing to WIN. Our guys are out there: We won two games ago at New York, we lost in the fourth quarter against Charlotte last night. We’re not tanking games. It is irresponsible for them to go on TV saying that. If you work at ESPN, you get fired for saying stuff like that.”
Flip definitely has a right to be mad, but the Utah Jazz commentators were merely making an observation because the Timberwolves only had 7 active players.
