After a solid(really phenomenal for their standards) 8-8 start to the season, the Minnesota Timberwolves have fallen apart. They sit at 14-33, and have lost 13 of their last 15 games. The younger players on the team are reportedly unhappy with interim head coach Sam Mitchell.
“I tell Zach all the time, when he gets through this, he’s going to be a much better player because he’s going to have went through the fire,” Mitchell said earlier this month after LaVine broke out of a shooting slump. “He’s going to be tried and tested. He’s going to have felt low and dejected sometimes. But that’s how point guards are made.”
When presented with that theory, LaVine appeared to grit his teeth.
“It’s not fun. Sometimes unfair,” LaVine said. “But he’s the coach, I’m the player and sometimes that’s what you have to deal with. You can’t really do anything about it but play good on the court.”
There is a battle of wills going on in Minnesota between an old-school coach and a roster built around new-school talent. The team’s surprising 8-8 start has been followed by a sobering 6-24 stretch that has left some players quietly grumbling about their 52-year-old interim coach.
Mitchell believes his approach is starting to pay dividends for his youngest players — 20-year-olds Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns and LaVine, 23-year-old Shabazz Muhammad — who are tasked with rescuing a woebegone franchise.
But nearly half the roster of 15 players privately expressed concerns to The Associated Press about Mitchell that centered on three basic tenets: His outdated offensive system, his tendency to platoon his rotations and a lack of personal accountability for the struggles. The players spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize their head coach.
Mitchell was appointed interim head coach after head coach and president Flip Saunders passed away due to Hodgkins lymphoma earlier this year.
It doesn’t sound like things are going too well in Minnesota, and I would be surprised if the Wolves kept Mitchell on as head coach past this season. The criticisms of his antiquated offensive system are valid. In today’s small-ball, pace-and-space league, teams need to adapt, and Mitchell hasn’t done that. He doesn’t fully utilize the 3-point line. With that sort of style, you can’t hope to be competitive against a team like the Warriors.
Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor commented on the team’s current standing, expressing frustration about the team’s recent struggles. From Krawczynski:
Taylor said he wants to be able to see tangible progress from the young core from the beginning of the season to the end. That it appeared to be the inverse before a win over the Grizzlies and a competitive loss at Cleveland on Monday is what concerned him the most.
“If we would have lost the first 12 games and then all of a sudden now the last 16 games or so be playing .500, maybe our record would be the same but I would be feeling a lot better about it,” Taylor said. “We started out pretty good and now we’re just having difficulty finishing games — that makes all of us concerned about how long is it going to take for us to get some wins in here with the young guys.”
I love Minnesota’s young core. Wiggins and Towns are phenomenal talents, and LaVine has all the tools to be a star. Mitchell might not be the right coach for this team. We’ll see whether or not the Timberwolves decide to keep him on board past this year.
