Minnesota coach Sam Mitchell benched all his starters en masse
If you tuned in midway through the third quarter of Minnesota’s game against Milwaukee on Friday night, well, shame on you. It’s a Friday night, and unless you were being paid to watch these teams, you should be doing anything but tuning into a Bucks/Timberwolves game.
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If you did tune in, though, by the time the fourth quarter hit you were probably wondering if a team-wide case of the flu had hit the Wolves. Ricky Rubio, Gorgui Dieng, Tayshaun Prince, Anthony Wiggins and even Rookie of the Year favorite Karl-Anthony Towns (effectively the team’s starting lineup) were all removed from the game at around the eight-minute mark, with four of the players never to return.
Rubio got to hang out a minute longer than his teammates, but Wolves coach Sam Mitchell did not have the cheeriest response to the 20-4 run Milwaukee hit Minnesota with to begin the second half.
Via Pro Basketball Talk, here are the highlights from Mitchell’s half-minute press conference following the game:
“This is going to be quick,” he said.
And it was. Mitchell’s terse postgame remarks spanned 30 seconds and included no questions.
“I thought the guys who played in the second half played hard,” he began. “Played together, played with a type of intensity and energy we needed to. I thought some of the guys in the first group didn’t play that way. And they have to understand, every single night you have to earn it. You don’t get to sleepwalk your way through 20, 25 minutes of the game and then decide you gotta play. … So the guys that didn’t play in the second half, after we pulled ’em out, hopefully they understand that there’s two sides on the court. You have to play both sides.”
The Wolves, with Dieng returning for a six-point, four-rebound, two-block run in the fourth quarter, played better with the starters off the court. The finishing outfit made the game respectable, outscoring the Bucks by eight to finish the contest, forcing Milwaukee to re-insert three starters in the game’s final minutes to preserve MKE’s eventual 116-101 win.
Worse, the Minnesota starters that Mitchell pulled were largely on the court for the second part of the second quarter, registering a collective -13 during that span. That’s a -29 disadvantage for the Timberwolves in roughly a quarter’s worth of time and that’s … that’s not acceptable.
The loss came on the heels of an afternoon that saw ESPN’s Zach Lowe report that Minnesota had engaged with talks with these same Bucks, as the Wolves were gauging whether or not to end the Ricky Rubio experiment in favor of adding a package centered on Khris Middleton:
After some initial talks, the Wolves told the Bucks they would swap Ricky Rubio for Middleton, and when the Bucks declined, the Wolves even discussed the possibility of tossing in a protected 2016 first-round pick, per league sources familiar with the matter.
(Why are the Timberwolves so obsessed with turning Zach LaVine into a point guard?)
Because sports are usually played to really terrible scripts, of course Middleton went off in the Milwaukee win on Friday – the swingman scored 32 points on 16 shots, his third-highest point total of the season.
Following the contest, Rubio defended Mitchell’s move:
Rubio said Mitchell’s decision was justified. “We played terrible,” he said. “You can’t make that many mistakes on defense, and we can’t let anybody outwork us. And that’s what happened. … We couldn’t find our pride out there. We can have a lot of talent. But if we don’t play hard, it doesn’t matter.”
In the heat of that chilly moment, it’s somewhat understandable to want to banish everyone from rookie Anthony-Towns (born two weeks’ into Chicago’s 72-10 season) to the veteran Tayshaun Prince (born three months before Magic Johnson’s first NBA title), and it’s always good for developing players to get a sense of the game from observing on the bench.
Minnesota is so young, from top to bottom, that it wasn’t as if Sam Mitchell was handing minutes to a cadre of geezers that won’t be around when the team turns the corner. Youngsters Shabazz Muhammad, LaVine, Dieng, and Tyus Jones all got significant burn. Big man Greg Smith feels like someone who’s been around since 2003, but he’s only just turned 25. Project shooter Damjan Rudez, at age 29, was the team’s resident greybeard.
It’s only if Minnesota (which has gone 11-35 after an 8-8 start) makes this a habit, then we’ll have a problem. Because that will mean, concurrently, the Wolves are still playing uninspired and terrible defense (the team is 29th in the NBA at that end), and Sam Mitchell is still going scorched earth with his indelicate reactions.
That’s not ideal. Not for any team, least of all one that hasn’t made the playoffs since 2004.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
