Flip’s Letting The Kids Play … And That’s Something

The 2014-15 Minnesota Timberwolves season is not going to be measured by wins and losses. With an NBA-worst 8-40 record going into Wednesday night’s game at the Target Center against the Miami Heat, that’s a good thing.

No, the ultimate success or failure of 2014-15 will be measured down the road by the development of the cadre of young players second-time-around Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders has at his disposal.

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He’s turning the reins over to the kids almost exclusively at this point. No. 1 overall pick Andrew Wiggins—acquired in the deal that sent All-Star Kevin Love to the Cleveland Cavaliers—is playing 34 minutes a game.

Second-year big man Gorgui Dieng averages close to 30. Second-year wing Shabazz Muhammad is getting more than 23 and rookie guard Zach LaVine is getting almost that many.

Even second-year forward Anthony Bennett is getting 16 minutes of burn a night.

Saunders, also the president of the team, understands this is going to be a process, but one that can be accelerated greatly by letting the kids play.

Will they drive him crazy with their mistakes? God, yes. But if he does it right, they will learn.

That’s part of the reasoning, almost certainly, behind continuing to give Dieng significant minutes even with veteran Nikola Pekovic back from his injury.

In the eight games since Pek returned on Jan. 21, he is averaging 27.8 minutes a game. Over that same span, Dieng is still getting 29.1 minutes a night and Saunders even experimented with starting the two of them together for four games.

But over the course of his coaching career, Saunders has never been afraid to commit big minutes to young players.

In his first full season in his first stint with the T-Wolves, 1996-97, 20-year-old Kevin Garnett played almost 39 minutes a game and 19-year-old Stephon Marbury averaged nearly 35.

A radical departure

Saunders’ approach with the kids is both necessary and a huge departure from his predecessor, Rick Adelman, who made a 23-year career as an NBA coach out of finding the furthest seat from his at the end of the bench and sending his young players there to rot.

In 23 years as an NBA head coach, Adelman gave at least 30 minutes a game to a player 23 or younger just eight times—twice with Joe Smith when Adelman coached the Golden State Warriors, twice with Ricky Rubio with Minnesota and once each with Jason Williams, Peja Stojakovic and Mike Bibby with Sacramento and Love in Minnesota.

Last season, Adelman let first-round pick Muhammad off the bench in just 37 games, for an average of 7.8 minutes.

Dieng got 13.6 minutes—much of that during the final 18 games of the season, when he averaged 30.2 a night after Pekovic went down with an injury (a recurring theme for Pekovic’s tenure in the Twin Cities).

Prior to that stretch, however, Dieng averaged only 6.5 minutes and was a healthy scratch 22 times.

So, you might call that a wasted year of development for both players.

The priority was different for the Timberwolves last season, I get that. They were chasing a playoff berth in a bid to entice Love to stay in Minneapolis before entering free agency in the summer of 2015.

In any event, as it turned out, the coaching change was probably the best thing that could have happened for the Timberwolves.

With Love gone and an emphasis on youth, that would have been the worst possible situation for Adelman, who goes together with young, rebuilding teams about as well as peanut butter and gravel.

The results might be frustrating for Minnesota fans, particularly given the constant starts and restarts in rebuilding during the unfortunate tenure of general manager David Kahn.

Because whenever you can draft three point guards within 14 picks if each other, you just have to do it, right?

But at least the franchise will move forward to 2015-16 with a pretty solid idea about the futures and ceilings of younger players such as Wiggins, LaVine, Muhammad, Dieng and Bennett.

That’s not a bad place to launch phase two of a rebuild.

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