Click here for the forum’s thread for tonight’s game against Miami
Game previews:
Tuesday’s challenge: Contain Minnesota center Al Jefferson.
”[He’s] a big monster in the middle,” Heat forward Shawn Marion said. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to send double-teams at him.”
Jonah Ballow/Timberwolves site posts audio from Kevin McHale, Kevin Love, Al Jefferson, and Randy Foye talking about tonight’s game.
From 13 consecutive losses to seven victories in their past nine games and a five-game winning streak, the Timberwolves have come a long way in the past 2 1/2 weeks. But there’s one thing they haven’t done: defeated a team with a winning record.
They get another chance tonight when Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat (19-17) visit Target Center for a game that could be a good measuring stick of how far this team has come…
Rodney Carney’s recent emergence has left almost no playing time for Rashad McCants, who hasn’t gotten off the bench in three of the past four games.
“He has been practicing hard, been working hard,” McHale said. “As always happens, if you do that, it seems like good things will happen for you.”
Jerry Zgoda/Star Tribune on Mario Chalmers:
The Wolves have won five consecutive games — their longest win streak since December 2005 — and seven of their past nine after they started the season 4-23. These past two weeks have helped quiet the grumbling among their most fervent fans that they traded away Chalmers for money and two uncertain future draft picks.
“I really like Mario, we liked him a lot,” McHale said, shrugging when asked if he regrets the trade and its timing. “We said we’d trade that pick, and then everything changed. That’s the way it is in this business sometimes.”
The team has scored at least 100 points six times in the past eight games and is playing with a confidence and free-wheeling attitude that wasn’t there under Wittman.
“For me, seeing them smile, seeing them high-fiving and belly-bumping, that’s why you play,” McHale said. “If you were a kid and you were 13 and you played the way we make them play in the NBA sometimes, every kid would play soccer. They’d go, ‘I’m not doing this.”’
That appeared to be the case under the taskmaster Wittman, the former Hoosier who graduated from the Bobby Knight school of coaching. This young team just never really responded to Wittman’s hard-line style.
“I just think people were beaten up a little bit, beaten down and just was tired of the situation,” Foye said. “When he came and took over, we knew things were going to change. We didn’t know how fast. We thought it would probably take longer.”
From Kare 11:
Randy Foye and Jason Collins welcomed 40 kids with diabetes to to the Way-Cool Cooking School in Eden Prairie.
The players helped the kids learn to prepare diabetic-friendly foods.
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