Dances with Wolves

Skipbo! Hope you all made it through the lines and got your Shania Twain autograph.

Last week I learned a lesson about successful teamwork. Today, many organizations put all their faith in a system, feeling that if the system is strong enough, it doesn't matter who they plug into the slots. Upon much reflection, I learned otherwise as I took my two nieces to see those feisty, fightin', growlin, mighty Minnesota Timberwolves. I doubt few have suffered through the seven miserable seasons as much as I. From Scott Roth to Bob McCann through Marques Bragg, I have learned the NBA through the woes and struggles of our local franchise. Yes, I am one of the few and far between, a Wolfies' fan. And I have been rewarded. They have won all three times I have seen them in person.

No other professional sports franchise has been so inept for so long a period. Each season the improvement that is supposed to occur with an expansion team has been kicked away as we hear excuse after excuse. Coaches come and are fired. Players are brought in and sent away. We have never been lucky in the draft, and up until last season, the club never made a good trade. Someone could literally write a book on how not to run a franchise simply by recounting the Timberwolves' history.

The current team was supposed to be competitive, and finally with local legend Kevin McHale in charge, the organization seemed to finally have some competence at the top. But this season has been more disappointing than any of the others because it has just been more of the same. The talent is more abundant than ever (no Charles Shackelfords, Gary Leonards or Gunther Vetras). The coach, Flip Saunders, seems to walk the walk of a man who knows what he is doing (unlike Jimmy Rodgers or Sidney Lowe). Yet just like previous seasons, the losses come about twice as often as the wins.

A team with Christian Laettner, Tom Gugliotta, J.R. Rider and Kevin Garnett should win more often than it has. But despite being a league of stars, the NBA isn't only about talent and talent alone. It's about being able to make an extra pass to get a higher percentage shot. It's about being able to quickly guard an open man off of a double team. It is a league of mismatches, of being able to exploit the other team's weakness. What ails the Wolves isn't so much not having the players to compete, it's a matter of not utilizing the players into a system that takes advantage of what they do well, and minimizes what they don't do so well.

With the move to center, Laettner is a prime example of this problem. While not the prototype post-up, shot blocking, rebounding intimidator like Hakeem Olajuwan, David Robinson, Shaquille O'Neal or Patrick Ewing, he is more athletic than most centers, and with his outside shooting ability combined with his penetrating and passing skills, he has become the Wolve's most effective player. There's a unwritten rule in the NBA that a team cannot be a championship team without a dominating center. The Wolves have bought into this, and despite Laettner's unique skills and improved production, they remain puzzled how best to utilize him.

The one position the Wolves are truly lacking is probably the most important position on the court- point guard. Terry Porter is certainly a step up from Chris Smith, Winston Garland and Scottie Brooks, but he is no longer a full time player. Darrick Martin has shown signs of being a better than average player, but too often makes bad decisions at crucial times in the game. Without an adequate point guard, too often the offense breaks down, and the aforementioned mismatches are not taken advantage of. Rather than hide this weakness, the Wolves continue to try and play despite of it. Rather than use the passing skills of Gugliotta, Garnett, Rider and Laettner, the Wolves seldom do anything to utilize that part of their offense.

The most successful coach in the team's history was Bill Musselman. What made him different was he took the players he had, developed a system foreign to the rest of the league and was successful because he didn't try to compete playing the other team's game. This is a useful lesson to be learned by anyone interested in effective teamwork. The moral of the Wolves' seven years of bad luck is that if a team doesn't take into account the individual skills of its players, they will not be successful. You can increase your talent but that doesn't mean a better end result if the system is what is broken in the first place. The people involved are often more important than the systems in place- an often overlooked concept.