The WGOM

2008-09 Game 6: Wolves at Blazers

November 8th, 2008 by GreekHouse

<GreekHouse>The Wolves kinda sucked last night, losing in a blowout to the Kings. However, I'm not quite as down about it as a lot of the other Wolves fans. Yeah, the Wolves defense wasn't great and there were quite a few easy baskets, but there were also tons of difficult jumpers that kept dropping. When a team shoots almost 55% from the field, it can rarely be attributed to just bad defense. Usually it's a combination of that and teams making a higher percentage of shots than they normally would.

On the other side of the ball, the Wolves managed to shoot just 43% from the field. Given the tremendous disparity in FG%, you'd think the Wolves would have lost by 30 points. Yet they only lost by a dozen. I'm not going to say the Wolves played well, I'm just saying this game gets a big "meh" in my book. Teams are going to have shooting nights like that, and when they do, all you can do is tip your hat to them.

So now the Wolves are 1-4 and some people are already crying and throwing in the towel for the season. The 1-4 looks particularly bad given their strength of schedule, but I'm also giving the start a big "meh" in my book. People (myself included) came into this season with lofty expectations for this team, so the start is somewhat of a reality check. The Wolves won 22 games last season, so even a much improved team will still kinda suck. On the plus side, Love is even better than expected and it seems that he has nowhere to go but up as he works himself into better shape and adjusts to the size and speed of the players in the NBA.

Tonight the Wolves play another team which looked to be much improved this year. Unfortunately for the Blazers, Oden when down literally minutes into the NBA season. But this Blazers team is good and should likely give a tired Wolves team a thorough ass whooping tonight.</GreekHouse>

<SBG>Last night was my first look at the 2008-09 Wolves and I'll confess that I wasn't watching all that closely, but what I saw made me feel encouraged about Kevin Love, but I'm less excited about the overall 2008-09 Wolves. Last year was pretty tough to take, what with Our Guy being shipped out to the eventual World Champions, while the Wolves were a punching bag. The time to mourn has passed now, though, and it's time to think about whether this team can build something worth watching. So, I promise not to despair like I did last year.

The problem with promising not to despair tonight is that the Wolves are playing a young and strong divisional rival in the Portland Trailblazers. We've helped them get to where they are (Foye for Roy), but all is not Rosy in Portland. As GreekHouse mentions above, last year's first overall pick Greg Oden got hurt the first game of the season and is out. That's discouraging, of course, but I wouldn't say that a sprained ankle is the end of the world. However, it's possible that he might not be the kind of player that the Blazers thought he might be. At least, that's what the Sport Guy thinks. I should say that relying on Bill Simmons for talent evaluation is a risky, at best, proposition, but sometimes it's clear that a guy can't play. I didn't see Oden play at all in the preseason (last night was my FIRST NBA action of the season), so I can't say. But, if he's not all that, the Blazers may not become the behemoth that I thought they might.

Portland is favored by eight points. I think they'll cover.</SBG>

Tags: Kevin Love, Sucking

This entry was posted by GreekHouse on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under 2008-09 Wolves Game Logs. It is one of 44 entries by the author. We are no longer accepting Letters to the Editor on this post.