Large Hadron Collider nearly ready.

The Wolves have resigned Telfair. No word on the details yet.

Jefferson has apparently purchased a new home in Minnesota that formerly belonged to another famous Minnesota athlete.
Timberwolf Al Jefferson has bought ex-Twin Johan Santana's $1.6 million house in Golden Valley. Santana, with the New York Mets, still owns a $3.9 million house at Bearpath.

GreekHouse examines the trade of O.J. Mayo from the Timberwolves to the Grizzlies.

<GreekHouse>I haven't got a whole lot to say at this point. From the Twolves perspective, this season is really starting to drag. From an NBA perspective, the season is getting really exciting!</GreekHouse>

Yeah, the Wolves are playing Cleveland and possibly the best player in the league tonight, LeBron James.
What I want to talk about is that the Wolves bought out Theo Ratliff, allowing him to (probably) head to Detroit for the rest of the season. Ratliff, of course, came over to Minnesota in the KG trade, [...]

<GreekHouse>The Wolves had a pretty good stretch that had everyone feeling a lot better about the team, but the recent skid has brought them back to reality. Still, the Wolves are playing better ball than they were a month ago. The problem is that they're still worse than most of the teams in [...]

<GreekHouse>I just realized I hadn't posted anything and that SBG hadn't posted anything for this game. I was gonna write some stuff about Foye and McCants, but I guess that will wait until next time.
In any case, here's your not so sweet game thread.</GreekHouse>

GH and I had worked up a mid-season conversation on the Wolves, which I intended to post after game 41. As it started at the beginning of the 8 game death march, it was basically a bunch of man they suck stuff. A funny thing happened on the way to game 41. [...]

<GreekHouse>The Wolves have emerged from their brutal 8 game stretch with a 2-6 record. They played as expected for the first 4 games, but really came on strong during the last 4 and almost pulled off the upset of the season at Boston on Friday. The result of the game was disappointing, but [...]

[SBG] I was late to the party tonight, but I made it. The Wolves close out the first half of the season looking to get their seventh win of the season against the team with the best record in the West, Phoenix (30-12). The Wolves have half a dozen wins this year, [...]

I don't have a lot to say tonight, but luckily, GH has put together a good pre-game read. The line is GS -8 and the O/U is 212. I'm like a novice sailor who can't see land when it comes to predicting the Wolves. I'll go GS and the points.
<GreekHouse>

The news on [...]

The number one story line for tonight's game is that Portland is the blueprint for where the Wolves want to be. They have stunned the league with their strong start -- and that's without the number one overall pick in the draft, Greg Oden. Including Oden, the Blazers have a stunning 8 players [...]

SBG doesn't seem to be around, so I'll fill in for him tonight. I assume this also means I'll spend most of the game log talking to myself. The Wolves come into this game off of a dominating performance by our young boys in New Orleans. Dallas is 9-5 on the season, [...]

TNHP went on vacation last week for Thanksgiving and I'm probably going to put it on hold for a couple more weeks while I finish up school for the term. In the meantime, hopefully this will hold you over.
Rather than my standard discussion+problems, I will do something different today. I will first present [...]

Last week I talked about expectation with a short note at the end about sports and expectation. Whether or not you realize it, expectation is at the heart of every strategic decision that a team makes. If a team signs a big name free agent, it is in an attempt to maximize their [...]

I am going to be gone this evening and so I'm delaying posting of The Nation Has Problems until tomorrow. Also, I haven't written it yet.
Instead, I thought I would pose a different kind of question to The Nation. Ratliff was included in the Garnett trade almost entirely on the basis of expiring [...]

Expectation
One of the most important concepts in sports as well as probability deals with the concept of expectation. Statistics such as ERA or points per game are attempts to use expectation to quantify how good a player or team is. Although these stats aren't perfect, they are based on the concept of expectation.
In [...]

I still remember when it hit me. I was sitting at my computer last season, looking at the Twolves payroll on hoopeshype.com and getting depressed over how terrible it looked. I had a revelation.  It was one of those moments of total clarity.  The Wolves will never win a championship with Garnett. [...]

The Monty Hall Problem
When I first announced that I would be doing this feature on a regular basis, Moss asked me a question about whether a person on the game show "Deal or No Deal" should have switched cases at the very end. I noted that it didn't matter whether or not he decided [...]

I had written an elaborate introduction to probability theory, but my post got to be a little bit long and I wanted to shorten it. It people are interested, I can post it later. For this post, I had a couple of interesting examples and wanted to cut to the chase.
Conditional Probabilities

Often times [...]

The first thing they always did was count you.
We're going to be a bit more sophisticated than the counting you did in high school, but I imagine this will be familiar to a lot of you anyway. A lot of the stuff I write about has to do with discrete, finite probabilities. In [...]

The other day I posted an interesting stats question in the middle of the comments of one of SBG's posts. To be honest, the reason I posted it was because I hadn't solved it yet and I wanted to know the answer. I figured that it didn't really involve any deep theoretical math [...]

Get your first look at KG in his new Celtics uniform here:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/trainingcamp07/news/story?id=3051778
As usual, KG destroys the opposition with 19 points and 16 rebounds while juggling 5 tennis balls and donating $3.6 million to charity. Immediately after the game, he ripped the game ball into 6 pieces with his bare hands and gave each piece [...]

I don't normally have special contacts of any kind, but today an inside source sent me some pictures of a Lake Minnetonka property that recently went on the market. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to post these pictures here, but I will give out as much information as I can.
This house is alleged to [...]

Earlier tonight, I was debating with a friend over the existence of clutch hitting (I was of course arguing against it). I stumbled upon this article, which gives a pretty good argument saying that clutch hitting does indeed exist.  (Note: This article is a few years old.  I'm not sure if anybody has done [...]

Hi, I'm Greek House! You may remember me from such posts as Sharks vs. Piranhas Parts I and II. I am also the author of the best selling book "Guppieball: The Art of Leaving Runners on Base".
The 3rd part of the series deals with what happens when our two teams slump. I [...]

For any of you who have not yet read part I of the story, I recommend reading it first. I won't bother to reintroduct the two teams here, so you will need to at least look at part I before reading this. I had intended to include slumps in part 2, but in [...]

I always find it funny when old timers talk about "small ball" and "doing the little things" as an efficient way to win baseball games. I found it even funnier when Ozzie Guillen used to talk about how his hitters needed to stop hitting so many home runs and start doing better situational hitting--as [...]

SBG: GH introduces himself below, but I wanted to say that I always enjoyed his Timberwolves blog. I'm glad to have him come aboard.
Hi all! I figure I should introduce myself for those of you who aren't familiar with me. I am GH (short for Greek House) of the now defunct [...]