We're a couple of days into training camp, and with the likely roster at least somewhat finalized, I thought that it was time to take a look at the new edition of the Timberwolves.

That said, two days into training camp, we hardly know everything about the team.  So, in the interest of brevity, we're taking a page out of the book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure , and taking a look at the Wolves roster - with six words per player.

Rashad McCants: Put up or shut up. Now.
 
Sebastian Telfair: Time to produce... or ride pine.

Randy Foye: Can he be successful at PG?

Craig Smith: Dude, grow a couple of inches.

Ryan Gomes: Important off-season re-signing... yet kinda forgotten.

Rodney Carney: Everyone says: why isn't he better?

Brian Cardinal: I hated this guy at Purdue.

Corey Brewer: The sound of Brewer's off-season: clank!

Al Jefferson: Oh, no!  PLEASE, NOT THE KNEES!

Chris Richard: Well, there's room in Sioux Falls.

Mike Miller: Biggest acquisition.  So, Mike: No pressure!

Jason Collins: (This statement ruined by golf cart.)

Mark Madsen: HUSTLE RUN HUSTLE EFFORT FAIL BENCH

Kevin Love: Miller - no pressure, compared to Love.

Calvin Booth: Still tall.  Still old.  Still unproductive.

Kevin Ollie: Backup to the backup's backup PG.

And of course, we also have the overall theme for the season: Better... But They'd Have To Be.

I've had a couple of days to digest the Kevin Love trade, and the one thing I can't escape is this: take a look at the Wolves' roster in 2006-07.

2006-2007 Roster (Player - Salary)      

• Kevin Garnett - $21,000,000
• Mark Blount - 7,288,165
• Ricky Davis - 6,364,400
• Troy Hudson - 5,603,000
• Marko Jaric - 5,525,000
• Mike James - 5,215,000
• Trenton Hassell - 4,350,000
• Eddie Griffin - 2,700,000
• Randy Foye - 2,448,240
• Mark Madsen - 2,210,000
• Rashad McCants - 1,653,720
• Justin Reed - 1,300,000
• Bracey Wright - 664,209
• Craig Smith - 412,718

(Click Read More... to find out where I'm going with this...)

This past year after working extremely hard to recover from microfracture surgury, I found myself coming of the bench being the sixth man and the second leading scorer. The only bad part about it was that I could have been twice as productive with more minutes. I would have been able to meet my individual goals, we could have won more games, and I'd be on my way to being a respected player in the NBA.

Naturally, I immediately went over to basketball-reference.com to check out this assertion.  The results: I think McCants is misremembering his season.  Here's what I found:

1) McCants's minutes barely dipped at all after being moved to sixth man.
The change was made right around February 1 of last season.  McCants had started 24 of 40 games up to that point, including 11 in a row; he wouldn't start again after that date.  Hence, this is the obvious dividing line between the two halves of the season.  And what the numbers show is this: Before the move, McCants was averaging 28.1 minutes per game.  After coming off the bench, he averaged 25.7 minutes per game.  Somehow, I don't think that extra two minutes, twenty seconds per game was really enough time for McCants to change much.

2) McCants wasn't any less - or more - effective coming off the bench.
In the first half of the season, when he was starting regularly, McCants averaged 15 points per game, or 0.53 points per minute.  As the sixth man, he averaged 14.7 points per game - or 0.57 points per minute.  This extremely small fluctuation in points per minute can be explained by two things: as the sixth man, McCants shot slightly more (0.482 FGA/min, versus 0.455 FGA/min in the first half) and made a slightly higher percentage of his shots (46.4% from the field, vs. 44.4%).  In other words, he was almost exactly the same player in either role.

3) There's no evidence that more minutes would have helped anything.
Let's put it this way: McCants had a PER of 14.65 last season, and John Hollinger normalizes that statistic so that 15.00 is the league average.  He wasn't a future superstar stuck on the bench - he was a league-average shooting guard.  Playing McCants 10% more minutes would, for the most part, have meant 10% more points - not twice the productivity.

Basically, the move to sixth man meant for McCants that he missed out on the first two minutes of the game.  After that, he was a regular part of the rotation; even after the move, he only played less than 20 minutes in a game seven times in 35 games, and nine times in those 35 he played more than 30 minutes.

I appreciate that McCants has confidence in his own abilities; I think most NBA players believe that they could help the team, if only they could play more.  However, I'm not sure there's any evidence that McCants has much right to complain - not only did he see the floor almost as often after the move as before, he didn't do anything either before or after the move to convince the team that it had made a mistake. 

(Note: When not discussing failure here, Jon Marthaler can be found living it at TNABACG.)

The Timberwolves have just eight games to play in what is certainly their worst season in quite some time.  The team sits at 19-55 for the year, thus guaranteeing that for the first time since 1996 (and not counting the shortened lockout year), Minnesota will finish with fewer than 30 wins.

With that in mind, let's take a look at Minnesota's goals for the end of the season - and just where in team history this team could end up ranking.

More after the jump... 

(Note: When not pontificating about the NBA draft, Jon Marthaler can be found pontificating about nothing special at TNABACG.)

As part of yesterday's Gerald Green trade, the Timberwolves received Houston's second-round pick in 2010.  On the one hand, an extra draft pick can't be a bad thing, especially when the Wolves picked it up for dropping a player that didn't figure into their plans anyway; on the other hand, Minnesota doesn't exactly have a history of getting value out of its second-round picks.

With that in mind, I thought it might be time to take a look at Minnesota's second-round draft history. 

(Read more below...)

(When not rambling on about the Timberwolves, Jon Marthaler can be found at TNABACG , rambling on about Minnesota sports of all stripes.)

It's All-Star Weekend, and we're just a few hours away from All-Star Saturday Night.  With that in mind, it's a good time to look back at All-Star games past, filtered through the blue lenses of the Timberwolves fan.

Read on for more...