Frustration mounts for Rubio-less Timberwolves

Even before Minnesota Timberwolves teammates J.J. Barea and Kevin Love had a brief scuffle on the bench in a loss to the Sacramento Kings on Sunday, there was a sense that tension was building on the team in the wake of the season-ending injury suffered by rookie point guard Ricky Rubio, tension that has been exacerbated by the Wolves’ season-long seven-game road trip. They started that trip with a win, but dropped three straight since. In all, Minnesota has lost four out of five without Rubio and, in doing so, relinquished their hold on the West’s final playoff spot.

What’s especially frustrating for the Timberwolves is that they played two games on this trip—against the Utah Jazz and Los Angeles Lakers—that they might have won with Rubio on board. This team hasn’t quite gotten over Rubio’s injury, it seems, and that’s particularly bad timing for a franchise looking to make its first playoff appearance since 2004.

But this is not just a bump in the road, not a time to congratulate oneself on a good year and wait until next season. This is a chance for the Timberwolves to grow up. Even if they don’t make the playoffs, what matters is that they stop complaining and feeling bad for themselves, and simply play better.

“We need to accept (Rubio’s injury) and move on, because he’s not coming back this season,” star forward Kevin Love said. “Guys on the team need to step up, we need to find a way to move the ball and share the ball—it has got to be contagious. Guys can’t try to do it all themselves. If we do that, if we come together, we still have a chance to make a playoff push. If not, we need to—I mean there is no way I can explain it. We’ll just fold.”

Despite the downturn for the Timberwolves, credit coach Rick Adelman for taking a quit-yer-whinin’ approach with his team. Adelman is not looking at the plight of his Rubio-less bunch and leaning on the excuses of Rubio’s injury and the general youth of the roster, and for the future growth of the team, that’s a good thing. Over the course of the last two seasons, which yielded a combined 32 wins, the Timberwolves wrapped themselves far too cozily in the youth excuses.

“We’ve got to play with more urgency,” Adelman said. “If you want to be in the playoff race, you got to go out and play like you really want to stay in it. I think sometimes, if things don’t go their way or they don’t play as many minutes, they seem to start kind of thinking about that. You can’t do that. If you want to stay in this, forget about your individual stuff and think about the team. You’ve got to come out and play.”

This is why the Timberwolves brought Adelman in—he is a veteran who has 967 wins to his credit, and has 157 playoff games on his resume. That’s 10 more playoff games than his entire roster of players. Adelman has done well to change the culture of losing in Minnesota, but he knows that if the Timberwolves “fold,” as Love said, in this critical stage, if they can’t find ways to win difficult games, even short-handed, then they will have given back some of the progress they made.

“I think it’s very important,” Adelman said. “It’s a really important time. We’ve got to win some games to stay there, to stay right close to people. You see a team like Portland go into Chicago and win, you see Sacramento beat Boston. That’s how it’s going to be. You’ve got to go out and win games. I don’t care who you’re playing, it doesn’t mean you can’t win the game. We have to have more urgency as a group. You can’t talk about it, you have to do it.”

Of course, it would be nice if they started doing it soon.