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Digging into Flip Saunders’ end-of-season comments

By Ben Beecken

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End-of-season press conferences are more or less about blowing smoke, promoting the front office’s agenda, and generally don’t include much of note. Flip Saunders continued that tradition on Monday afternoon.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he said too much, and maybe he revealed too much about the misguided off-season that they’re about to embark upon.

Our own Drew Mahowald had all of the highlights and low-lights of the presser, but here are the items I’d like to unpack a bit more.

#1: “I’ll coach until I feel we need to move in a different direction”

Yeah, Saunders said that. Or, as this Yahoo headline so eloquently put it, “I’m the coach until I say I’m not.”

If we can set aside the obvious and weird idea that Saunders basically said that he’d coach until he fires himself (who would fire themselves?), let’s look at what this might mean.

Clearly, he’s not at the point where he feels the need to move in a “different direction”. Which, of course, is a bit worrisome since the squad won a league-worst 16 games this year. I mean, even Kurt Rambis managed a 15-win season in Minnesota.

It’s a bit jarring, since even when the team was mostly healthy (sans Ricky Rubio) in November they still weren’t on pace to win more than 25 or so games. And with Rubio in February and March (albeit without Nikola Pekovic and during a period with quite a bit of roster fluctuation) they weren’t too much better. It’s also concerning since Saunders doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of guy that would decide someone would be better than him at his current job.

#2: “I guarantee you we’re probably not keeping both second round picks”

Huh. Might as well start the paperwork to the league office that sends either the #31 or #36 pick over to Houston or San Antonio or any number of savvy organizations. (And never mind the whole “guaranteeing” that they’ll “probably not” do something. Yikes.)

While I completely get the reasoning that Saunders gave (along with their first-round pick, the Wolves would have far too many young players on the roster) it’s not like it would be any different than what he did this year. And he kept adding young players: accepting Anthony Bennett in the Kevin Love–Andrew Wiggins trade, trading a future pick for Adreian Payne, etc.

At one point this spring, every single one of the Wolves’ rotation players except for Kevin Martin was either a first or second-year NBA player. That’s crazy.

But man…trading away some of the current young players (anyone want Bennett or Payne?) to free up a roster spot sounds great. Bennett is not worth anywhere near his number-one overall draft pick salary that he’ll be commanding.

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Or the Wolves could draft one or two international players to stash overseas. Worked pretty well with Nikola Pekovic, didn’t it? Not to mention Manu Ginobili, Dirk Nowitzki, and so forth. The Sixers did it with Dario Saric last year, and he was a first-round pick.

The fact that Saunders is already tipping his hand (probably not the most accurate phrase…) is disconcerting, and the likelihood that he swaps one of those very valuable picks for cash is unfortunately very high.

It’s become a yearly draft tradition: the Houstons, San Antonios, and Trail Blazers of the NBA find second-round bargains while the Wolves take a local favorite (let’s go back to Rick Rickert), a Big Ten player with ties to old friend Tom Izzo (Marcus Taylor, anyone?), or acquire the rights to actual, real-life, good NBA prospects (Chandler Parsons, Nikola Mirotic, Norris Cole) and then trade them away for cash.

At any rate, this off-season is already off to a shaky start. The playoffs, on the other hand, are not. They are fun, and you should watch them.

We’ll have all the draft coverage you’ll need here at DWW over the next few weeks. But enjoy the playoffs in the meantime.

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