Kevin Love for the victory. (Getty Images) |
Kevin Love endured the worst flight of his life coming home from Los Angeles on Thursday. When asked if he was going to be able to make the scheduled flight home with the team, he could barely think about whether or not he’d make it through the excursion home.
It may be the flu or it may be food poisoning, but whatever was ailing Love the past two days left the All-NBA power forward feeling completely drained. When he warmed up before Friday night’s home game against the Milwaukee Bucks, Love said his body seemed confused if he was going to throw up or perhaps have something more embarrassing happen on the court.
It was this confusion in his body that left him believing he was good enough to play in his sixth straight game since returning early from a broken hand.
“My body couldn’t decide if I wanted to throw up or the other,” Love half-joked about his decision to play Friday night. “I figured as long as there’s a little confusion with my body, I can get through the game.”
The Wolves are no strangers to ailments by any means over the last two years, which have served as a renaissance of sorts for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Since the NBA lockout ended roughly a year ago, only three members of that Wolves’ roster remain on the team. Love is there with his partner in big man crime, Nikola Pekovic patrolling the lane with him. And veteran point guard Luke Ridnour are the only Wolves from the Kurt Rambis era roster still around.
Everybody else is new, finding their role within the designed and injury-adjusted attack of Rick Adelman’s system, and fighting through various injuries to put together a makeshift rotation until the team can get back to full strength.
With Love feeling like he’d throw up during the 95-85 win over Milwaukee, it was nice to see his teammates battle through unfamiliar lineups along with bumps and bruises to have his back and help the team pull out a victory. Pekovic helped Love control the boards, grabbing 16 of the duo’s combined 30 rebounds. The entire team played incredible defense and challenged shots, holding the Bucks to just 36.6 percent shooting.
And rookie guard Alexey Shved took over with 10 points and two assists in the fourth quarter, to give him 16 points on the game and his seventh double-digit scoring effort off the bench this season.
Through the knee injuries to Ricky Rubio, Brandon Roy, and Chase Budinger and the back spasms that kept Andrei Kirilenko out of the lineup the last two games, the Wolves have somehow endured all of the trips to the training room to post a 7-8 record.
This is not something the Wolves saw last season.
“I was laughing when I walked in (to the locker room) after the game,” Love confessed. “Guys were asking me why and I just said that we would not have responded (to the injuries and illness) this way last season.”
Before Rubio went down with his ACL tear on March 9th against the Los Angeles Lakers last season, the Wolves were about to be 21-20, knocking on the door of the playoffs for the first time since 2004. After Rubio’s knee injury, JJ Barea battled leg injuries, Pekovic dealt with bone spurs in his ankles, and Love eventually suffered a concussion. When the injuries piled up last season, the Wolves went just 5-20 down the stretch, falling completely out of the playoff picture.
Guys like Michael Beasley, Wes Johnson, Darko Milicic, and Anthony Randolph seemed unwilling or uninterested in fighting to keep this team afloat. Players started pointing fingers and frustration boiled over at times in games and after games. Oddly enough, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to the team.
It gave Rick Adelman an easy slate of evidence to point to when he went to president of basketball operations, David Kahn, and owner, Glen Taylor, to tell him which players he wanted off the team. There wasn’t any hope spread throughout the roster. The Wolves knew their core and knew they needed to stop gambling on lottery castoffs and focus on bringing in quality players. The injuries led to an overhaul of the roster, which led to bringing in guys willing to back up their teammates in tough times.
That’s exactly what’s happened so far. This isn’t the same pie-in-the-sky look of a Wolves team that survived injuries and jumped out to a surprising 5-2 start early this season. They went on a five-game losing streak and a road trip that resulted in a 1-3 record. The tough stretch and the stream of injuries and ailments that keep flowing into the team still do not rattle them.
If anything, it makes this team hungrier to fight through this until the team can get a relatively clean bill of health.
Rubio begins practicing with the team on Sunday and should be back within a couple of weeks. Once he gets his conditioning up and past the mental barriers of coming back from an ACL injury, the team feels confident they’ll become the playoff team they looked like nearly two-thirds of the way through last season.
“We’ve had a lot of guys hurt or just had different missteps here and there,” Love reflected on the resiliency of this team to stay afloat with the battered roster. “I think it does say a lot. A lot of those games, whether it’s the Clippers, whether it’s Portland or Golden State, Denver -- well, really almost all of our losses we’ve been right there.
It just shows you once we get back completely healthy, obviously we’ll be better off. But we’re still able to persevere even through some short-handed lineups.”
As Love gets healthier and the team keeps coming together through these victorious efforts, the flights will definitely get a lot easier.