This is the year?

The Minnesota Timberwolves start their season tonight with a lot of hope. A determined Kevin Love, a revitalized Ricky Rubio, the return of Corey Brewer, and a healthy Nikola Pekovic.

The Timberwolves have long been in buried in losses, horrible personnel decisions, and bad luck. The hope is that finally they’ve finally assembled a decent post-Garnett era team and can avoid injuries. They have a point guard that excels on defense and as a passer, a sharp shooting big man who also owns the boards, and a bruiser in the low post. They’ve also added enough pieces to assemble an actual NBA roster that appears capable of at least competing for a playoff spot.

This has happened before, the past few years the Timberwolves have put together decent rosters on paper only to have their season’s ruined by injuries. In 2011 Ricky Rubio blew out his knee in December and the team couldn’t hold on to make the playoffs without him. Last year, everyone else got hurt. Kevin Love missed almost the entire season, Nikola Pekovic missed 20 games, and Chase Budinger was out for more than half of the season. You can’t win many games when 3 of your starters miss that many games.

The Timberwolves haven’t been in the playoffs since 2004 and haven’t even been close in the years since. The closest they’ve been to a winning record was last season with an amazing record of 31-51. The following stat will give you an idea of how terrible the Timberwolves have been. In the past three seasons combined the Wolves have won a total of 74 games, last season alone the Miami Heat won 66.

Going into the home opener tonight almost everyone is healthy. Budinger reinjured his knee in the preseason but the Wolves have added multiple players that can replace his production. That’s right, the season hasn’t even started and the injuries have begun, or maybe not. Maybe Budinger just came back to early, just a fluke, the rest of the team will be fine. I sure hope so. If this season goes down the same way as the last 9 seasons, I don’t know if people will buy in again. You can only burn your fans so many times before they give up.

Who am I kidding? I’ve been a Vikings fan my entire life. I’m used to having my guts ripped out, I’d just like the Wolves to do it for once.

Hit the reset button

Blow it up, fire the coach, gut the front office, its time.

It should surprise no one that Vikings are in the spot they are now. The Carolina Panthers destroyed the defense and completely shut down the offense. I am confident the offense can be fixed, but the defense needs serious work.

The offense isn’t great, but they have some pieces in place. They have a good group of receivers and when you have Adrian Peterson, your offense always has a chance to be great. The Vikings rank 11^th in scoring and 19^th in overall offense. Numbers that aren’t spectacular, but numbers that aren’t terrible either.

Through 5 games this season, the Vikings have given up 189 points. That amounts to about 31 points a game. They have the 28^th ranked pass defense, are 17^th against the run, and are ranked second to last in overall defense. For a team led by a “defensive minded” coach, the Vikings don’t play much defense.

Since Rick Spielman has been with the Vikings, the team’s pass defense has only been ranked in the top 10 once and no better than 15^th overall any other year. What’s worse is that since Leslie Frazier has been the head coach (I’m not counting his interim coaching in 2010) the pass defense has ranked no better than 24^th.

They tried to bolster the pass defense by drafting Harrison Smith in the 1^st round and Josh Robinson in the 3^rd round of the 2012 draft. Smith is a great young player and should be a starter for a long time while Robinson has been thrust into a starting role, which he clearly is not suited for. They also added Xavier Rhodes in the 1^st round this year but it is too early to tell how good of a player he will be. In addition to these issues, the team has continually neglected the strong safety position. Jamarca Sanford, Mistral Raymond, and Andrew Sendejo are not starting NFL safeties but the team has made no effort to find a suitable player to replace them.

If the front office doesn’t know how to stop the pass and the coach doesn’t know how to stop, so how will the players?

It doesn’t matter if you can stop the run, which the Vikings have shown they can do (currently 17^th), if you can’t stop the pass. For the team to start winning consistently they need to change who signs the players, who drafts the players, and who coaches the players. Their deficiencies on defense, particularly in the secondary, are a far greater detriment to the team than the guy throwing passes.

It’s time to rebuild, it’s time to let go, and it’s time to fire the people who got the Vikings into this mess.