Wolves head coach Rick Adelman has put together quite the resume during his 25-year NBA head coaching career.
Adelman is one of eight coaches to accrue over 1,000 wins, has missed the playoffs just seven times (three of those with Minnesota), and was the leader of a Sacramento Kings team that had it not been for the L.A. Lakers dynasty of the late ’90s and early 2000s, would most likely have won at least one NBA championship.
The Wolves head man has taken a club that was absolutely atrocious when he started, winning just 17 games the year prior to Adelman’s arrival, and brought it to respectability, sitting at .500 heading into their contest with the New Orleans Pelicans tonight.
But Adelman sounds tired, not only of losing, something he is not accustomed to doing, but of the NBA life.
The Portland Tribune’s Kelly Eggers spoke to Adelman after Minnesota’s loss to the Blazers Saturday, with some not-so-indirect quotes about how he feels about this year’s team, but constant travel and worry that floods his personal life.
The 68-year-old Adelman to Eggers in a story published Tuesday:
“When I took this job, I thought we could turn it around. The first year was just weeding people out. The second year, we had so many injuries. This year, we’ve made changes, and it looks better. It is better. But how much better can we be?
“We’re just not that good defensively. We’re more of an offensive team. We get to close games, and we’ve broken down at the end, not getting stops at the right time.
“The other part of it, we’ve been up and down with our play with certain people. Kevin Love has been very consistent, and Pekovic has gotten better and better. But we need our perimeter people to be consistent offensively, and we just haven’t done it in close games. We’ve turned it over, we haven’t made shots when we needed to.”
Those comments on the team come just a week after Adelman shredded players following a loss to Sacramento at home, saying the Wolves were a .500 team that should “think again” if they believe they’re headed to the playoffs.
Here’s Adelman’s comments to Eggers about the NBA life and his wife’s health, which he admitted nearly kept him from coming back to coaching until September of 2013:
“She had to get better. It’s still hard for her to be (in Minneapolis), when you’re traveling so much and she’s by herself so much. We talked about it all summer. I really wasn’t sure (whether he would return to coaching) throughout the summer. In August and September, we started talking about it and decided I’d do it again.
“I don’t know why (sons R.J. and David) they want to get into the NBA, but they do.”
One final quote about a possible return next season:
“We’ll take a hard look at it after the season. As you get older, you get tired of the travel.”
The Wolves take on the Pelicans at 7 p.m. tonight, as they try to break their season-long winless streak when trying to get above .500.
