The Minnesota Timberwolves haven’t sniffed the postseason since their riveting run all the way to the Western Conference Finals eleven years ago, but Ricky Rubio intends to help change all of that in 2015-16.
Rubio, 24, is thrilled with the intriguing mix of explosive young talent and veteran leadership the front-office has surrounded him with.
Making the Playoffs won’t be a cakewalk in the brutal West, though: the T-Pups finished with an NBA-worst 16-66 record last season.
Per GulfNews:
“I have confidence that the team wants me but you know in this league anybody can get traded,” said the flashy playmaker. “You don’t listen to the rumours. You just live day-by-day and that’s it.” […] When asked if he wanted to stay with the long-suffering Timberwolves, Rubio gave a firm: “Yes.”
“[Andrew Wiggins] can be as good as he wants. He has a lot of talent. What surprised me about last season is the quickness of how he adapted to the league. He was fearless about the big stage, to play against LeBron James and the bigger names. There are a lot of ways he can score. It is hard to stop him. If you stop one of the ways he scores, he can score in other ways. […] I have seen [Karl-Anthony Towns] working out this summer in Minnesota. I can tell he is a great player and not just like a big centre, he can really shoot the ball, he can play in the pick-and-pop and he is really going to surprise some people. We have a lot of young talent with a big future but we have got to start doing it because it has been a building process for the last couple of years. We have to start putting it on paper and start winning games.”
“My goal is to bring this team to the play-offs. It has been my dream for four years. In my first year, I almost did it, but then I got hurt and everybody got hurt too so we couldn’t do it. It’s too early to talk because we haven’t been through training camp yet. The Western Conference is really tough, but we want to dream big.”
