Rick Adelman Hired As Timberwolves’ Head Coach

Rick Adelman has coached some of the best teams in the NBA over the past decade, but now he will coach one of its worst. The Minnesota Timberwolves announced Tuesday that they’ve reached an agreement in principle for Adelman to coach in Minneapolis.

A 65 years old with 945 career wins, Adelman will become the 10th head coach in franchise history for the Timberwolves. The rest of his credentials are impressive, too. From the T’Wolves release:

But a look at the data suggests that for all of ennui towards retread culture, there’s actually been a major shift toward the inexperienced in head coaching hires over the past six seasons.

It’s not cut-and-dry. There’s plenty of variety on the NBA coaching carousel.

Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski on the Rick Adelman hire.

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Adelman’s acumen, history and the credibility he lends the lost-at-sea franchise are what got him hired. But his relationship with Love could end up being the most important factor here. Minnesota can’t afford to lose the one star it has, and this looks like a strong step toward preventing that.

For more on Adelman, Love and the Wolves, visit Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

Adelman has a career winning percentage over 60 percent, and is one of the winningest head coaches without an NBA championship. In Minnesota, they’ll be glad to see improvement in lieu of parades. For now, at least.

For more on the Wolves, visit Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

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If any available coach is worth it, it’d be Adelman, who can lay claim to some of the best offenses of the past 20 years with spells in Portland and Sacramento. Adelman has a career winning percentage over 60 percent, though he’s been blessed with solid rosters, except for a stint in Golden State. Minnesota would more closely resemble that than any other team Adelman has coached; the Wolves have gone just 32-132 over the past two seasons.

The Wolves are the only NBA team with a head coach opening. For more on the team, visit SB Nation’s Canis Hoopusand SB Nation Minnesota.

For more on the Wolves, visit SB Nation’s Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

Adelman left an interview with Wolves owner Glen Taylor in the Twin Cities and returned to Portland without a job offer, according ESPN’s Ric Bucher. Bucher went on to write that Adelman left “without an offer to be the Timberwolves’ next head coach or a promise that one would be forthcoming.”

Apparently the report that said Adelman has already locked up the Wolves job and is looking at potential assistants is false, by the way, or Kahn is making this thing awfully awkward once again.

See, Kahn always had a vision. It just seemed wholly unreasonable and poorly executed. Rubio’s the keystone, the piece that can either bring the vision to life or make it all seem like an elaborate joke. Because such an untested player holds so much power over the success or failure of the Kahn dream, many will continue to be skeptical. Ricky has played in a top league, the Spanish ACB, but hasn’t thrived there. This isn’t the case where a dominant European player will try to find his way in the bigger, faster, more physically demanding NBA. This is what everyone believes to be an NBA player struggling to gain a footing in Europe, and opting to cut straight to the chase. Rubio’s open-court talents might thrive in the NBA, but we’ll have to take his word for it right now.

Now give Adelman a young savant at point guard, a monster of power forward and a young finisher with strong work ethic like Williams, and you have something sustainable. Adelman’s the perfect piece to bring the Kahn vision together, to make critics like me look like armchair-bound fools, to let the Timberwolves finally see the dawn of a new day. The summer of Kahn is nearly over, and this final gambit can complete the remodel or leave the renovation site a mess. Which will it be?

Wolves GM David Kahn had previously discussed the job opening with Adelman over the phone, but only now was able to draw him to face-to-face meetings with himself and higher management, including team owner Glen Taylor, who chairs the NBA’s labor committee.

For more on the Wolves, visit Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

For more on the Wolves, visit Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

The Minnesota Timberwolves need a new head coach, and have already interviewed quite a few of them. And, well, this is interesting:

Zgoda went on to tweet that when exactly Brown would interview is up in the air because of a death in the family. He also mentioned that Wolves GM David Kahn and Larry Brown probably won’t fit because of Brown’s tendency to overhaul teams’ rosters and Kahn’s previous statements saying he has no intention of doing so.

Matt Moore of ProBasketballTalk has a strange feeling that Nelson will be the next coach:

Nelson is no stranger to Minnesota, as the original report from the Star-Tribune points out, because his daughter and grandchildren live in the area. So one way or another, Nelson will be in Minnesota.

The Timberwolves have gone 32-132 over the past two seasons. Landing Adelman would be an incredible coup. Adelman has a career regular season record of 945-616 as head coach, and a 79-78 career postseason record. Of the 25 coaches in NBA history with at least 1,000 games on the ledger, Adelman is one of just six with career winning percentages over 60 percent.

For more on the Wolves, visit Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

Like Woodson and Porter, Bickerstaff is known as a half-court oriented coach. This pokes a hole in general manager David Kahn’s stated goal to find a coach willing to teach an up-tempo style.

For more on Rambis’ firing, visit Canis Hoopus and SB Nation Minnesota.

Rambis was fired earlier in July after the Wolves went just 32-132 over the past two seasons.

In announcing the firing of Rambis, Kahn said he’d be looking for a coach more committed to the fast break. Like Porter, Woodson is puzzling in that context. The Hawks finished No. 27 in the NBA in pace factor in Woodson’s final season in Atlanta, and over his tenure averaged a finish of No. 20.

Porter has a career winning percentage of .460 in two-plus years as a coach. He coached Milwaukee for two years from 2003 to 2005, then Phoenix for half a season in 2008/09 before being fired after 51 games.

Porter is a somewhat surprising choice to interview, given general manager David Kahn’s preference for an up-tempo coach. The primary reason Porter was fired in Phoenix in 2009 was because the teams’ stars were resistant to Porter’s goal to make the Suns a more half-court oriented team.

So again, fret not: nothing has happened, and if Kahn’s M.O. holds, nothing will happen for quite a while. But what a tantalizing nothing it is.

When you have a lot of speed and little conscience, and you want more speed and even less conscience, there’s only one man for the job, and now, I’m not talking about Paul Westhead. It’s Don Nelson. That’s what makes this improbable pairing so appealing. Nelson is literally the only available guy who can give Kahn what we wants.

Nelson, who has a daughter and grandchildren living in nearby Minnetonka, summed up his interest rather succinctly while talking to the Star Tribune.

Nelson wouldn’t seem to be the best Rambis replacement considering that he’s been rather hard on young players in the past -- the make-up of most of Minnesota’s roster -- but the 71-year-old clarified that sentiment.

It’s unclear whether either would volunteer to take the job, considering Minnesota’s instability. One would think Adelman would not be interested in coaching a rebuilding team after leaving Houston for that very reason. Nelson, on the other hand, reportedly has interest in the job. Both would certainly qualify as the “up-tempo” coach general manager David Kahn has coveted.

Rambis departed after compiling just 32 wins in two years on the job. His firing was inevitable for a while, but was only made official last week.

This news comes on the heels of Wolves’ GM David Kahn’s press conference, in which he announced he wants the team to have a more up-tempo attitude despite leading the NBA in possessions per game last season.