MINNEAPOLIS – No one wants to talk about anything but Ricky Rubio. When's he coming back? (Yet to be determined.) What does he do best? What does he bring to the team? How will he change it? How does he look in practice.
And for a week, the Timberwolves have been waxing poetic, with so few new details and so much praise. On Tuesday, Andrei Kirilenko put it perfectly.
When asked about playing with the point guard in practice, Kirilenko came so close to launching into typical the laundry list of praise. He makes everyone around him better, Kirilenko said. He can …
And then the veteran stopped and laughed. The list was silly.
"I'm just trying to give compliments for everything he is doing," he said. "He is just a great player."
What a great perspective. There's nothing new to praise, not two weeks into Rubio practicing as everyone awaits his arrival with bated breath. He's good, great even. That's it.
In terms of a return date, after coach Rick Adelman's rare candid details Monday (they'd be meeting to discuss a return date soon, the schedule isn't exactly conducive to slotting him in right now), no new information came out Tuesday. That doesn't mean Rubio won't be playing against Denver on Wednesday, just that, as usual, we won't know until the last minute.
Love not quite full strength: Kevin Love made it very clear after his 36-point outing Friday that one game does not necessarily mean he's back. Tuesday, he said that his hand is "still getting there" and that he hopes that by January he'll have hit his stride.
Andrew Bynum turning into Brandon Roy?: Philadelphia's big man, who's yet to play a game this season, went on the record Monday to provide an update on his bad knee(s).
He told the Delaware County Times:
"Health is going to be an issue. There's nothing I can really do about it. It's arthritis in the knees. Cartilage is missing. That's not going to regrow itself. Maybe in the future, the next three to five years, there may be something out there that really does help. For right now, it's a waiting game."
Brandon Roy, anyone?
Maybe Bynum isn't quite as sympathetic a figure as Roy, but it's still a shame if he befalls the same fate as the shooting guard, falling from one of the league's best at his position to someone clinging to the hope of playing. It'll be interesting to see in the next few days and weeks what information (preferably from doctors) comes out about Bynum and where exactly his knees stand on the spectrum from wobbly to shot. Another interesting wrinkle: Unlike Roy, who had years of salary owed him due to his amnesty, Bynum is in a contract year, with even more incentive to play.
