|
Only super dummies are even trying to deny it anymore.
http://www.nba.com/2012/news/features/david_aldridge/01/09/ricky-rubio-minnesota-timberwolves-future/?ls=iref:nbahpt1
Rubio proving that his game translates into NBA just fine
Posted Jan 9 2012 11:42AM
I always worry about being parochial about international players.
For many of us from the States, learning a new language, for example, seems so ... foreign. I took Spanish nine straight years in school, from the fifth grade in elementary school through my freshman year of college. Can't speak a word. Whereas many people who emigrate here don't think twice about absorbing two, three, maybe four languages by the time they're out of high school.
Dribbles
Top O' The World, Ma!
Team of the Week
Team of the Weak
Nobody Asked Me, But ...
... And Nobody Asked You, Either
MVP Watch
By The Numbers
I'm Feelin' ...
Not Feelin' ...
Mr. Fifteen
Tweet Of The Week
They Said It
Vlade Divac quickly learned how to speak in English as well as Serbian; Dikembe Mutombo was, and is, fluent in nine languages -- and he sounded great in every one.
This leads us to Ricky Rubio, of the El Masnou, Spain, Rubios, whose English, at 21, is perfectly good. And has been since he was a teenager. When the Minnesota Timberwolves took Rubio with the fifth pick in the 2009 Draft, he translated their English into Spanish for his father, Esteve, and vice versa.
Rubio is, it seems, comfortable in many languages -- including basketball. Euroleague, Olympics, NBA. It doesn't seem to matter the level. The sample size for the latter is small to date, but so far ... whoa.
Y'all may want to rethink those "Wrath of Kahn" jokes.
Looks like C-Webb's best bud, David Kahn, got this one right.
Kid can ball.
Now, Sunday, he was not going up against an NBA team. If the NBA was really serious about restoring competitive balance, the Washington Wizards would be relegated to the NBA D-League, while the Austin Toros or Iowa Energy got to move up a level. But, no matter; Rubio was still dazzling. The game was his from the moment he entered late in the first quarter to late in the fourth, when the Wolves had dispatched woeful and winless Washington. And Minnesota didn't even play that well. But in 30 minutes, Rubio's line read 13 points, 14 assists, 6 rebounds. A fairly good +29 plus-minus for the day.
He has work to do, on many things. He turns the ball over too much for a point guard, for example. But it would be grossly unfair not to concede that Kahn's faith in Rubio's skills was correct, and that he has the potential to do special things in the NBA. Rubio, of course, has been in the limelight since he was 15, when he broke in with DKV Joventut in Spain, and proceeded to win championships at every level in international ball. That preceded his star turn at the 2008 Olympics, when he dazzled the basketball world in helping Spain get to the gold medal game against the United States, and his F.C. Barcelona team's Euroleague title in his first season there.
Yes, Rubio struggled with Spain at the World Championships in Turkey last year. And then he struggled in Barcelona last season, slowed by a foot injury that helped bring his shooting percentage under 40 percent, and just 22 percent on threes. (And it's not like Barcelona was awful; it did win the Spanish ACB title this past season).
But getting knocked around a little, and off the pedestal, may have helped toughen him up a little. Like many precocious talents, he is used to being special. But he hadn't gotten smacked around much, and toughness is a daily requirement -- like a vitamin -- in this league. In Minnesota, he can have dinner in relative peace, but the pressure of being Ricky Rubio is never too far away. He wears his fame and the attention he receives well; there is a calm about him, both on the court and in the locker room. And like other international stars who have to do more than just play, he handles extra duties; after the Wizards game Sunday, he had a meeting with 80 people in the stands at Verizon Center. Just another day in the life.
"It's hard sometimes," Rubio said before the game. "Because when everybody's talking about you, if you do something good, they're talking good. If you do something bad, they talk worse, you know. So it's hard. You have to know that when they talk good, they're gonna talk bad when you do the bad things. So you (don't) have to listen to them. Just play what you love. It's basketball. And forget about everything. Just enjoy when you're in the court and don't think (about) anything else."
After going 32-132 the last two seasons under Kurt Rambis, the Wolves had a great many things to think about as a franchise.
They had to get a coach and they had to do something to convince All-Star Kevin Love to put his John Hancock on a contract extension offer instead of playing out his current deal and seeking a better place to continue his career. So Minnesota owner Glen Taylor paid big ($5 million per) for Rick Adelman and his 945 career wins. The Wolves got the second pick in the Draft and took talented forward Derrick Williams from Arizona. Kahn put $19 million into free agent guard J.J. Barea from the Mavericks. And though there was some thought outside Rubio's inner circle that the lockout might keep him in Spain another year, he opted to come over as planned and start his pro career.
"The one great thing about him is, he's not caught up in the hype," Adelman said. "He doesn't play like that. He doesn't approach things that way. He just wants to get better. He's a great kid. He works really hard at trying to become better. I don't think, besides the extra exposure he's got, he's like all rookies."
The Wolves are trying to bring him along as slowly as they can. Adelman, for now, will keep bringing Rubio off the bench, where he's not usually playing against starters and can work his way into a game. The Wolves like pairing Rubio with veteran Luke Ridnour -- the Wolves' starting point guard since opening night -- to take some of the ballhandling duties off of him. But Rubio has played almost every minute of every fourth quarter, including against Miami ( a close loss) and San Antonio ( a solid win).
He's not expected to immediately take over, as was the case in Barcelona, where they take their basketball quite seriously -- part of the reason Minnesota didn't publicly push the issue of when Rubio would arrive in the NBA was a need to proceed delicately with one of Europe's most powerful teams.
"He's just been very solid," Kahn, the Wolves' president of basketball operations, said Sunday. "And I think people continue to forget that he's 21. He turned 21 in October. So he's 21 years and three months. I just think the kid's ceiling is just enormously high, and I think he's going to get better and better ... the hard thing for him is just going to be the adjustment period. Because he hasn't been playing the NBA-style game. At Badalona (where Rubio played for Joventut before signing with F.C. Barcelona) they played more of a style like this. Any rookie, cultural or non-cultural, has an adjustment period. He's actually ahead of most rookies in that he's been a pro for so many years. So he's had experiences that most rookies haven't had ... he's not as fazed as most rookies might be in big moments. He's got a lot of confidence, self-confidence."
Rubio knows he's not typical -- "I had like almost six years with the pros already, and it's a little different, you know? I know how it works, a pro team, and other stuff. Six years is a lot of years to learn that" -- and that experience, combined with his size and big hands makes finding open men easier in the NBA, he says, than it was overseas.
"Here, you can find more space, because they have three different zones," he said. "They can't stay in the lane more than three seconds in zone, and you can find more spaces to penetrate and find more passes."
Rubio's game is sublime. Like all great point guards -- he isn't there, yet, but he's close -- Rubio seems to play among teammates yet float above them at the same time, like he's playing by himself and then snaps to attention. But he feels the game. He doesn't give up his dribble until he's ready. He already has a mastery of the hesitation dribble, textbook bounce passes in traffic, skip passes that wind up right on a shooter's hands. Rubio makes scoring passes, not just passing for the sake of passing, and his teammates must have their heads on a swivel at all times -- " I got hit in the face the other day," Love said. Williams, who also had a +29 plus-minus Sunday playing with Rubio, should start Rubio's car every morning; like Kidd, like Nash, Rubio is gonna get guys paid.
Love was hopeful, but reserved, when Rubio arrived.
"I wanted to see if he was the real deal," Love said. "I was always a believer, but I wanted to see with my own eyes first. Now that I've seen it, I'm just happy he's on my team. This is the first time in my career, at least in the NBA, that I've played with a pass-first point guard -- and a guy that makes scoring passes. For me to be on a team like that, it's only going to make me more effective and the guys around me more effective. We're going to win a lot of ballgames with him on the team."
Wait. Run that last sentence back.
"We're going to win a lot of ballgames with him on the team," Love said.
This should warm the hearts of all who reside in the Twin Cities. While there are still two weeks until the Jan. 25 deadline for contract extensions for Class of 2008 draftees, everyone in Minneapolis is desperately waiting to see if Love will commit long-term. Assuming "we" still refers to the Wolves, this is a good sign. But nothing is official, as we all know by now, until it's official. Love has gone underground when his contract is concerned, and Kahn falls back on what he's said for months when the subject comes up -- "I've said consistently, and I said it last year, I expect Kevin to be here for a number of years and be a part of our program here," he said again Sunday.
For that and other reasons, it was important that Rubio come over this season. But it was more important just because it was the right time. Rubio couldn't come over in 2009 and 2010 because the buyout with Barcelona was prohibitive -- and because Minnesota stunk on ice. If Rubio had tried to make chicken salad out of the collection the Wolves initially had on Kahn's watch, he would have turned vegan. But Kahn has flipped the roster; only Love, Wayne Ellington and Darko (!) Milicic remain from Kahn's first crack at putting a roster together in '09. Now, Love is an All-Star and 20 pounds lighter; Williams has monstrous potential; Ridnour, Barea and Anthony Tolliver are solid pros. The Wolves are by no means a finished product, but there's a skeleton of a contending team down the road.
And two years ago, Rubio was a 19-year-old kid. Now he's 21. Those two years make a difference, as anyone who's been a sophomore in college, and then a senior in college, can tell you.
"We were not ready for him, and he wasn't ready for us, and it would have been too much pressure," Kahn said. "Now that we have some better players for him to play with, he doesn't have to shoulder so much of the burden."
There will, of course, be a reckoning. Rubio will, no doubt, have to adjust as teams get NBA tape on him and their book becomes thicker. Even though he's shot the ball reasonbly well so far, his shot is still kind of flat; the guide hand falls behind the ball on occasion instead of consistently to the side. And teams are already starting to play more physical with him -- "the welcoming committee," Wolves assistant Terry Porter said -- which, combined with the Lockout Grind this season, will slow him down, short circuit the wiring from brain to hands, mess with his form and his head. For a time, he will likely struggle again, as the Wolves, with their new, but still young core, will as well.
But he'll get his second wind.
For the first itme in his life, though, he is alone. (Well, sort of; you're never really alone when you're as famous worldwide as he is.) His parents and younger sister, Laia, stayed with him in Minnesota during the lockout, and just left to go back to Spain last week; not knowing when the lockout would end in the fall, they had to make arrangements to return to Europe so that 15-year-old Laia could go back to school there this semester. They may be back periodically. But he's a grown man now. The world is in front of him, and he is starting another chapter in his education.
"There is a process in your life, you know, that you have to leave home," he said. "But your parents are going to be your parents forever, and they're going to love you, anyway. No matter who you are, they're going to love you. So you have to respect them. I mean, they're our heroes, because they're the people who teach us the best lessons in the world, I mean, life. And you always have to know that." --------------------------------------
It wasn't any conspiracy, or the media. They weren't doing anything. We were bad boys, and we were enjoying being bad boys.
Michael Irvin
Black person
The U
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
Okay Sports
