Sports

Adelman focused on finale

Wolves can finish .500 for first time since 2004-05 season

By Jerry Zgoda

April 17, 2014 at 12:13AM

Minnesota coach Rick Adelman, left, guard Kevin Martin, second from left, forward Kevin Love, third from left, center Nikola Pekovic, and guard J.J. Barea, right, watch their teammates from the bench against the Los Angeles Lakers. (Brian Stensaas — Associated Press/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Rick Adelman met with the media before tonight's regular-season finale against Utah at Target Center and it sure didn't sound like he's ready to announce his retirement either before or after the game.

Tomorrow?

That might be an entirely different matter.

Adelman said he will meet soon with Flip Saunders and Glen Taylor to discuss the future. Both sides have two weeks now to opt out of Adelman's fourth and final contract year next season, but Adelman suggested it won't take nearly that long.

"Then it will be determined," he said.

Still, he wouldn't say before the game that this is it for him, for this reason:

"As I said before, I want these guys to finish the season out and I've asked them to stay with it," he said. "Don't start looking ahead, thinking about what's going to happen tomorrow. Get this win tonight. That's how I tried to approach it. If I did it any other way, I wouldn't be doing what asked them to do."

For now, he reiterated that it's important to focus on the one game remaining and getting the Wolves to .500 -- at 41-41 if they win -- for the first time since 2005.

"It would mean something for sure," Adelman said. "It's not what we wanted to do but certainly finishing .500 is improvement over last year, I guess improvement over the last 10 years here."

An interesting tidbit: Coaching superagent Warren LeGarie is in the house tonight. He represents George Karl and many other coaches and said he's here to see and lend support to Alexey Shved's European agent, who's also in town. He gave the distinct impression that Karl isn't interested in a rebuilding job like this one. We'll see...