Rand: Wolves, Twins welcoming eras of change

Timberwolves media day, an opportunity to interview players before the start of training camp, ended shortly before 2 p.m. Monday. An hour later and a very short walk from Target Center, the Twins ushered in a new beginning of their own in holding a news conference to announce officially that Ron Gardenhire is done as manager after 13 years.

Both organizations have been accused of being patient to a fault in their decision-making in the past, but there can be no denying that both are very much starting over now.

For the Wolves, it means moving on from six years of Kevin Love — from many monster games statistically, from not enough winning and from a general sense that he was ready to leave not long after he arrived.

Thaddeus Young, part of the Love trade and the player who will take a lot of his minutes at power forward, summed it up perfectly when asked about his role on this year's team. Young said it wasn't his job to replace Love's production, adding that, "26 [points] and 12 [rebounds] hasn't got us to the playoffs. … I'm not coming out here to try to be a stat stuffer."

Whether that was an indirect shot at Love, an honest assessment of his own game or a little bit of both, Young's words are an indication that these Flip Saunders-coached Wolves are intent on being better than the sum of their stats — a characteristic last year's team did not have, and which could be related to what Saunders admitted was a lack of identity.

It's easy to say those things, of course. Doing them — and replacing Love's output, regardless of any flaws he had — will be quite another.

The new era for the Twins is quite different, and was delivered in a very Twinsy way: with the fired manager attending the news conference and essentially agreeing with the man who fired him, Terry Ryan, that the Twins lost too many games and that a new voice could be the right thing to jump-start a team that has lost at least 92 games each of the past four seasons.