Flip shuffles front office, fires five scouts today

They say the new guy always wants to bring in his own guys...

Well, Flip Saunders started to do that today.

He fired five scouts -- international scouting director/player personnel Pete Philo, regional scouts J.T. Prada, Curtis Crawford and Steve Gordon as well as special-assignment scout Will Conroy -- today in his first full week on the job as president of basketball operations.

All four either had contracts expiring thissummer and were working without contracts.

It looks like scouts with years remaining on their contracts -- Milt Barnes, Derek Pierce -- will remain.

How Flip re-makes that front office with just seven weeks left before a draft in which the Wolves will have two first-round picks and two second-rounders, well, we'll see.

The general manager's job is open as now is most of the scouting staff.

Philo had been with the team the longest -- eight seasons -- and his knowledge in international scouting helped reshape the Wolves roster into one that's now filled with players and prospects from Europe and South America.

He ran the annual pre-draft EuroCamp for years -- and he had a young player named Alexey Shved there for three straight years.

The Wolves, of course, last summer signed Shved to a three-year contract..

He also was instrumental in wooing Ricky Rubio to sign with the Wolves after the team drafted him in June 2009 and influenced decisions to draft European players Nemanja Bjelica and Henk Norel as well as international prospects Paolo Prestes and Tanguy Ngombo.

Philo called himself a "little bit shook up" by the brief call from Saunders informing him today and said "what hurts most" is all the "great" seasons that wait ahead for a team he and fired president of basketball operations David Kakn helped assemble.

"It hurts to go through all those years, painful seasons, knowing we had a plan and things started to shape up,'" he said. "I'm very proud to be part of that. It was a lot of hard work and now not to be part of it..."