Success story: Sam Cassell has turned the page in Minnesota, giving the Timberwolves reason to believe there could be a happy ending come June.(NBA)

Think of this as a modern basketball fable. Let's call it, The Boy who Cried Timberwolf. You see, Sam Cassell plays basketball, and for him, it always has been a simple game. There's some running, there's some shooting, there's some picking-and-rolling. As Sam sees things, it's his job to do those things against an opponent for 48 minutes in a given night, then proceed to the next game. That's why he never quite understood what he was doing each morning in Wisconsin, where he was employed by the Bucks for four-plus years, running plays, over and over. He'd been executing the same plays for all of those years, with the same coach and, essentially, the same players. The ...