Another April as a Timberwolves fan…
By Ben Beecken
April is a pretty decent sports month, all things considered. Unless you’re a Timberwolves fan.
The month of April brings the start of baseball, and, at least in 2015, the Final Four and championship game of NCAA basketball as well as the NFL draft in a few weeks. There’s also the home stretch of the NBA regular season and the opening rounds of the playoffs.
None of the aforementioned sporting events occurring in April affect Timberwolves fans in the slightest. There hasn’t been a regular season “home stretch” for Wolves fans in over a decade. The race to lose as many post-Spring Equinox games is a tired way to finish the long, grueling campaign that is the NBA season, and what hasn’t seemed to wear on the franchise (or at least not enough to change things) has certainly taken it’s toll on fans.
This is the time of year when we should be excited to see the young core jelling and notching a few wins in their belt, giving us enough optimism to allow us to enjoy playoff basketball and tide us over until the draft lottery in May (yes, a legitimately exciting, albeit perpetually disappointing event for Wolves fans) and finally the NBA draft in late June.
But alas, Ricky Rubio has been shut down for the season. Nikola Pekovic has, too, and will undergo a complicated and serious surgery that may call the future of his career into question. Kevin Garnett has played in exactly five games since being acquired at the trade deadline in exchange for Thaddes Young, who was acquired at the cost of a mid-first-round draft pick. Gary Neal, Gorgui Dieng, and Shabazz Muhammad are also out.
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The Wolves are giving a staggering 37.7 minutes per game to rookie Zach LaVine since March 15th, a span of 12 games. LaVine is a 20 year-old shooting guard who has been forced to start and also play a lot at point guard in the absence of Rubio. Kevin Martin made his return from injury on Friday night against Orlando, meaning that LaVine played many of his minutes at point and second-year point guard Lorenzo Brown only saw the court for nine minutes.
LaVine has a Win Shares per 48 minutes of -.037. He’s played in 71 games. The only player that’s played in 50 games or more with a worse mark in the entire NBA is fellow rookie guard Gary Harris of the Denver Nuggets. LaVine has been beyond atrocious on defense and has only recently begun to show any understanding of how to run an offense.
He’ll improve, and he does need to be playing heavy minutes at this point in a lost season. But improvements from a -.037 WS/48 to something resembling a competent NBA player don’t happen overnight.
The most frustrating thing about this moment in Wolves fandom is that we don’t know what/who happens next. Andrew Wiggins has been great as of late, and his development is the only thing worth smiling about this season. The only other player seeing the floor right now that will certainly be here next year is LaVine, and the odds that he ever develops into a star are very, very low.
It’s tough to see Brown or Justin Hamilton having a future in Minnesota. Anthony Bennett is bad. Kevin Martin will be 32 years-old next year. In other words, there isn’t as much of a “young core” as the Wolves would have you believe. It’s Wiggins, the injured Rubio, and that’s about it. They let Glenn Robinson III go in a short-sighted move, and 22-year old Shabazz Muhammad is still somewhat of a question mark after an impressive stretch of 20-25 games. It’s hard to say exactly what he is at this point.
2015-16 will bring a 25-year old Ricky Rubio, a 20-year old Andrew Wiggins, and a 20-year old Zach LaVine, who still isn’t good at basketball. 26-year old Gorgui Dieng may or may not still be on the team, and 30-year old Nikola Pekovic will be back with a huge contract and only one-and-a-half Achilles tendons.
The Wolves have a ton of work to do, or else they’ll end up with Andrew Wiggins as the next Kevin Garnett — a star with nothing around him. And not only that, the odds of Wiggins ever being as good as Garnett are quite small.
Don’t let the marketing campaigns fool you; things are far from sunny when it comes to the state of the Wolves’ roster-building.
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- Which Timberwolves roster additions have upgraded the bench?