How good will Timberwolves’ Karl-Anthony Towns be in Year Two?

After winning the Rookie of the Year award last season, how good will Timberwolves big man Karl-Anthony Towns be in his second NBA campaign?

Karl-Anthony Towns was far and away the best rookie in the league a year ago. He didn’t turn 20 years old until after the season started, but he quickly acclimated to the speed and style of play and was nearly an All-Star-caliber player by the end of the season.

The Timberwolves are expecting to make large strides in 2016-17. Sure, they’ve hired a consensus top-four or five coach in the league in Tom Thibodeau, but they also have the last two Rookie of the Year award winners.

And not just any ROYs, either. Wiggins was good as far as rookies go, but Towns was other-worldly.

It’s been discussed at length just how rare a season like Towns’ 2015-16 was, but we won’t spare you here, either. Check out this list of mostly Hall-of-Famers that Towns finds himself on — rookie seasons with at least 60 games played and 15 points, 10 rebounds, and 1.5 blocks per game.

So traditional per-game numbers love Towns. What about advanced stats?

Let’s look at a list of all power forward/centers who played in at least 60 games as a rookie during the three-point era. Towns is ranked tenth when sorted by win shares, but look at the names above him…not a list to be ashamed of when all nine names were All-Stars — and Bill Cartwright is the only non-multiple time All-Star.

Take off Cartwright, Buck Williams, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas and you have a slew of basketball Hall-of-Famers.

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The FanSided Network’s Nylon Calculus took a bit of a deep dive into the rookie seasons of Towns, as well as Denver’s Nikola Jokic and New York’s Kristaps Porzingis, including what their sophomore campaigns could ultimately look like.

The author, Ian Levy, walks through a series of advanced metrics that suggest that Jokic, not Towns, was last season’s top rookie.

"Box Plus-Minus, Real Plus-Minus, and Justin Willard’s new Dredge metric were all a little more fuel for the Jokic hype train. All three metrics represent an estimate of a player’s net impact per 100 possessions and all three rated Jokic the highest, often by a wide margin.Jokic probably received the least attention of the three last season, mostly by virtue of not being the top pick in the draft and not playing for the New York Knicks. However, after building on his rookie season with a strong finish in this summer’s Olympics for the Serbian national team, Jokic is on a lot more radars."

Levy then looks at playing time (Jokic played approximately 400 minutes less than Porzingis and about 700 minutes less than Towns) and the peaks and valleys of their respective rookie years.

He ultimately concludes as follows, regarding what we know about the upcoming 2016-17 season:

"For Jokic, temper expectations with the understanding that he’s going to be playing more minutes and more meaningful minutes. For Porzingis, remember the season as a whole — thunderous tip-dunks and early expectations shattered, as well as a second-half of the season that wore him down. And then there’s Towns, whose rookie season was pretty much without caveat. I suppose the lesson there is, prepare to be amazed."

A fair analysis, to be sure. Jokic was a revelation over a relatively small sample size, Porzingis wore down, and Towns was…well, Towns.

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Timberwolves fans can rest easy knowing that not only did they have the best rookie in the league to watch last year, they very well should have the best sophomore across the league come fall.