NBA Team Preview: Minnesota Timberwolves

Dunking With Wolves is counting down NBA Team Previews from the worst to the best. The Minnesota Timberwolves are ranked #23.

Let’s start by making one thing clear — in light of the NBA Team Preview series, this will be a short, sweet glance at how the Wolves will fair in 2014-15.

Cody Gerrells has already posted a fantastic look at the pre-training camp Wolves from his perspective, and the FanSided mother ship, along with DWW, will have something of a team preview cooked up a bit closer to the opening tap of the regular season.

This preview, on the other hand, will be a drive-by, if you will, to keep consistency with our other snapshot-style team previews.

Obviously, the Wolves have undergone a weird transitionary period over the summer. The best player is gone, but there is a strange yet understandable amount of optimism surrounding the squad. The double-boss (owner and president of basketball operations) added head coach to his business card and became a triple-boss. And the training camp roster has taken on an odd mix of painfully young players and still-young-but-more-experienced players.

In fact, of the 18 players on the training camp roster, a staggering 8 of them are entering either their first or second NBA season. Only 10 were part of the league before the 2012-13 season. And of those 10 players, Ricky Rubio (turning 24 years old), Thaddeus Young (26) and Chase Budinger (26) are still quite young, despite the combined twelve years of experience that Young and Budinger bring to the roster.

Flip Saunders is certainly trying his hand at the whole “rebuilding on the fly” thing that has rarely been successful in today’s NBA. But if one is going to about this tenuous process, the Wolves are off to a heck of a start.

Saunders played the Kevin Love trade situation perfectly. Despite plenty of national cries regarding the supposed “lack of leverage” that the Wolves possessed, Flip made it clear that he was more than willing to coach the superstar power forward during the 2014-15. He’s one of the top six or seven players in the league after all, so I’m not sure that he was bluffing, either.

This firm stance aided in the acquisition of this year’s number-one overall draft pick in Andrew Wiggins from the Cleveland Cavaliers. We don’t need to go over all of Wiggins’ credentials here, but let’s just say that he’s easily the most highly-touted number-one overall pick since Blake Griffin, if not LeBron James. Deserved or not, there are a lot of very, very well-respected basketball folks that believe that he’ll be a superstar in relatively short order.

In the same trade, Saunders managed to land the 2013 first-overall pick in Anthony Bennett (nowhere near the talent of Wiggins, of course), and borderline star-level forward Thaddeus Young from Philadelphia.

To many, it appears as though the Wolves may be in the dreaded ‘treading water’ territory, but there is a bit of a method to Saunders’ madness. Surely, it will beneficial to have veterans like Young, Pekovic, and Kevin Martin to mentor players like Bennett, Dieng, Wiggins, and the Wolves’ own first-round pick, Zach LaVine. Flip also added guard Mo Williams to help out with LaVine and Rubio.

Yes, there’s a point to the mish-mashing of old and young, it’s just been taken to the extreme. Is it a good idea? Will it work?

Sure, from a purely win-loss record standpoint, this team will assuredly be mediocre. They’ll win at least 30 games, but shouldn’t threaten last year’s win total of 40. Teams that lose their best player don’t manage the same record the next season. It just doesn’t happen.

I settled at 34 wins for this year’s edition of the Wolves, but I believe that their floor is 30 wins with a ceiling of 37. There isn’t much fluctuation for a team with a few known commodities and so many young unknowns playing heavy minutes. Especially in the Western Conference.

I’ll have a much more detailed breakdown of the off-season that will look more closely at the outlook for 2014-15 in the near future. In the meantime, enjoy the training camp reports that trickle in from Mankato. We’ll have recaps and link-dumps from what the media reports throughout the week until the Wolves’ first preseason game on October 7.