Dunking With Wolves
Fansided

Wolves Notes: Pre-Free Agency Updates, Penberthy returning?

By Ben Beecken

facebooktwitterreddit

We’re just over 24 hours away from the time of year during which free agents can meet with all 30 NBA teams but are not allowed to sign. The Wolves have a couple of unrestricted free agents that we hadn’t hear much about until today.

We had a couple of updates regarding point guard Lorenzo Brown over the weekend. While the Wolves drafted Tyus Jones and Flip Saunders has said publicly that he would be comfortable with Zach LaVine as his third-string point guard, Brown has a few guarantees here and there in the coming months if he remains on the roster. He will also be playing in Summer League with the Wolves entry that begins play on July 10th.

Darren Wolfson of KSTP and ESPN 15oo in the Twin Cities gave us updates on a couple of players who are not expected to be back with the Wolves in 2015-16.

No surprise on either player, as the Wolves are pretty loaded at two-guard right now. Andrew Wiggins will play heavy minutes between shooting guard and small forward with Kevin Martin and Zach LaVine splitting the rest of the minutes at the two.

Hamilton is expendable as well with Nikola Pekovic, Gorgui Dieng, and Karl-Anthony Towns already on the roster and Kevin Garnett expected to re-sign in short order. All four of those players are fits at the five-spot, meaning that Hamilton was simply no longer a fit with the current roster.

More from Free Agency

(Side note: Jerry Zgoda of the Star Tribune mused that a contract for Garnett could be $8 million per year for the next two seasons with an opt out for both the player and the team after 2015-16. That’s more than he’s worth at this stage, but there’s certainly no stopping Saunders from completing the transaction at this point.)

Elsewhere, Zach Harper of CBS Sports posted a fantastic look at the improvement that Ricky Rubio made with his jump shot in his abbreviated 2014-15 campaign, as well as the role that shooting coach Mike Penberthy played in that positive turn. The Wolves have apparently not decided what to do with Penberthy as of yet, as Jon Krawczynski noted.

It’s confusing, of course. If Penberthy truly wants to return and Rubio has gone so far as to make public comments regarding the credit he attributes to the shooting coach, why would the team not simply bring him back? While we don’t know the inner-workings, it seems as though an explanation will be due if Penberthy does not return.

Lastly, I thought it was important to point out that our Dunking With Wolves NBA Mock Draft (Version 1) was ranked fifth out of 73 logged mock drafts from around the internet by boydsbets.com. DraftExpress.com took the number-one spot, of course, but only scored three more points than DWW in a scoring system that awarded one point for a player that was selected in the first round and two additional points for the right player in the right spot.

We’ll have a tentative look at how the Wolves’ roster and depth chart breakdown heading into free agency as well as a couple other draft-related pieces for your Tuesday. Keep your machines tuned to DWW…

More from Dunking with Wolves