The curious case of the Wolves new dynamic
By Josh Bungum
As the wild offseason winds to a close and we start seeing season predictions emerge, Minnesota Timberwolves’ fans will see many different takes on what to expect from their squad. What is creating the wide variety of projections for this year’s team?
It’s not too often that teams are able to acquire a superstar player to a roster laid with young and inexperienced talent. It’s even rarer when this superstar is intimately familiar with his new coach’s expectations and systems.
This is the situation the Minnesota Timberwolves currently find themselves in. Add this superstar addition to a series of corresponding moves that shook up the roster, but at the same time increased the coach’s comfort level with his players. This casts a confusing light onto whether the team gained or lost more cohesion as we move into the upcoming season.
On one hand, the Wolves lost franchise staple Ricky Rubio, who at the time was the longest tenured player on the roster. They also cast away Zach LaVine, who had forged close relationships with team cornerstones Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins, and was on the path towards lifting the team to relevance as a young trifecta along with those two. Kris Dunn was also a casualty of the Timberwolves crazy summer, as he was traded by the club after being drafted fifth overall just one year prior.
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On the other hand, they gained a plethora of experience and unity by their new additions. The aforementioned Butler may have a better understanding of Thibodeau’s principles than anybody. Fellow former-Bull and acquisition Taj Gibson adds an element of grit and veteran savvy along with his own advanced knowledge of what his new/old coach desires.
Out with the old and in with the, well….old? It is tough to gauge whether these two players will look more like newcomers to a fresh team, or the seasoned veterans who seem to have a better understanding of their surroundings than anybody.
Comparing to other similar situations:
Nobody could logically argue that this year’s Wolves are a super team, at least not this season. But, the fact that they added a probable top-15 NBA player in Butler to another top-20 player in Towns casts a similar outlook on this team to previous organizations who combined multiple superstars.
It’s just that the way they did it and the dynamic of this new team is vastly different from its predecessors.
Perhaps the inaugural NBA super team in this new era was the “Big Three” that was constructed on the 2007-08 Boston Celtics. Boston acquired two grizzled star veterans in Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to team up with Paul Pierce and coach Doc Rivers. They built their success off of players who had legitimized their place among the NBA’s elite before coming together on the same team. They also did not have previous experience playing for Doc Rivers as their head coach, creating a different set of circumstances from this year’s Wolves team.
Another case in which star players came together to create a successful conglomerate is the 2010 Miami Heat. They manually overhauled their roster by luring the best player in the NBA, LeBron James, to join current star Dwyane Wade. They also convinced Chris Bosh to jump aboard to accelerate their inevitable success. Again, this team threw together already-established star players who did not have familiarity with a system or coach, but instead relied on their superior physical gifts to achieve success.
The Warriors are also a difficult team to base a Timberwolves comparison to as far as roster construction is concerned. They slowly built from within, drafting their star players such as Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green and letting them marinate together for multiple seasons, working through their failures and eventually creating a monster seldom seen throughout NBA history. They then added a former MVP and scoring champion, turning the monster into some scary combination of Godzilla and King Kong.
The Wolves were sort of on this path (to a much lesser extent) but then traded one of their homegrown guys for their reputable star, Jimmy Butler.
The list goes on. The Houston Rockets added Chris Paul to a James Harden-led 55-win team, but again, that was adding an already established superstar to a system in which he isn’t familiar. The Oklahoma City Thunder essentially did the same thing in adding Paul George to last year’s MVP Russell Westbrook.
The Unique Construction:
The Wolves differ from these precedents in a few ways.
The first has already been mentioned in that Butler isn’t just joining a new team already consisting of star players and foreign coaches. He is realigning with the coaching staff who molded him into the player and worker that he is today. Together, they managed to reach high levels of success in their former stint and the hope is that they can replicate this winning culture in their second go-round.
The second way that these Timberwolves vary from the other star-studded rosters is that two of their three most important players still have so far to go in order to reach their ceilings.
Karl-Anthony Towns, already a basketball spectacle at 21-years-old, needs to shore up several parts of his game before becoming the masterpiece that everyone hopes he will be.
It is common knowledge by now that Andrew Wiggins must improve in many facets of the game to grow into the megastar he is capable of becoming. But there is still much work to be done and experience to be gained on his part.
Add these variables to the fact that there were other changes to the roster as well. The team also acquired Jamal Crawford, applauded as probably the best sixth-man of the last decade. Jeff Teague is now on board too, bringing a drastically different style than his predecessor.
When all these things are added up, it creates a cloudy picture of what will actually come of this season for the Timberwolves. Will Butler and Gibson step right in and funnel their former triumphs with Thibodeau into instant success, or will they take awhile to re-acclimate after some time apart? Will Towns and Wiggins blossom into reliable co-stars for Butler, or will their progress stagnate as they are still so young and inexperienced? Are the Timberwolves now a veteran team, or will the youth they depend on so heavily bring them down in clutch moments yet again?
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These are all questions that will be answered in the next 9 months. It will be a fascinating storyline to watch unfold. But no matter how many predictions there are, whether bold or underwhelming, we won’t have any idea until we see this team actually step on the court together. It should be fun.