With a superstar already on the team in Jimmy Butler, the Minnesota Timberwolves are on the verge of having a second with Karl-Anthony Towns.
There is a big difference between being a star and being a superstar. A star is a player who can be a top-two option on teams that are not expected to do much. Guys like Devin Booker, Kemba Walker and Blake Griffin are stars. There are stars are very good teams as well. Players such as Kevin Love, Al Horford, and Klay Thompson are stars too. They could carry their own team, but it would not be as successful as the team they are currently a part of. I want to be clear, that is not a knock on guys like that. Being a star in the NBA is not an easy thing to do.
Superstars, however, are on another level. These are the massive difference makers. Guys that, if you took them from their current team and stuck them on any other squad, would make a huge and immediate impact. LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant, and Kawhi Leonard are superstars. If you put King James on the Brooklyn Nets, they would immediately be considered the favorites in the Eastern Conference. Taking Durant from the Golden State Warriors and sending him to the Phoenix Suns would make them a top-three seed in the brutal Western Conference.
Superstars are very hard to find, but the most important part of winning a championship in the NBA. Since the year 2000, there is only one team that has won the NBA finals without a true superstar: the 2004 Detroit Pistons. They had a bunch of stars (Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, etc.), but not one true superstar. That shows how hard it is to win big in the association without elite talent.
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The current Minnesota Timberwolves already have a superstar on the roster in new addition Jimmy Butler. He is a bonafide top 10 player in the league and has turned the Wolves from the laughing-stock of the league into a contender in the Western Conference.
While they might have a superstar already on the team, Minnesota has a player who is right on the edge of superstar status as well: Karl-Anthony Towns.
The most important thing for a superstar to do is very obvious: win games. A good way to figure out how much a player accounts for winning is win shares. According to Basketball-Reference.com, win shares are “an estimate of the number of wins contributed by a player”. Pretty self-explanatory. Among Minnesota’s big three of KAT, Wiggins, and Butler, Towns has the highest win shares this season with 6.3. Butler is close behind at 5.7 and Wigs is trailing way behind at 1.3.
Another solid indicator to a player success is Plus/Minus. Plus/Minus is basically how much the team outscored the other team when a certain player was on a court. KAT’s plus-minus has been great most of the season, even compared to James. Over the course of the season, King James has had 13 games where he had a negative plus/minus. Towns only has 10 games where he had a negative impact in that category. Any category that allows a player to be above James during arguably his most effective offensive season ever is saying a lot.
He has been stepping up his play at both ends of the court lately, which has resulted in the Wolves going on to win nine of their last 13. During that stretch, he has better than career average marks in field goal percentage (54.9 percent), three-point percentage (42.4 percent) as well as rebounds (11.5) and assists (3.1) while averaging 20.7 points per contest. He has also stepped things up on the defensive end, averaging 1.6 steals and 2.2 blocks in the last 13 games. He has also been able to keep his plus-minus at 9.8 all while averaging 37.7 minutes per game.
Some people might point to playing with Butler and Taj Gibson, who are both stout defensively, as a reason why Towns’ stats are up on that side of the court. He also has to play with the defensively challenged (and that’s putting it nicely) Jeff Teague and Wiggins. I look at it as watching Towns blossom from the star he has been his first two years in the league into something more. His defense has always been a point of concern and he is taking big steps to turn it around.
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With Joel Embiid and Kristaps Porzingis dominating the headlines lately, many often forget about the uber-talented Minnesota big man. While he might be in a smaller market, he is with the best team out of the three. Once Towns hit superstardom, his team will turn from the team everyone has questions about into the team no one in the league wants to face.