Minnesota Timberwolves: 5 things they need this offseason
By Ben Beecken
#2 – Figure out the payroll situation/find cap room
The Timberwolves will operate in 2018 with Andrew Wiggins as their highest-paid player. And it isn’t close; Wiggins will pull in nearly $5 million more than Jimmy Butler during the 2018-19 campaign.
In a vacuum, it’s of course crazy that Wiggins will out-earn his superior teammates, but it’s just how the system works. Here’s what I wrote after the extension was signed:
"Yes, this extension is the right move to make. In today’s NBA, teams must pay for future projected performance. (That’s virtually always the case anyways, one could argue, but it’s especially true for players coming off of rookie contracts and signing their first extensions.) Very, very rarely are players stars when they’re first eligible for a contract extension — and yes, Karl-Anthony Towns is absolutely the extension to the rule. Andrew Wiggins is not a star. Will he be a star? Maybe. He has the physical tools. That’s the most important thing. He’s also produced from a scoring perspective, albeit inefficiently."
Alas, Wiggins treaded water once again in his fourth NBA season, and even regressed in some areas. It’s reasonable to assume that the front office will at least have a conversation regarding the possibility of trying to trade Wiggins over the summer, although the poison pill provision would make moving him until the start of the next league year problematic.
Wiggins could be attractive to another organization for the same reasons that the Wolves decided to extend him, as cited above. But he could be a tough asset to trade for exactly those reasons as well.
Karl-Anthony Towns obviously isn’t going anywhere, and you can bet that Thibodeau is going to do everything he can to sign Butler to an extension before he hits free agency in the summer of 2019. That essentially means that either Towns or Butler will have to take less than the maximum (unlikely), or Wiggins will have to be moved.
Thibodeau, Scott Layden, and Co. have no doubt had this discussion, but they need to have a plan in place as early as possible.