Minnesota Timberwolves: GMs around the league are down on the Wolves

The annual NBA.com GM Survey was released on Tuesday, and mentions of the Minnesota Timberwolves and their players were few and far between.

The last several years have seen the Minnesota Timberwolves enjoy a heavy presence on the annual NBA.com GM Survey. Not so much in 2018.

From the 2015 survey, completed early in the respective careers of up-and-comers Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins, to the 2016 version which included even more Towns and Wiggins-driven optimism, plus the fuzzy feelings surrounding the upcoming first year of Tom Thibodeau as head coach.

Then, there was last year’s edition, which predicted the Wolves to finish No. 5 in the Western Conference and overwhelmingly as the league’s most improved team, plus Towns as the best center, the best player to start a team around, and the player most likely to have a breakout season.

The GMs weren’t exactly wrong, either. While the season — and certainly the offseason that followed — didn’t play out exactly as everyone was hoping, Towns and was named to both his first NBA All-Star Game and the All-NBA Third Team. While his per-game and counting stats were down slightly, he shot 42.1 percent from 3-point range and showed clear all-around improvement.

The Wolves finished as the No. 8 seed, of course, but were sitting at No. 3 for much of the season until Jimmy Butler‘s injury at the end of February.

This year, GMs seem to have forgotten all about the Wolves. (At least when filling out this survey, that is. They’ve no doubt all been chatting up their counterpart in Scott Layden about other, more pressing matters.)

Towns fell from receiving 28 percent of last year’s vote as the league’s best center to third, with seven percent of the vote. That put him behind the Pelicans’ Anthony Davis (40 percent) and the 76ers’ Joel Embiid (33 percent).

The Jimmy Butler trade request landed fourth on the list of most surprising offseason moves with six percent, trailing DeMarcus Cousins heading to Golden State (35 percent), the Kawhi Leonard–DeMar DeRozan trade (29 percent), and Paul George staying in Oklahoma City (19 percent).

Butler also made an appearance as tied for the second-best perimeter defender in the league along with the Warriors’ Draymond Green and the Pacers’ Victor Oladipo, each garnering seven percent of the vote. Leonard won easily with 60 percent.

Butler also received votes for the most versatile defender and toughest player. The only mention of Thibodeau was the seven percent of the vote he received for having the best defensive schemes. This tied him with Golden State’s Steve Kerr and placed him behind Utah’s Quin Snider (33 percent), Boston’s Brad Stevens (30 percent), and San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich (13 percent).

To recap: the Timberwolves have finally ascended the playoff ladder, only to settle into the midst of NBA mediocrity — and if it wasn’t for the ongoing Butler saga, relative obscurity.