Minnesota Timberwolves: Panning the Wolves’ offseason

It isn’t all sunshine and roses when it comes to the Minnesota Timberwolves’ offseason — or, at least not according to a recent NBA.com article.

It’s easy to look at the Minnesota Timberwolves’ offseason and conclude that they had a solid showing, the ill-fated pursuit of D’Angelo Russell notwithstanding.

But perhaps many of us have been looking at the Wolves’ offseason through rose-colored (or Rosas-colored) glasses.

Shaun Powell of NBA.com published a somewhat critical piece regarding the Timberwolves franchise as part of his 30 Teams in 30 Days series.

For starters, Powell manages to mention the Wolves qualifying as one of the “bigger disappointments” of last season without so much as mentioning the departure sabotage inflicted by Jimmy Butler. As it turns out, losing one of a team’s two All-Stars will absolutely shave a few wins off your total as a team, and sure enough, the Wolves won 11 fewer games last season than the previous campaign.

Instead, Powell decides to lay the blame on development hitting “a speed bump”. He correctly identifies Andrew Wiggins as the chief issue (outside of the non-mention of Butler) when it came to the team’s stagnation and overall regression.

The biggest issue with Powell’s analysis, however, has to do with his assumption that Karl-Anthony Towns is on the precipice of requesting a trade, simply because Anthony Davis did.

It’s ridiculous, of course, but that’s the false parallel drawn by the piece. Towns himself has scoffed at the idea that he’s interested in fleeing for a larger market, musing aloud about why small markets continue to get a bad rap in the media.

The conclusion of the article is that the Wolves might be headed towards “more trips to the Draft lottery” if they are to continue “adding to a young base to build assets.”

If you’ve been paying attention at all, you’ll notice that Gersson Rosas isn’t about to simply make moves to gain young assets and land back in the lottery. Rosas is doing whatever he can do to try and match Towns’ “window” with that of other young stars.

This analysis of the Wolves as an organization and, more specifically, of their offseason, was not much more than a quick drive-by. That isn’t to suggest that the Wolves are an organization that has earned the benefit of the doubt — hardly the case for a franchise that has made the playoffs once in the past 15 years.

But it is fair to give Rosas a beat to prove that he has a plan for the organization. And so far, the returns appear to be better than what Mr. Powell at NBA.com is suggesting.