Minnesota Timberwolves Roundup: Towns, Taylor donate and more

The Minnesota Timberwolves are contributing to the greater community during the coronavirus pandemic in a couple of different ways.

The Minnesota Timberwolves haven’t played a game in over a week, but they’ve still found a way to be in the news during the NBA’s ongoing hiatus.

First, Karl-Anthony Towns donated $100,000 to the Mayo Clinic with the purpose of increasing their capability of testing for the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) as the outbreak spreads across the United States.

Mayo Clinic released a statement saying that the donation will help them increase their capacity from 200 tests per day to over 1,000. Obviously, that increase is key as we’re still working to understand the virus and grasp how quickly it may have spread.

Kudos to Towns for his donation, and kudos to Mayo for being transparent in just how much the donation will help in the immediate future.

On Tuesday, Wolves owner Glen Taylor announced that he would be donating “up to $1 million in a relief fund for the part-time gameday staff at Target Center.”

This is similar to initiatives already announced by other teams, beginning with Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s declaration on live television last week as the coronavirus issue was unfolding in real time across the NBA.

The Mavs’ situation is not exactly apples-to-apples compared to the Wolves; Cuban employees virtually everyone that works at American Airlines Center. Taylor, on the other hand, works with various other entities that employee the gameday workers, including ushers, security, and concessions staff. That simply means that there were a few more legal hoops to jump through to set everything up, but good on Glen for making this happen.

Elsewhere, Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic posted a mailbag piece (subscription required) featuring questions from his readers. There were a few questions surrounding Malik Beasley’s status and what he may be worth as a restricted free agent this summer.

That’s a topic that I covered something like 24 hours prior to Jon’s piece, and he provides some additional color to the situation beyond what we said here at Dunking With Wolves. That said, the overall sentiment was the same. In short, the Wolves want to keep Beasley, but his price is only rising given the strong 14 games he has played in a Timberwolves uniform thus far.

Check out Jon’s piece at The Athletic if you can, as well as my take on the situation with both Beasley and Hernangomez.

We’ll be back with some more thoughts on how this hiatus is impacting the Wolves, including some of the potential hidden benefits. Stay safe out there, everyone.