Minnesota Timberwolves Roundup: In-Market Bubble, free agency

The Minnesota Timberwolves’ In-Market Bubble is underway, and we’re starting to see videos from the on-court action.

The Minnesota Timberwolves have passed the “hard quarantine” portion of the In-Market Bubble and advanced to on-court action on Thursday.

While we don’t yet have the answer as to whether or not any of the scrimmages will be streamed and/or televised, we do know that there are officially-scheduled scrimmages as part of the bubble.

Minnesota Timberwolves Roundup: In-Market Bubble underway

The bubble is underway, and the Wolves released nearly a minute’s worth of video for various media personalities to put out into the Twittersphere.

Here it is from the radio voice of the Wolves, Alan Horton:

No, it isn’t much, but after 197 days, we’ll all take it and like it, won’t we?

And not that we’re trying to get too greedy, but KSTP and SKOR North’s Darren Wolfson left the jar slightly ajar for those of us who are holding out hope for some live-action scrimmages…

Streaming at least one of those scrimmages seems too be entirely possible, as the Wolves have been both fairly transparent in general and on the leading edge in a lot of areas of operation, including the video/access department.

At any rate, we have real Minnesota Timberwolves basketball, and it’s glorious.

The Athletic’s Jon Krawczynski notes that Jake Layman broke his nose in the bubble, so that mystery, which was reported seemingly unprovoked — yet mysteriously, as he didn’t reveal which player had been injured — by President of Basketball Operations Gersson Rosas earlier in the week.

Chris Hine of the Star Tribune also put together some notes on the early stages of the Wolves’ bubble.

There has been little coming from the Timberwolves official social media accounts, but we did find out that James Johnson looks … different than he did six months ago.

https://twitter.com/Timberwolves/status/1308802574238330880

Also, the team doing work in the weight room…

We’ll keep tabs on the bubble, of course, and relay anything intriguing that goes down over the next couple of weeks.

Minnesota Timberwolves Roundup: Boom-or-bust free agent

Malik Beasley was named one of the top-five “boom-or-bust” free agents by Zach Buckley of Bleacher Report.

Buckley cites the major differences between Beasley’s quiet first two years in the league, his quasi-breakout in 2018-19 with Denver, and then bouncing back from a quiet first half of the 2019-20 campaign with a fantastic 14-games stint in Minnesota post-trade this year.

Indeed, it’s the major offseason question that the Wolves need to parse, as yours truly noted a couple of weeks ago. In fact, it was a critique of Buckley’s article about the Wolves’ biggest challenge of the offseason, so … great minds think alike, right?

For whatever it’s worth, we’re all on the same page in that Rosas and the Minnesota Timberwolves have a challenging and intriguing offseason ahead.