Minnesota Timberwolves: Wolves populate the fringes of NBA GM survey

The Minnesota Timberwolves are no strangers to being an up-and-coming team.

That may seem like a ridiculous thing to say about a franchise that has made exactly one playoff appearance in the last 17 years, but a good number of those years have seen the Wolves go about selling hope to the fanbase and the NBA landscape at large.

Minnesota Timberwolves: Wolves populate the fringes of NBA GM survey

The annual general manager survey put out by NBA.com is a solid barometer of the pulse of the league’s landscape as a whole. Oftentimes, the Wolves are prominently featured by virtue of promising young talent. The last two years, however, they were barely mentioned.

This year, the Wolves are back, with a whopping seven mentions in the survey — albeit on the fringes of the exercise.

Let’s take a dive into what the league’s front offices think of the talent assembled at 600 N. 1st Avenue.

On the Minnesota Timberwolves’ promising, young, up-and-coming core

We can’t stray too far from talking about the promising, young, up-and-coming core, can we?

Despite a 23-49 finish in the truncated 2020-21 campaign, NBA GMs understand that the Wolves still have an ultra-talented roster. Not only that, it’s one of the league’s youngest groups.

In this year’s edition of the survey, the Wolves’ standing as an exciting young team came through in two different categories: which team will be most improved, and which team has the most promising young core.

The two are directly related, of course, with the young core being the reason for said potential improvement.

Yours truly would argue that health is the other major factor; while every team could cite avoiding injury as a factor in playing their best basketball season this year, the staggering number of games lost by the Wolves’ best players and the timing of significant injuries and suspension last year was massively detrimental to Minnesota’s won-loss record.

Remember, the Timberwolves’ three best and highest-paid players last season (Karl-Anthony Towns, D’Angelo Russell, and Malik Beasley) appeared in just 129 of 216 contests last season. That’s just 59.7 percent of potential games. Factor in that Edwards didn’t start until Game No. 18, and the opening night Wolves rotation in Oct. 2021 will look starkly different from the December 2020/January 20211 version of the same squad.

Incidentally, the Atlanta Hawks led the “most promising young core” category by a huge margin, garnering 50 percent of the vote. Somewhat surprisingly, Houston was along in second place with seven percent. There were 10 total teams receiving votes.

The Chicago Bulls topped the “most improved” category, winning 27 percent of the vote. They were followed by the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers, two teams leaning entirely on improved health this season to make this list. There were 13 total teams receiving votes in this category.

Let’s take a look at few individuals in the Wolves organization mentioned in the NBA GM survey.