Can the Minnesota Timberwolves build on their 2021-22 season?
By Bret Stuter
Covington and the 2022 second-round pick
While we await the results of that second-round pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, let’s talk about how the Minnesota Timberwolves handled Covington. He played a hybrid small forward/power forward role for the team. He had a solid 43 percent shooting from the floor, a better than 33 percent shot from three-point range, and was a solid contribution on the boards with 5.9 rebounds per game average for the T-Wolves.
Best of all, he has remained an affordable player. So why was he traded? The answer lies in one of our previous articles: Minnesota Timberwolves: Reevaluating the Robert Covington trade by Ben Beecken. He does a masterful job of unraveling the components of a four-team trade, pulling out the pieces that ended up with the Timberwolves, and then compares the value of the input to the value of the output.
Now, I’m not here to rewrite that assessment. But I will evaluate the pieces that contributed to the resurgence of the Timberwolves to a playoff team during the 2021-22 season. The 2019-2020 roster had a number of quality players, but injuries seemed to repeat to key players. From that 2019-2020 season, the Timberwolves have Karl Anthony Towns, D’Angelo Russell, and Malik Beasley. They would become the core for the 2021-22 playoff run. But they needed more, and help was on its way after the 2020 NBA season.
The Minnesota Timberwolves finished the 2019-2020 season with the third-worst record among the 30 NBA teams. But even as the Timberwolves sank to the bottom of the NBA pile, the team’s chances at winning the NBA Lottery for that coveted first overall pick rose. Why is that so special?
The NBA Draft typically has one to three players who become available to the league via the draft who are franchise-changing players. So much so that some NBA teams discovered that the best way to improve is to sink like a stone one year, draft an elite prospect, and then rebound the following season. So the NBA constructed the NBA Lottery for that top pick, to ensure that teams would not be incentivized to flop (tank) in the regular season.
In 2020, the Timberwolves were in that lottery. Would they win it?