Who gets more Timberwolves PF minutes? KAT, Slo-Mo, Minott, or other?
By Bret Stuter
While the Minnesota Timberwolves front office has worked hard to upgrade the team’s overall roster, the position that appears to have received the least amount of attention recently is the power forward role. Well, perhaps the least amount of attention is too strong. What the role has become in terms of the Timberwolves strategy is the equivalent of the ‘All Other,’ category.
The power forward role has been a key component of the best years of the Minnesota Timberwolves franchise. The legendary power forward Kevin Garnett himself set the bar very high indeed for the position, and no one has gotten to the same level as Garnett, let alone been close enough to that level of play to draw natural and logical comparisons.
The Timberwolves planned to start Karl-Anthony Towns as the 4, but that only lasted for 21 games. In the end, the Timberwolves were compelled to give a starting role to newly arrived veteran Kyle Anderson. But even that strategy ran a bit aground as the team also had to lean on Anderson to handle the point guard role that disagreed with PG D’Angelo Russell.
Minnesota MacGyver’d the 2022 Timberwolves roster at PF
Throughout the 2022-23 NBA season, the absence of Karl-Anthony Towns from the roster for 53 games created a lot of headaches for Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch and forced a lot of adaptive and MacGyver-like temporary solutions upon the Timberwolves starting line-up and every changing rotations.
The truth is that all of the Timberwolves’ tactics throughout the 2022-23 NBA season were more about surviving the unique set of circumstances to compete in any given game.
As far as how well last season carries over to the 2023-24 NBA season in terms of minutes distribution, I would expect very few similarities in terms of how the Wolves coaching staff dispatches playing opportunities and minutes this season. There are new and rising equations that must be solved by this time this year and in the years ahead, and curiously, many of those solutions hinge on the power forward role this season. What do I mean? Let’s dig in and I will explain: