One thing I always love to do in the few months before the season starts is to look at the win total over/unders for the upcoming season for all of the teams. It provides a decent gauge of what the general perception is for each roster, and there are always around four to five lines that stick out for the wrong reasons.
This year, the Minnesota Timberwolves are one of those teams with a line that just doesn't make sense. Vegas has them at 48.5 wins, the same number as the Denver Nuggets, and tied for third-best in the Western Conference. Third best in the conference seems realistic, but they've proven over the past couple of years that they're in a different tier than Denver, and I fully expect them to reach 50 wins.
Winning 48 games wouldn't be a bad season by any means, but with the acquisition of LaMelo Ball, the bar has to be higher.
This Wolves team has the recipe for 50+ wins
Yes, they've yet to get on the court together, but on paper, they have all of the components to be one of the juggernauts in the NBA. They have a top five to seven player in the league capable of leading the league in scoring; they have one of the best playmakers in the NBA, also capable of scoring 25 a game. They have a perennial DPOY candidate. They have elite role players with different specialties, and they have one of the more successful head coaches of the decade.
Their chemistry has also been off the charts this offseason, and players are making a real effort to build the foundation of this new-look roster right away. In the past two seasons, the Wolves won 49 games in both, and that was with rosters significantly more flawed than this one.
I just don't see a world where the Wolves significantly upgrade their roster and manage to finish with a worse record than last season's team, which barely avoided the play-in.
A lot of the talked about issues with the Wolves are way overblown
On an episode of Brian Windhorst and the Hoop Collective, Tim MacMahon openly stated that he's worried about their lack of a power forward. He also mentioned that he's not a huge believer in LaMelo Ball and even compared the Wolves' acquisition of Ball to when the Milwaukee Bucks traded for Damian Lillard a few years ago.
"I am a Timberwolves skeptic this season. I've been a LaMelo Ball skeptic for a while now. In his defense, he proved me wrong last year, and the Hornets were so convinced by it, they shipped him out the first chance they got. But typically you make a big trade, and I've learned this the hard way because remember how high I was on the Dame Bucks. I think I picked them first in our Winspool draft that year. You make a big trade like this, it's going to take some time to figure out fit, chemistry, all those kind of things. And they don't have a lot of depth, and they do have a gaping hole at power forward," MacMahon said.
These situations couldn't be more different, other than the fact that each team traded for a star point guard. First of all, that Bucks team was old, like ancient. This Wolves team's entire core is under 26 years old, except for Rudy Gobert. That Bucks team was also a very injury-riddled roster with minimal depth and very questionable coaching.
I understand the power forward conversation too, but the Wolves have more than enough positional height to compensate for that, with Jaden McDaniels' length and LaMelo Ball's outlier height.
I don't want to act like 48 wins is a ludicrous prediction, but I don't see a world, assuming decent health, where the Wolves don't improve on last year's win total by at least a couple of games.
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