Prior to draft, Timberwolves president Tim Connelly addressed the media and talked about what he learned to watch from this year’s playoffs. The first sentence he spoke on the subject was: “It will be really difficult to get to the level where we think we can get to.”
It is easy to look back on that sentence and say that it foretold the kind of great movement. Connelly made a mammoth deal for Utah Jazz Center Rudy Gobert on Friday in a move that included four players from last year’s team, four future first-round picks (2023), 2025, 2027 unprotected, 2029 top-five protected), a 2026 pick-swap and one of this year’s first-rounders, Walker Kessler.
The wolves had no regrets about the kind of price they had to pay to get Gobert, with a member of the organization saying the mood was “ecstatic” after the trade went down. The Wolves now feel as if they have been positioned to be a top-four team in the Western Conference for some time. The NBA is a league where elite talent wins, and the Wolves have squandered much of their fortune on someone who they believe will raise the franchise’s ceiling in a big way because the other players they play as part of their Dear female.
They were thrilled to keep Jaden McDaniels, the young striker on whom they had high hopes, and they sacrificed some extra draft capital to ensure that McDaniels was part of the foundation that is moving forward.
One of the biggest questions surrounding the Gobert movement is: How does it all go, not just on the court, but on the books as well? Here is a breakdown.
The projected starting lineup of D’Angelo Russell, Anthony Edwards, McDaniels, Karl-Anthony Towns and Gobert means that Towns will slide to the 4th, or Power Forward, position when the two share the floor. At least in the regular season this should not be much of a problem on the defensive end. Gobert is a three-time defensive player of the year and the most prominent defender in this generation of the NBA.
The Wolves defense, even with Towns guarding the power forward, can function knowing that it has the best backstop in the NBA waiting on the sidelines – and one that was the leading rebounder in the NBA last season for missing. Gobert will improve the wolf on the glass by jumping in (re) bounds, her biggest needs of last season.
Gobert can allow McDaniels and Edwards to be aggressive with their on-ball defense around the perimeter, to make Towns aggressive when he has to watch players along the perimeter, which he did a lot in the Wolves high-wall scheme last season. , and it could allow Russell to be the roaming presence he was last season, which seems to fit his limitations on defense.
The move also means McDaniels’ start will be 3, small forwards, a position for which he is likely to be more suitable than the 4, which is where he will have to play for a good chunk of his two seasons.
Teams will probably try to go small to fight the wolf, but not everyone will have the staff to pull it off. Who knows what might happen deep into the playoffs when individual matchups become more critical, but the Wolves have a whole season to figure out how to do this before they get to that hill.
Jazz never dropped out of the top half of the league in defensive efficiency and were often in the top three during Gobert’s tenure.
This is where it’s important that the wolves have Chris Finch. If anyone in the NBA is equipped to design and insult the two majors involved, it is Finch who helped make it around Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins while he was an assistant in New Orleans.
Finch was there as the Pelicans advanced to the second round of the 2018 playoffs with 6-10 stars Davis and Cousins. The two combine for an average of more than 53 points per game this season. Supervising this team was General Manager Dell Demps, now a member of the Wolves Front Office. Demps also worked in Utah as an assistant coach with Gobert.
Gobert is one of the leaders in the NBA in statistics of “Screen Assists”, or when a screen puts a player, leads directly into a basket of a teammate. Expect Gobert to deal with that a lot with either Russell or Edwards. Gobert’s presence and efficiency scoring inside should prevent cities from seeing too many double teams when he goes inside. Too often last season, teams (like the Jazz) doubled Jarred Vanderbilt with their center and limited Towns efficiency. The wolves even called this scheme the “Utah defense.” Gobert is more of an offensive threat than Vanderbilt was.
The ability of cities to mark outdoors will keep the ground at a distance and prevent a logjam inside. If teams get small because they try to score at the offensive end, the Wolves should punish them inside at the other end.
Gobert has four years on a Supermax contract, which means he makes 35% of his salary. That will pay him more than $ 38 million this season. It’s the same contract Towns will have in two years when its current deal (which is 25% of the cap) expires.
For the next two years, the Wolves also saw Edwards and McDaniels on their rookie dealerships before seeing both potentially lucrative extensions. In Edwards’ case, that could also be a maximum contract.
Without going too deep into the numbers, the Wolves have two years where they can play limbo with the luxury tax line and try to stay down before the extension of Towns comes in and Edwards and McDaniels start earning more money.
They do this by signing Kyle Anderson on most of their mid-level exceptions, on a two-year $ 18 million deal in that window. They signed Taurean Prince to a two-year, $ 16 million contract with a team option for the second year, signed Gard Bryn Forbes to the minimum and recorded cheap team options on Naz Reid and Jaylen Nowell ($ 1.9 million each) for this coming season.
If this new core is successful, the wolves will look to the luxury tax to keep the band together for two years. That will be a decision that Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez will have to make after taking over the controlling owners of the team in 2023.
At the moment, the Wolves have a two-year window where they can try to compete in the upper echelon of the Western Conference, while possibly avoiding the luxury tax.
