The Minnesota Timberwolves are officially past the quarter mark of their season and sit in 11th place in the Western Conference at 11-12. They are only 4.5 games behind the first-place Phoenix Suns and only two games behind the sixth-seeded Los Angeles Clippers, who are in the final playoff spot.
However, the standings don’t reflect how disappointing and generally confusing the season has been. We have seen some flashes of the two-big pairing working how we hoped it would on offense. Karl-Anthony Towns has acclimated well to being a wing distributor. He has been a natural at finding Rudy Gobert when a double-team comes and Gobert’s defender leaves him open by the hoop. Towns also has been one of the team’s most accurate lob-throwers to Gobert.
Still, these bright spots have been largely overshadowed by the dark cloud that constantly hangs over Minnesota’s defense and threatens to rain threes whenever they seem to get some momentum going. It’s looked so bad at times that it’s left even the strongest optimists and Gobert trade defenders questioning whether it’s time to hop off the bandwagon before they get caught up in the winds of Hurricane Connelly.
When I first saw that the Wolves traded for Gobert, I was as confused as anyone. However, having already researched Tim Connelly’s successful track record as the Utah Jazz’s President of Basketball Operations before joining the Wolves, I was cautiously trusting of the decision. Unfortunately, I have become even more confused after watching the team slog their way through the beginning of the season, looking worse than they did at the end of last year. I find myself searching for answers other than Connelly’s made a huge mistake, or that he’s bad at his job because he’s been great at it to this point in his career.
Alas, to find new answers, one has to ask new questions.
Fortunately, one brave podcaster dared to ask a thought-provoking question this week. The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor waded into the dangerous waters of Wolvespiracy with an interesting hypothesis about the Gobert trade. On his podcast, The Mismatch, with Chris Vernon, he said: “There’s just something fundamentally wrong with the build of this team with two bigs — with what they intended to do, and thought they could do versus what they’ve been able to do.”
Vernon: “Man, who could have seen it coming?”
O’Connor: “Part of me wonders, is Tim Connelly — you know, seems like a very good general manager, he’s made great decisions over the years — I wonder if there’s any part of him that made this deal knowing that it might not work out, with the intentions of flipping Karl-Anthony Towns elsewhere.
“It’s just been a thought on my mind, cause like, everybody knew there was a chance it wouldn’t work, right? Like we all agreed, I liked the deal ’cause I like Rudy Gobert, I like what he brings defensively, I like what he can be offensively when he’s in high pick-and-roll.”
Vernon: “He has less blocks than Walker Kessler.”
O’Connor: “Yeah. But to the point, though, Chris, I wonder if Tim Connelly and that front office made the deal with any thought in the back of their mind that I know this might not work, but we want to move on from Towns anyway, we can’t win a championship with that guy. I wonder if that was the mindset.”
Vernon: “No way!”
O’Connor: “No way?”
Vernon: “Wait, hold on. You can’t win a championship with that guy, so you go get the guy that’s been ousted in every playoffs? What the hell?”
They both laugh, then agree that the Jazz’s playoff losses weren’t all Gobert’s fault because the teams had no wing defense around him. Vernon is right that O’Connor’s hypothesis is ridiculous at first glance, and it may make no sense to trade for a player who is only elite on one end of the court when trying to move on from a player that is similarly only elite on one end of the court.
Still, O’Connor’s logic tracks if you lay it out. How could someone good enough at their job to assemble the current Denver Nuggets roster make such a risky and confusing all-in trade without some sort of backup plan to escape almost certain chaos and ridicule? The man was smart enough to work his way up into a highly coveted, competitive position as a POBO and become respected as one of the best in the league. As a result, we can assume he knows more about basketball than most analysts who panned the trade from the beginning, right? Surely that means he thought deeper into the subject than they’re talented players, they’ll figure it out. Perhaps Connelly is playing 3D chess while the rest of us think he’s playing Connect Four.
I don’t believe that KAT isn’t a “winning” or “championship” player, and I doubt Connelly believes that entirely either. It has been well-documented that the teams surrounding KAT were not very talented up until the past two years, excluding the Jimmy Butler season. However, a vocal group of analysts believe not only that KAT isn’t a championship player but altogether question the viability of having an offensive-oriented center when trying to win a championship in the modern NBA.
Even two-time MVP Nikola Jokic has been the subject of this line of questioning, despite putting up ridiculous individual numbers and leading his team to playoff success. Despite how hot those takes are, they have yet to be proven wrong — or right, for that matter. Therefore, the discourse continues. Given that Connelly came from Denver to Minnesota, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he has at least pondered the question himself.
It’s also entirely possible that O’Connor’s theory puts too much trust in Connelly’s history of success as a POBO. Perhaps he does not give enough credit to the auxiliary team he had working with him in Denver’s front office. Connelly stated several times during his introductory press conference that he hoped he wouldn’t “mess up” what the Wolves had going. He regularly defers credit to his coworkers and has said in interviews that drafting Jokic was “lucky scouting.” While I mainly read this deference as humility, maybe we should take some of those words at face value.
Connelly’s background in scouting primarily gave him his reputation as a POBO, not trading or salary cap management. There has been a fair amount of criticism surrounding the max contract extension Connelly gave Michael Porter Jr. in Denver. Despite Porter’s incredible talent, his history of back injuries (something that doesn’t heal easily) usually indicates that a team shouldn’t give a player a max contract.
Still, you can’t ignore all the good things Connelly did in Denver, which allows O’Connor’s mastermind theory to persevere. Perhaps I am merely entertaining the idea because I am blinded by homerism’s endless flow of optimism. Maybe I want to believe there is a secret plan that’s going to make everything better. I may be stuck in the first stage of grief, in denial that I have lost the team I loved to watch, and thus grasping at straws for support despite how much they’re struggling.
Regardless, O’Conner’s theory is an entertaining exercise in basketball thought because there probably is a modicum of truth to it. I think it’s very likely that Connelly and the front office ran through several emergency escape plans and asked themselves what do we do if this doesn’t work? before finalizing the trade. Frankly, it would be irresponsible not to when the future of the Timberwolves franchise is at stake, and you’re making an obviously risky decision.
However, I doubt Connelly would have traded as much as he did for Gobert if he and the coaching staff didn’t believe strongly that they could make Gobert and KAT operate at a high level together. It would be entirely too long of a con because neither player can be traded until next season. As Vernon points out in The Mismatch, KAT is a better fit with Edwards on paper because floor spacing is helpful for Edwards. Additionally, the media would still criticize Connelly for the Gobert trade, even if they moved KAT and won a championship. Why? Because the optics of claiming it was your master plan to lie to one of your best players for a year just so you could trade him would be awful, regardless of the outcome.
No matter Connelly’s thought process, if the Wolves continue to play poorly with two bigs, they may face a point in the future where one of them has to be traded to try to right the ship anyway. Luckily, it’s not happening anytime soon. They still have three-quarters of a season to figure out their problems and turn things around. Remember, the Boston Celtics were sitting around .500 halfway through last season and ended up making the Eastern Conference Finals.
