With just 19 games left in the season, the Minnesota Timberwolves sit in a precarious place in the overpacked middle of the Western Conference standings. All things considered, a 31-32 record is pretty good given that Karl-Anthony Towns, an All-NBA player coming off one of the best seasons in his career, has missed all but 21 games. Anthony Edwards has done an impeccable job taking the wheel and keeping the bus on the road to success. At just 21 years old, has been the primary driving force for winning when the team desperately needed it. Jaden McDaniels has continued to develop into one of the premier defensive players in the league, and Naz Reid has proven that he deserves minutes no matter how many centers are on the roster.
Still, despite the silver linings, it’s hard to deny that this season has been disappointing, and the Timberwolves are in a tough position. Many of the “curses” that have followed the Wolves for decades still feel like they are in full effect, despite many changes to the roster, coaching staff, and ownership. Timberwolves GMs have been historically incapable of making a big trade that doesn’t ultimately haunt them for years. In the past 10 years alone, Tom Thibodeau traded Zach LaVine and the No. 7 pick which became Lauri Markkanen for Jimmy Butler, only to have to trade Butler for role players because he was toxic in the locker room. Gersson Rosas traded Andrew Wiggins and a first-round pick which later became Jonathan Kuminga for D’Angelo Russell, which most considered an overpay even before Kuminga proved his talent.
Now this season, just when we thought things would finally stabilize with the hiring of proven GM Tim Connelly, he traded half of last year’s team and all future picks that were available to him for Rudy Gobert, one of the most polarizing players in the NBA. This time the trade was almost universally considered an overpay. To make matters worse, Gobert has been much less impactful for the Wolves this season than he has with the Utah Jazz in the past. And due to KAT’s injury, the two haven’t spent enough time on the court together to know if the pairing even works long-term.
As a result, the vultures have started to circle, the aggregators have mounted up, and a familiar story has entered the news cycle: Teams are watching to see if KAT will become available for trade.
While these reports are accurate, don’t let the out-of-context headlines convince you that a trade involving KAT is guaranteed to come this summer, or that Minnesota’s internal commitment to Towns has changed. The headlines were grabbed from an appearance Jon Krawczynski made on Zach Lowe’s podcast. Lowe states he feels it’s inevitable that teams will express their interest in trading for KAT this summer, to which Krawczynski responds:
Absolutely, teams are already talking about it. There’s no doubt that other teams are eyeing this situation and looking to see if KAT will become available. I can tell you from everyone that I’ve talked to within the organization, they very much believe in KAT. They believe that once he comes back and they have some time to build around Ant and Gobert and KAT, they very much believe that that can still work. Chris Finch believes it. Tim Connelly believes it. So they don’t have any plans to trade him. But if the bottom falls out of this thing, and they go forward that way, there are going to be teams knocking on the door.
However, as Krawczynski points out, just because teams are “monitoring KAT’s status” does not mean the Wolves are considering trading him. In the modern NBA, the most common way those teams can acquire true star players is through trade. The Collective Bargaining Agreement allows teams who drafted a player (or have certain trade rights) to offer them the most money on a maximum contract, partially to help small market teams retain their talent. As a result, most players being offered a maximum contract these days choose to sign it and worry about asking for a trade later, even if they want to leave, because they can make significantly more money. This has also caused a large spike in trades involving players with multiple years left on their contract, including Kevin Durant a few weeks ago, and of course Gobert this offseason.
That paradigm shift has also forced GMs to change how they operate in their jobs. It rarely makes sense for a competitive team to plan to have cap space in the offseason. Players only tend to go to free agency if their team doesn’t want to re-sign them, or because the player thinks they can get more money or playing time elsewhere. While this can work out for teams, as it did for the New York Knicks signing Jalen Brunson this year, it can also result in overpaying a player in a bidding war. Additionally, if you’re a franchise located in an undesirable climate like Minnesota, or a small market like Oklahoma City, there’s no guarantee that a player will want to sign with you even if you make them the best offer on the market.
Instead, it makes more sense for front offices to acquire draft assets, develop their young talent, and wait patiently for a star to become disgruntled and demand a trade. Thus, GMs ‘eyeing KAT’s situation’ or ‘watching to see if he becomes available’ is hardly even news. It’s one of the most important parts of their jobs to monitor the status of stars (and role players) on underperforming teams that they may want to pursue. Even if they know there is little chance a player will be traded, it benefits them to keep an open line of communication, and have a foot in the door on the off chance things change.
For example, GMs have been monitoring Damian Lillard and Bradley Beal, two other stars on small-to-mid market teams for what feels like 10 years now. Neither have been traded, and yet the conversation comes up every year because they are great players on historically mediocre teams, and the headlines attract attention.
The same has been the case with KAT almost every year since he’s been drafted. In early 2018, Michael Scotto reported the Los Angeles Clippers offered a package including Blake Griffin for KAT. In late 2019, Ethan Strauss reported that the Golden State Warriors were monitoring KAT, in an article where he also reported that “every plausible team is keyed on Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo” for trades. Marc Berman reported around the same time that the Knicks were also “expected to monitor” Towns.
Teams monitor other teams’ players all the time, often nothing happens as a result, and most of the time it isn’t even reported. This simply isn’t new information, and we won’t get any new information on this subject unless the Timberwolves’ front office says they’re open to trading KAT. And given that teams want to operate from a position of power when making trades of this magnitude, they would likely publicly say their intention is to keep KAT to attempt to elicit teams to give them offers good enough to change their minds.
After all, that’s part of how Danny Ainge leveraged so many picks from the Wolves for Gobert, despite there being little evidence suggesting the Wolves were in a true bidding war against anyone but themselves. Ainge maintained the stance that he wasn’t pulling the plug on the current roster up until the moment he pulled it, and got maximum value out of the trades he made as a result. The same could be said for Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. The Brooklyn Nets were publicly adamant about retaining them throughout the offseason, right up until the trade deadline.
The Wolves still have 19 games left in the season, and KAT hasn’t even had a real chance to show what he can do with this newly reworked roster. There’s no reason to worry about GMs being diligent and having conversations, especially when Krawczynski reported the Wolves front office maintains that KAT isn’t available.
