Minnesota Sports Forum

I said the season was over after last game.

For reals... it's really really over now. Like done done.

Again, it looked like the other team had more TALENT. The Timberwolves were literally running the offense in the 4th quarter of an NBA game through Austin Rivers.

The team blew three straight games vs. bad or depleted teams because the other team took over late.




[Note: Anthony Edwards played like the first 35 games of his rookie season. YUCK!]

CoolBreeze44 wrote:

Camden wrote:

PorkChop wrote:Everyone wants to give Kat more time with Ant. How about we give more time for Gobert to play with both of them

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm less inclined to give Rudy Gobert another season because of his individual play and stranglehold on the cap. If we're being honest, we can admit that he's already on a serious decline and his supermax will become even more of an anchor than it currently is. Get what value you can for him and keep building with what's left over, which is still an attractive core.

Anthony Edwards is an ascending star player. Karl-Anthony Towns is still a star player in the midst of his prime. Gobert is no longer in that category for me even on the defensive end. He's become just good, which is far from the dominant defensive force he was just a year or two ago, and the purpose he was acquired for. They needed him to remain elite or near-elite for this mess to have championship potential.

Simply, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

I agree with your points, but do you really think TC will do that? He might as well resign if he did because he would surely be fired.

I've lost a lot of faith in Tim Connelly so I can't say with any confidence that he'll be willing to swallow his pride and make the necessary decisions from this point. Ego and job security, to your point, will probably force him to triple-down on Rudy Gobert, which is extremely disappointing from my view.

I also remain convinced that Chris Finch has mismanaged his personnel all season long so there's definitely shared blame to be had.

WildWolf2813 wrote:

CoolBreeze44 wrote:

Camden wrote:

lipoli390 wrote:I've always been against trading KAT. Unlike Cool, I think this team can be a contender with KAT provided that Edwards becomes the star we're all hoping he'll be. But I'm beginning to think the only path for this team is to trade both KAT and Gobert after this season for picks and talented young players for something approaching a rebuild.

Still not sure I'm there yet as I still favor just trading Gobert. But if we really want to get meaningful talent and picks back, trading Gobert might not be enough.

I'm still very much on the Karl-Anthony Towns wagon. Towns remains an elite offensive player and his game is extremely complimentary to Anthony Edwards'. Throw Jaden McDaniels in there and one or two others and that's the core of this current roster moving forward.

I'd look to trade both Rudy Gobert and Mike Conley Jr. this summer for younger, more dynamic talent even if unproven or risky. Re-sign Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker as well.

I'd like to trade Rudy as well, but I just don't think it's realistic. TC is not going to cut his own throat like that. The guys who hated the Gobert trade from the beginning have been proven right, it was a bad move given the other options out there. I always thought it was too much to give up, but I had hopes it would make us a contender. Well I can't see that happening now so the whole thing stinks. KAT would get our draft capital back and hopefully a really good starter as well. I understand those who don't want to move on from him, but before you blink he's going to be 30 and still not accomplished anything in this league. We will probably stay the course, but if you really want to inject some life into the organization, trading KAT would be the move. The new owners might be looking to do something like that.

Trading KAT in effect makes you the Nets (and I'll continue to hammer this point home: KAT is at best getting you 2 unprotected picks: He has FOUR things working against him:)

1. He's on a super max, so some teams will think he's highly overpaid.

2. He's become injury prone.

3. Players don't like his game because they think he's soft, so teams don't view him as some piece that puts them over the top the way Cleveland viewed Mitchell or Phoenix viewed KD or how we viewed Gobert.

4. Players don't like KAT as a person.

That's all working against us (It's amazing how we had 3 of the 15 most hated players in the league on the same team at the same time in Rudy, D'Lo and KAT). So, as I may have brought up in another thread, when the best offer we'll get is RJ Barrett, Obi Toppin, Evan Fournier, 2 Knick 1's and 2 heavily protected 1's that become 2's, it's gonna be really painful watching this board prop up what we got back.

https://nbaanalysis.net/2023/02/24/nba-trade-rumors-los-angeles-lakers-minnesota-timberwolves-karl-anthony-towns-toronto-raptors-anthony-davis-bold-scenario/

papalrep wrote:

WildWolf2813 wrote:

CoolBreeze44 wrote:

Camden wrote:

lipoli390 wrote:I've always been against trading KAT. Unlike Cool, I think this team can be a contender with KAT provided that Edwards becomes the star we're all hoping he'll be. But I'm beginning to think the only path for this team is to trade both KAT and Gobert after this season for picks and talented young players for something approaching a rebuild.

Still not sure I'm there yet as I still favor just trading Gobert. But if we really want to get meaningful talent and picks back, trading Gobert might not be enough.

I'm still very much on the Karl-Anthony Towns wagon. Towns remains an elite offensive player and his game is extremely complimentary to Anthony Edwards'. Throw Jaden McDaniels in there and one or two others and that's the core of this current roster moving forward.

I'd look to trade both Rudy Gobert and Mike Conley Jr. this summer for younger, more dynamic talent even if unproven or risky. Re-sign Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker as well.

I'd like to trade Rudy as well, but I just don't think it's realistic. TC is not going to cut his own throat like that. The guys who hated the Gobert trade from the beginning have been proven right, it was a bad move given the other options out there. I always thought it was too much to give up, but I had hopes it would make us a contender. Well I can't see that happening now so the whole thing stinks. KAT would get our draft capital back and hopefully a really good starter as well. I understand those who don't want to move on from him, but before you blink he's going to be 30 and still not accomplished anything in this league. We will probably stay the course, but if you really want to inject some life into the organization, trading KAT would be the move. The new owners might be looking to do something like that.

Trading KAT in effect makes you the Nets (and I'll continue to hammer this point home: KAT is at best getting you 2 unprotected picks: He has FOUR things working against him:)

1. He's on a super max, so some teams will think he's highly overpaid.

2. He's become injury prone.

3. Players don't like his game because they think he's soft, so teams don't view him as some piece that puts them over the top the way Cleveland viewed Mitchell or Phoenix viewed KD or how we viewed Gobert.

4. Players don't like KAT as a person.

That's all working against us (It's amazing how we had 3 of the 15 most hated players in the league on the same team at the same time in Rudy, D'Lo and KAT). So, as I may have brought up in another thread, when the best offer we'll get is RJ Barrett, Obi Toppin, Evan Fournier, 2 Knick 1's and 2 heavily protected 1's that become 2's, it's gonna be really painful watching this board prop up what we got back.

https://nbaanalysis.net/2023/02/24/nba-trade-rumors-los-angeles-lakers-minnesota-timberwolves-karl-anthony-towns-toronto-raptors-anthony-davis-bold-scenario/

Most of their trade proposals suck, but in every trade proposal they make, they assume Jaden McDaniels can easily move over and play PF, which is preposterous.

A win would have been a nice steal for playoff positioning, but I'm not going to take much from a game where literally half of the starting lineups of both teams including 4 max players (plus a $25 million guy) were missing, plus some key reserves! It had all the makings of a preseason game in that regard, so I didn't take the time to watch it. Still, with so many reserves forced to play big minutes, this was a tossup game like any preseason game that we had to steal to improve our playoff chances, and we didn't.

Box score comments:
1)Nice to see such a big offensive game from Naz, but the Warriors' 16 (!) offensive rebounds and 13 more rebounds in total tells us about our squad's rebounding problems when both Rudy and KAT are out.

2) Austin Rivers can't be putting the ball up 12 times in a game when he only makes two of them...he's just not an adequate NBA offensive player, and simply can't be that much focus on offense.

3)We're not going to win many games when Ant makes only 5 out of 19 shots, and has only 1 free throw and 5 turnovers...that's a bad game by anyone's standard.

On to the next one, I guess...

Dane Moore
@DaneMooreNBA
·
10h
With an offensive rating of 100.9, the Wolves entered this game 27th in the NBA in clutch time offense -- only better than Houston, San Antonio and (ironically) Golden State.

There are a lot of reasons the Wolves have underperformed this season (the absence of KAT being the biggest one), but I was not aware of this and find it quite troubling...teams who struggle at crunch time aren't winning teams. While we have shown the ability to build big leads early all season, we have been terrible at clutch time. Unfortunately the PG trade hasn't fixed this problem. I want to add a "yet" to the last sentence, but who knows. I only know that 27th in clutch time offense is not going to cut it.

Camden wrote:

PorkChop wrote:Everyone wants to give Kat more time with Ant. How about we give more time for Gobert to play with both of them

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm less inclined to give Rudy Gobert another season because of his individual play and stranglehold on the cap. If we're being honest, we can admit that he's already on a serious decline and his supermax will become even more of an anchor than it currently is. Get what value you can for him and keep building with what's left over, which is still an attractive core.

Anthony Edwards is an ascending star player. Karl-Anthony Towns is still a star player in the midst of his prime. Gobert is no longer in that category for me even on the defensive end. He's become just good, which is far from the dominant defensive force he was just a year or two ago, and the purpose he was acquired for. They needed him to remain elite or near-elite for this mess to have championship potential.

Simply, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

Like you, I'm still inclined to keep KAT for at least one more season. And of course, I'm fully on board with moving Gobert after this season. I didn't like the trade in the first place and I would have liked to see the Wolves move Rudy at the February deadline. Will we get anything close to what we gave up for him? Of course not. But the key is liberating the franchise from Rudy's super-max deal and the negative impact he has on our offense. His defense has obviously declined and it will continue declining as he goes deeper into his 30s.

Unfortunately, I think Cool is probably right that TC's ego will get in the way. TC shouldn't be worried about the money since he probably gets paid the full value of his contract if fired. The question I have is whether TC even realizes his Gobert deal was a mistake.

I agree that the Wolves have vastly underperformed our expectations this season, and the reasons are open for discussion (personally I see the absence of KAT for most of the season is far and away the primary reason), but I see moving Rudy in the offseason as a terrible move. Two main reasons:

1) Kekgeek has pointed out in almost every game this year how easily we are to score on every time Rudy goes to the bench...it's a striking difference, and he does the board a service in tracking it. Why do we think it would be much different next year if we traded Rudy? Teams that can't make defensive stops aren't going to be very good.

2) We have proven over and over to be a terrible rebounding team when Rudy is out. The Warriors were missing three of their top 4 rebounders last night, and still destroyed us on the boards.

Teams that can't rebound or defend inside don't win, and we have neither without Rudy.

Trading Rudy - I guess you can try and outscore everyone and play no defense or rebound but you really got zero chance to be a contender doing that. Might be sort of fun to watch. KAT is better then Naz when it comes to defense and rebounding but he's actually pretty poor on defense himself (Naz is beyond terrible). I have a hard time having both my centers be one way players (only on offense).

Did the hero ball comments by Finch have something to do with Ant's performance? It should did look like malicious compliance out there. Ant stood around for the entire 1st and let the team run offense thru Naz. Well that worked until it didn't. Ant will need to get over it and take the next step...pass the ball after you get into the lane and 4 defenders show up. It is the next item on his growth chart.