Are the Timberwolves Truly Fixed?
Regardless of where their encouraging start takes them this season, Minnesota remains on the precipice of financial hell
Through the first four weeks of the season, one of the surprise storylines has been the stellar play of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Wolves are currently 3rd in the Western conference with an 8-3 record, and they have already banked impressive wins over top-tier championship contenders such as Denver, Boston and Golden State. It’s sweet redemption for team President Tim Connelly, who was highly criticized last season when he went all in to trade for Rudy Gobert only to see the Wolves struggle to the 8th seed and a first round playoff exit. This is the version of his team that Connelly envisioned when making that bold move - Gobert is the backbone of the Wolves’ #1 ranked defense, and former #1 overall pick Anthony Edwards is playing at a legitimate all-NBA level. However, on-court improvement was only half the battle for Connelly as soon as he pulled the trigger to acquire Gobert. The other side of why the trade was such a questionable decision is just how messy Minnesota’s future salary outlook is as a result. Adding Gobert, an expensive veteran, to an otherwise young and inexpensive roster gave Minnesota an extremely finite window of two years to win big before extensions for Edwards and other key pieces would kick in. Last season flopped tremendously, and as such, the pressure to win now is on in more ways than one. Despite the hot start, I have to be the bearer of bad news - no matter how good this year’s Wolves team becomes, changes are coming this offseason (at the absolute latest) because their finances are about to be completely untenable. How proactive Connelly is before this year’s trade deadline may ultimately determine whether Minnesota can build a sustainable winner for the future, but there’s no doubt it will take serious guts to alter this team if they continue to win at their current level.
*Note - all salary information and salary cap projections via Spotrac*
Let’s start with the positive - Minnesota nailed the 2020 NBA draft when they came away from the first round with a superstar in Anthony Edwards and a stud wing defender in Jaden McDaniels. Unfortunately, the fact that both players were in the same draft class also means that they will get significantly more expensive due to contract extensions that begin at the same time - Edwards’ salary will jump from $13.5M this season to $35.5M in 2024-25, while McDaniels will move from $3.9M to $22.5M. On their own, each of those salaries is more than reasonable, but the issues start when considering the rest of the roster. Minnesota has an additional projection of roughly $110M tied up in just three other players (Gobert, Karl-Anthony Towns, Naz Reid) - all of whom operate most effectively at the same position. Between those five players and small guarantees for end-of-the-roster players Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Wendell Moore Jr., and Leonard Miller, Minnesota has over $185 million in active roster salary devoted to just 8 players. That puts them a projected $13 million into the luxury tax with a minimum of 6 roster slots to fill, and no money allocated to impending free agents Mike Conley (starting point guard) and Kyle Anderson (critical depth on the wing). Maybe if Minnesota were a market like Los Angeles or New York, or had an owner like Steve Ballmer willing to fork over gobs of money to the rest of the league in luxury tax payments, the Wolves could use Bird Rights to bring back Conley and Anderson and be content with a payroll well into the $200 million range. However, this is far from the Wolves’ reality - in their 35 years as a franchise, Minnesota has only gone into the luxury tax 4 times, forfeiting a grand total of $25.2M in tax payments (Forbes). To further complicate matters, current owner Glen Taylor is in the process of selling the team to a new ownership group headlined by Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez, and the fact that the new owners are purchasing the team on layaway does not exactly inspire confidence that they will be willing to field one of the league’s most expensive teams in their first few seasons at the helm (Yahoo).
The most damaging aspect of Minnesota’s financial allocation is its lack of correspondence to their roster priorities. Conley in particular is critically important to their team - he’s by far their best passer and really their only viable option for heavy minutes at point guard. Conley is making $24.3 million this season, and even as he heads into his age 37 season in 2024-25, he can very reasonably command a new contract in the $15-20 mil/yr range. Minnesota cannot reasonably add this salary to their existing ledger, but if they allow Conley to walk, they would be left without a starting point guard and with only minimum contracts at their disposal to replace him. Gobert, Towns and Reid are all somewhere between solid and excellent NBA players, but it is simply unfeasible for the Wolves to dedicate so much of their spending power to three centers - they need to figure out a way to reconfigure their costs, and they need to do it quickly.
The Wolves have not been a serious contender since the Kevin Garnett days of the early 2000s. In the past 19 seasons, they have won a total of 4 playoff games and have finished with a winning record just four times. With the way the team has started the season, maybe it is defensible to keep the throttle down and remain all in, future consequences be damned. However, I believe this team should be thinking bigger, and the reasoning is twofold. First off, even if I’m buying Minnesota as a playoff team and maybe even a top two or three seed in the west, I cannot yet be convinced they are a championship contender as currently constructed. The team is just too unproven in the playoffs, and while their defense might be the best in the league, I worry about what happens when they face teams that pull Rudy Gobert out from under the rim, and I don’t trust Minnesota’s half-court offense to win a shootout. Secondly, Anthony Edwards is the centerpiece of this team, and he is only 22 years old with five additional seasons of team control still in front of him. It’s the central reason why the Rudy Gobert trade never made sense to begin with - the Wolves acted like their window was closing, when in reality, it was just opening up. He’s not quite there yet, but Edwards has the talent and potential to be the #1 option on a championship team. As such, it would be a tremendous shame if the best roster Minnesota ever puts around him is in just his fourth season. The Wolves should still be building, with the goal of peaking when Edwards truly reaches his prime in a few years.
If Minnesota is looking to both shed salary and also improve their asset stock for future maneuverability, there’s really only one answer to which of their three highly compensated centers they should be looking to move. Rudy Gobert’s re-emergence as a defensive player of the year candidate is the key component of Minnesota’s true strength as a team. Plus, he is 31 years old with two years and nearly $90 million left on his contract. It’s highly unlikely that an acquiring team would view him as a positive asset and be willing to send much in return. Naz Reid could be more easily moved, but he stands to make a modest $13.9 million next season, and with how underwater Minnesota is from a cap perspective, even trading Reid for entirely expiring contracts would not solve their financial issues. That leaves just one man: Karl-Anthony Towns. Towns is a tremendous offensive talent, one of the best shooting big men of all time, and a legitimate threat to go for 30 and 10 on any given night. However, he has struggled to be consistently effective as a scorer while playing next to Gobert, and the balance of Towns’ career is evidence that Minnesota cannot field a competent defense with him as the lone big man. Towns has also struggled mightily in the limited playoff action that he has seen - his per game scoring, true shooting percentage and usage rate in the playoffs are all lower than his career regular season figures, and he consistently loses his cool and battles foul trouble in high level games and moments. Contractually, Towns is making $36M this year, but in 2024-25 that will spike to $49.7M in the first year of a four year extension worth a projected $220 million. If the Wolves trade him this year, they would only have to take back roughly $30-$36 million in salary from the acquiring team - even if none of that were in the form of expiring contracts (unlikely), that’s ~$13-$19 million in savings against the 2024-25 cap right away. Going forward, Towns’ value is only likely to drop: He is guaranteed to become more expensive, and likely to become less productive as Minnesota funnels touches away from him and towards Edwards. This may be the Wolves’ only chance to trade Towns for a superstar-sized return - if they can pull that off, they can simultaneously restock their barren draft capital, fix their financial woes, and potentially add multiple cheaper and better-fitting players to their roster. Maybe that trade just isn’t out there, but I’m not so sure - off the top of my head I could easily see teams like the Knicks, Bulls or Grizzlies convincing themselves to go all in for Towns.
To be clear, this is by no means an obvious call for Connelly and his front office. After the disaster that was 2022-23 and with new ownership coming in, I have no doubt that the pressure to win immediately was at a fever pitch prior to this season - the Wolves’ 8-3 start must feel like an answered prayer. Nevertheless, from where I sit, there is still a ton of work to be done to configure the core of an otherwise promising team. Truth be told, you could make the case that Connelly has been gearing up for a Towns trade ever since he got the job. His first big move was to acquire a second center whose game more capably complements Edwards, and he prioritized re-signing Reid, who might be able to give Minnesota a scaled-down version of Towns’ offensive production in a bench role. Even though I didn’t agree with the Gobert move at the time, there’s no question it required Connelly to eschew public perception and think outside the box. In order to truly commit to that move, he will have to swallow hard and get creative once again.