For practical purposes, in the NBA it’s better to be abjectly awful than respectably mediocre. High draft picks are the premium lifeblood of rebuilding, and while they’re no sure thing – just ask Joel Embiid and the Sixers – they’re the best bet on the board.
Rationally, fans can accept this. Aesthetically, it’s something you never get over.
Last December I was in Washington to see the Wizards play Minnesota. It was a quiet, unremarkable Tuesday night in DC with the bars and restaurants half empty and the Verizon Center aspiring to half-emptiness. Sadly, it felt like the perfect setting for a Wiz-T’Wolves game.
The Wolves were 5-18 heading into the game, with Ricky Rubio, Kevin Martin, Nikola Pekovic and Chase Budinger all on the sidelines. Jeff Adrien, Robbie Hummel, Glen Robinson III and Anthony Bennett all saw time against the Wizards, while Zach LaVine – who is not a point guard – started at point guard.
Minnesota had talent. Andrew Wiggins was awkward, completely out of the flow on offence as he scored just nine points on nine shots, but he moved like someone who belonged, and someone who was going to be special. Shabazz Muhammad was relentless attacking the basket, LaVine bounced up and down the court like the offspring of a race car and a pogo stick, and Gorgui Dieng swatted shots and pulled down rebounds.
But every team has some degree of talent – well, except for this year’s Brooklyn Nets – and there was nothing concrete about Minnesota’s youth that guaranteed that meaningful success was on the horizon. Wiggins, Dieng, Muhammad and LaVine was nice, but it wasn’t exactly Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Serge Ibaka.
There was a future on display that night in DC, but it was murky, clouded by the reality that this team’s present day go-to offensive set was a Thaddeus Young isolation.
Those Wolves were the definition of abject awfulness. They would lose 109-95 to John Wall and the Wizards, a score that was only kept close by Young losing his mind and scoring 19 points in the third quarter on nine for nine shooting.
Minnesota ended the season 16-66, its 10th consecutive losing season. Hope was only something to loosely hold onto, a vague concept fans used as a coping mechanism. Seven months later, hope in the Twin Cities is a living, breathing, dunking reality.
Aesthetic dreadfulness served its practical purpose, rewarding the Wolves with the number one pick and Karl-Anthony Towns. A foundation that was loosely promising is now emphatically excellent. Wiggins-Towns is the best under-23 duo in the league, and it’s not especially close.
If you were building an NBA team for the next decade, you would want Anthony Davis or Wiggins-Towns – those are the two best foundations in the league. And, as New Orleans is demonstrating, two is better than one.
The supporting pieces in Minnesota are enticing, albeit still plagued by uncertainty. Rubio is only 25 and as well as being arguably the best passer in the league he’s one of the game’s best defensive point guards. Health is the perpetual concern for Rubio though, someone who has only played more than 57 games in a season once in his career.
LaVine is potential personified, an athletic freak with enough actual basketball skills to make you wonder if he could develop into something meaningful. But there’s nothing to suggest that he’s a point guard, and he should be playing alongside Rubio, not serving as his deputy. Muhammad and Dieng have starter level talent, but need to find out how they can co-exist with Wiggins and Towns.
In spite of their early 4-3 record, this Wolves team is still a conceptual mess for 2015-16.
There’s no reason why Tayshaun Prince should be starting for an NBA team at this stage, and it’s unclear what Andre Miller is doing playing for Minnesota. Martin is an awkward fit, a veteran gunner who doesn’t make his teammates better.
Sam Mitchell isn’t a good coach and his rotations are a mess. LaVine should be starting over Prince and it’s unconscionable that we’re not seeing the Rubio-LaVine-Wiggins-Towns-Dieng line-up at all, depriving us of a glimpse of the future, as well as a hell of a lot of fun.
But coaching machinations and role playing ambiguity is all just noise that can be tuned out now in Minnesota. This team has got Wiggins and Towns, and that’s all that matters
Wiggins glides and ghosts around the court like a turbo-charged Paul George, slithering to the hoop and exploding into the air. He has that early Michael Jordan physical charisma of being able to rise above the hoop and seemingly levitate for a second longer than seems plausible, before descending only of his own volition.
At 6’8″ he has the length to become an elite defender, and he seems noticeably stronger than he was last year, finishing through contact at the rim.
Wiggins is still raw and figuring things out, and his jump-shot will need to develop if he wants to become a generational star. But he’s already made huge strides on offence, going from a player who often looked hopelessly out of the flow last season, to someone who can actually dictate the flow of the game with his scoring.
‘Perennial All-Star’ seems to be his basement right now though, with a ceiling as boundless as his flights above the rim.
It’s almost unfair that Wiggins is only Minnesota’s second most promising player. Towns is the real deal. He’s an NBA anomaly – one of the few big man rookies in history who is a plus defender from day one. His defensive timing is impeccable, disrupting rolls to the rim and blocking shots as though he’s been in the league for six years and not six games.
The Wolves had the worst defensive rating in the league last season – through two weeks with Towns on the floor they’ve had the NBA’s best defence. He’s already averaging a 16-10 with three blocks a game on 49 per cent shooting and 91 per cent from the line. His shooting touch is pristine and don’t sleep on his passing ability.
Once Steph Curry descends from heaven, we all assume that this is going to be Davis’s league in the next few years. But in Towns there’s another destructive defender with feathery offensive touch to compete with AD for the throne.
This could very well be Towns’s league one day, and it could be Minnesota’s too – a thought which seemed incomprehensible just twelve months ago on a dreary Tuesday night in Washington DC.
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