I'd love to go after Mirotic, do not want Rudy Gay though, do not need people taking the ball out of Butler/Wiggins/Towns' hands. CJ Miles I definitely thought about as well, seems like he could be a good fit.

and yeah, a 4 would be a luxury. wings are way more important.

Patrick Beverley is my dream guy.

This.

PBev or George Hill are the dream Pgs we should want. Both 3 and D guys that don't need to be primary ball handlers (like Teague...I pass on him).

PatPat is solid. Mirotic works.

Redick is gonna get PAID and will be too expensive for Wolves.

Nate Duncan thought it would be interesting if Wolves got Ryan Anderson and PBev from Hou. Anderson's contract is..high..but man both those guys would be superb fits with Wiggins/Butler/KAT

KAT's going to have to take a big leap forward defensively to be able to play with Anderson. George Hill is the exact same age as Lowry (31) and has played 43, 74, and 49 games the last three years.

Strictly talking fits...

If we want to talk games then PBev has only broken 70 games once.

I am concerned at Hill missing games for little things here and there and not catastrophic injuries a la Rubio, but from a fit, we need off the ball defensive minded PG who can hit 3s

Ill be super interested to see the PG market. Im not up for paying him the max he wants but if it were a reasonable Rubio-like deal, then sure. I think its good for the Wolves that the market is going to be thin for FA PGS looking to get paid.

He's 29 and will cost half as much though. Also without looking I'm going to assume that 70 is an arbitrary cutoff that makes him look worse than simply posting how many games he played.

That would be all of our cap space assuming we traded Ricky. Our backup wings would be guys on minimum deals. No way that could work.

I'm not sure this trade was the best, just because of the depth and critical cap space it cost. We could have renounced all our free agents, dumped Cole and had $40M in cap space to spend. Could have signed a max free agent plus a nice luxury free agent. Oh course, the downside is ever getting somebody to sign up for a loser tundra team with a yell-ey coach. But now we have to spend all cap space, in the last offseason we'll ever have cap space, on replacing missing depth.

You're not sure this trade was the best? What?

I think it'd be interesting if we could play it out both ways.

Butler is probably done when KAT is 27 and i'm extremely nervous about needing so much from Wiggins. And the absolute best case scenario is we have a paper thin team that can't handle any injuries and the injury gods love to piss on us from a great height whenever we have a good looking team. I'm nervous.

As opposed to...? The rise of Kris Dunn?

I mean I see a lot of potential issues as well, but we won like 31 games last year.

Well, Kris Dunn would be a helpful player on this team. We need a backup wing that can also be a 3rd point guard (yeah, i'm thinking Derrick Rose for the Room Exception, 2.9M). We're a Ricky injury away from a Tyus Jones-John Lucas III (or other min guy) point guard rotation and that can't happen even for a few games.

I'm very nervous about our ability to fill out this roster. We need so much depth and we have so little cap space. I can't really see a scenario where we add a starting 4, for example. This is the last offseason where we'll have cap space, we probably won't have a 1st next year to add depth either.

Hopefully Thibs and Butler can do some recruiting because we need to be good now, right now, and we don't even have a backup wing on the roster.

We were 18th in SRS at -0.64. Before correctly tanking away the last 16 games of the season we were 12th in SRS. We were pretty much a borderline playoff team all year in quality, despite an atrocious 6-18 start. Crop out the 6-18 new system start and the 3-13 tank finish and we were 22-20. That's pretty good for a team of youngs with no vets to help. We could have mixed in some very strong veteran free agents with all our cap space.

If **** didn't go well this year I could at least hold onto hope that we were biding our time to be a team of the future (but we'd be capped out). If things go ****ty this year now we'll have to be sweating over Butler to the Lakers stories again. The fall is always scarier from higher up.

71
67
56
56
41

I don't understand. Of course the team has flaws, we're the Minnesota Timberwolves. And yes, if you carve out the worst portions of our season we were marginally ok. You can say that about every team. No need to be delusional anymore!

Thanks yeah although I discount his 41 since that was his rookie year and I wasn't able to speak to reasons for 42. But 62.5 games on avg in year 2-5 isn't anything great either and my anecdotal evidence is I feel like its been a smattering of injuries.

As I said, I'd still gladly take him.

Alright, task at hand.

Assuming the Wolves cut Hill and renounce the rights to Casspi, Payne, and Rush, the Wolves have 11,638,579 in cap space right now. They have 2 wings on the roster (Wiggins, Butler) plus RFA rights to Bazz. If they renounce the rights to Shabazz their cap space goes up to 19,254,327. Finding someone to take Cole for cap space would increase our cap space by 7,300,00 (to 26,554,327) but we might have to attach picks. We also have the room exception as an option. If we get up to the cap, we can offer 4,328,000 to a player.

Figuring out what to do with Bazz is pretty tough. I think it's pretty hard on counting on him as part of the rotation because someone could pay him way too much. So i think you renounce him if you have someone to sign. But i like the idea of hanging onto him in the hopes that someone tries to screw us over by making him a big offer. Then we can lol at them and Bazz can get paid.

I think we should consider keeping Casspi.

BAZZ can go either way, agree it is tough. He is probably fine value at a qualifying offer but beyond that I don't love the idea of clogging up cap space for a guy that sort of personifies why our bench is always horrible (can't play defense and pure ISO scorer). I find it unlikely he doesn't get paid more by another team anyway.

Is Patton going to log non-Dleague minutes this year?

What do you think about Patty Mills?

Also on the PBev point, would it not be possible (and preferable) to get him AND keep Rubio? Or does he want a starting gig? Would love to have him as a 6th man.

Wouldn't leave us much wiggle room to fill out the rest of the bench though.

Also Randerson shouldn't even be on the table even in a package with Bev. It's a horrible contract

Casspi is bad at NBA basketball. So is Shabazz. Both have advanced stats below replacement level. We should look elsewhere for backup wings.

If paired with PBev, combined, they aren't a horrible contract. $25m/yr for next 2 years to keep both is a very affordable rate.

The 3rd year is the issue, PBev would be a UFA and we would have to pay RAnderson 21m.

I think PBev would be a weird 6th man, don't know if he provides enough shot creation as a pg. Maybe it works if in the regular season we pair him with like butler or towns? He's definitely good enough to be a starter in the league and on the Wolves he'd be literally the perfect fit.

I'm ok standing pat with what we have, but if we get Pat, I'd be ok with that too.

With the trade rumors around rubio that have been floated, it just seems like what I think his value is and what the league thinks his value is are so far apart I'll probably never think a Rubio trade is good.