Minnesota Timberwolves: 5 predictions for the 2018-19 NBA season
By James Grieco
2. The Timberwolves will miss the playoffs
It’s hard to imagine the current roster (factoring in likely Butler trades) winning the 45 or more games necessary to realistically make the playoffs.
In 2016-17, the Wolves won 31 games and the franchise’s cornerstones, Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins, haven’t made much progress as players since then. There is no reason to expect them and the “Timberbulls” remnants to carry Minnesota to the playoffs past superior teams like the Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Lakers and Portland Trail Blazers.
While the 2017-18 Wolves had huge swings in net ratings when Butler or Towns went to the bench, the team posted just a -0.6 net rating when Wiggins sat, indicating his limited impact. He will have an expanded role once Butler is traded, but that is no guarantee his efficiency (which was bad last year) will increase too. The hope of him one day becoming Maple Jordan is long dead; how much of that optimism Wiggins can salvage will be a major factor in how long the Minnesota sniffs around the playoff picture this season.
That means that the Wolves might end up with a bizarro-New Orleans Pelicans roster, with one transcendent talent surrounded by a capable rotation of role players, except instead of the roster being young and fit for the modern NBA like the Pelicans’ is, it’s old and antiquated.