Minnesota Timberwolves: 2018-19 NBA season preview

Storyline 2: How successful can a Towns-Wiggins core be?

Once Butler departs the Twin Cities, the focus will shift to Minnesota’s core of the future: Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins.

The two former No. 1 overall picks are 22 and 23 years old, respectively, and still have time to develop into players capable of carrying a team deep into the playoffs, but with the little progress they’ve made in their two seasons under Tom Thibodeau, hope is fading.

Jimmy Butler was the Timberwolves’ engine last year — Minnesota went just 10-13 without Butler last season. When Butler was on the court, Minnesota had a defensive rating of 105.1, but when he went to the bench, Minnesota’s defensive rating fell to a disastrous 112.2, a mark that would have been dead last in the NBA last year.

The problems aren’t all on the defensive end either. Per Basketball-Reference, in 2017-18 Wiggins posted a turnover percentage (8.8 percent) higher than his assist percentage (8.2 percent). For someone who is supposed to be a creator and can’t space the floor as a career 33.0 percent 3-point shooter, those stats won’t fly.

Worse, Wiggins’ true shooting percentage was a measly 50.5 percent, nestled in the bottom half of the league among Sean Kilpatrick and Brandon Paul (among players who played at least 50 games).

Wiggins is capable of this …

… and even this on the defensive end of the floor, when he focuses and actually tries:

2018-19 may be Wiggins’s last chance to show he’s more than a one-trick gunner.

KAT doesn’t have as much to prove as Wiggins does, but even with traditional counting stats of 24.6 points, 12.9 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.2 blocks per game last year, he was often passive on offense and lost on defense.

Some blame goes to Thibodeau for failing to utilize him properly on the offensive end of the floor (and for building a roster with such little 3-point shooting that Towns needed to provide spacing), but there was no excuse for Towns to have a usage rate lower than Wiggins, Jamal Crawford and Derrick Rose.

Towns is clearly great, as he again showed in Butler’s absence last season.

If he can supplement that kind of offensive firepower and diversity with anything but the porous defense he’s played for most of his career (opponents shot 61.5 percent at the rim against Towns in 2017-18, which places him in the bottom half of the league among frontcourt players), he will be good enough to be the best player on a championship team.

The roster around Towns and Wiggins this season isn’t ideal, but if they can’t keep the Wolves competitive throughout the whole season, there will be vital questions the franchise needs to ask itself come next summer.