Tag: Timberwolves

Tim Connelly has built a reputation for being a risk-taker since taking over as the Minnesota Timberwolves president of basketball operations three years ago. He has swung major trades for Rudy Gobert and Mike Conley and traded Karl-Anthony Towns to New York just before training camp opened last fall.

As the clock ticked down on the NBA’s trade deadline on Thursday, Connelly was looking for ways to pull off his biggest deal yet. The Phoenix Suns had been entertaining trades for Kevin Durant over the previous few days with a possible reunion with the Golden State Warriors among the considerations.

Connelly and the Timberwolves explored getting into the Durant sweepstakes to unite him with his Olympic pal, Anthony Edwards, team sources told The Athletic. Timberwolves sources believed Durant would have been open to coming to Minnesota.

Nothing came close to fruition, team sources said, though there was a swell of hope as the day wore on. As a second apron team, the Wolves would have had to pull off a series of maneuvers and part with a significant number of players to pull the deal off. In the end, there were too many hoops to jump through for it to be feasible, team sources said.

Still, it’s a juicy little what-if, first reported by Chris Haynes, that would have been a major headline-grabber during one of the busiest trade deadlines the league has ever seen.

“Batman and Robin,” one team source mused.

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After making the Western Conference finals last season, the Timberwolves have been languishing near Play-In territory all season long. The trade of Towns for Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo and a first-round pick, while helping provide some much-needed financial flexibility to build around Edwards for the long term, has not been as productive as the Wolves had hoped in the short term.

They are currently 28-23 and seventh in the West, just 2½ games ahead of the 11th-place Warriors, who added Jimmy Butler at the trade deadline. Their historically good defense of a season ago has slipped to sixth this season, and the offense, while better than last season, is still at 14th.

Randle has been a solid addition, but his fit with Rudy Gobert in the frontcourt has not been as easy as was the pairing of Towns and Gobert. Randle also is out for the next few weeks because of a strained groin. DiVincenzo started slow but picked things up when he joined the starting lineup in January, only to go down with a painful turf toe injury that will keep him out for several more weeks.

Edwards has had another All-Star season, but he has struggled at times to acclimate to a new roster configuration that doesn’t have the same spacing Towns provided.

On the other side, the Suns have languished with a core of Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal. They are 25-25 and 10th in the West, nowhere near the contender that aggressive owner Mat Ishbia expected when he greenlit the trades to bring Durant and Beal to Phoenix.

But as of early Monday, the prospect of Durant being on the move did not appear to be in play. If there was a high-profile Suns veteran who was going to be traded, it was the former All-Star Beal (if he’d waive his no-trade clause) in a deal for Miami’s Jimmy Butler. All signs pointed to Durant staying put with the Suns hoping to form a Durant-Devin Booker-Butler trio that would revive their championship hopes.

Then came a report about the possibility of a Durant-Golden State reunion, followed by a steady stream of league-wide chatter that the Warriors weren’t alone in the pursuit. The Suns, who had realized trading Durant might be the only way to land Butler, were pushing hard to find a way. League sources say there were multiple structures in play, including a three-team deal between the Warriors, Heat and Suns, and a simpler deal between Golden State and Phoenix.

As of Tuesday night, league sources say the Warriors were in the lead for Durant’s services.

Except for one thing: As they would finally come to accept on Wednesday morning, Durant didn’t want to be there.

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The Warriors, who won two titles with Durant during their three seasons together, were already aware he might be lukewarm about the prospect of reuniting. Around that same time, league sources said, the Warriors started to fear that longtime Heat president Pat Riley was making a last-minute push to land Durant himself rather than see him join the Warriors.

That development, coupled with Durant’s impossible-to-ignore pushback, was enough to cause a sudden shift in Golden State’s strategy. The Warriors pivoted to the Butler pursuit (that would land him in the Bay that night), and Durant remained in play. Enter the Timberwolves.

There is deep respect between Edwards and Durant. Edwards has long gushed publicly over his appreciation of Durant, a rarity from a young player whose bravado normally keeps him from giving his peers too much love.

Durant smiled as Edwards took it to the Suns in a first-round sweep last season, seeing a younger version of himself in the competitive but also joyful Edwards.

The Wolves kicked around many ideas on how to make a trade of that magnitude happen, but it would have eradicated almost all of the depth on the roster. As a second-apron team, the Wolves were not able to aggregate salaries in a two-team trade, so they would have had to execute several trades to get them in position to land Durant. But the gymnastics were just too much and would have cost the Wolves too many players, to pull off.

The Wolves looked at several other scenarios involving trades for other players, team sources said, but didn’t see anything that helped them. Wolves fans have been clamoring for Randle to move, but the team remains high on his contributions and did not see a move out there that would have improved their team for the stretch run.

“I’m at peace,” coach Chris Finch said Thursday night before the Wolves played the Houston Rockets. “There was never this great momentum within the organization to shake it up or do anything.”

Despite some dispiriting losses at home to Sacramento and Washington, the Wolves are hopeful that, once they get Randle and DiVincenzo back healthy, they can make a run. Since Dec. 1, they are 19-13 with the fourth-best defense and 10th-best offense. They are seventh in net rating in that span.

“Since the middle of December, I think we feel like we can point to the team we can still become, and we’ve seen glimpses of that,” Finch said. “That gives us great encouragement and hope.”

The chaos of these past few days sets the stage for another Summer of Durant. The mere fact that the Suns considered trading him and that the revelation was made public, has led to a league-wide belief that the Suns will be forced to revisit this sensitive situation at season’s end. Durant, who has one year left on his contract worth $54.7 million, bypassed a one-year, $60 million extension before this season and is eligible for a two-year, $120 million extension this summer.

Ant will be watching.

(Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)