Pursuing Durant? Wolves are in a dilemma: Reinforcing may not win against the Thunder, not reinforcing or losing Edwards

The Timberwolves made a major deal after losing the Western Conference Finals last year...What will happen in 2025?

When the Minnesota Timberwolves once again lost in the Western Conference Finals and then entered the 2025 offseason, there are two reasonable ways to evaluate the team.

This team has entered the Western Conference Finals in a row. The only other team that has done this in the past decade is the dynasty Golden State Warriors, and the Timberwolves are centered around 23-year-old Anthony Edwards. Edwards has many young players around, such as Jayden McDaniels, Naz Reid and Nikkiel Alexander Walker, all rotation main players at the age of 26 or even younger, and Jaylen Clark, Terence Shannon and Rob Dillingham are all potential rookies aged 20-24. It is one of the best and most stable teams in the Western Conference and is expected to remain competitive in the coming years. The Timberwolves, who entered the 2024 Western Conference Finals, no longer existed the moment they traded Carl Anthony Towns, and the Timberwolves were able to return to the Western Conference Finals in 2025 simply because their opponents were weak. The Timberwolves defeated the Los Angeles Lakers without center and the Warriors without Stephen Curry in the first two rounds of the series, and then, when they tried to compete with the strong team, they were slapped hard by a real championship team like the Oklahoma City Thunder. Even with young players on the team, their role is weakened by veterans who seem to be on the verge of decline. Mike Conley is 37 years old. Rudy Gobert, 32, has almost negligible offense in the playoffs, and now his three-year early contract extension will begin to be executed. Julius Randall is 30 years old and because of his player options, he has the confidence to ask for a long-term contract that the Knicks didn't want to offer. This team has reached their peak.

As with most things, the truth may be somewhere in between. It's very worrying here that it might not even matter considering that it just beat their opponent in five games. The Thunder raised the benchmark. While people are talking about the league’s balance of strength and the emergence of seven championships in seven years, the Thunder will remain competitive for the long term.

We now know that the Timberwolves in the current lineup do not have the ability to defeat the Thunder. And they may not be able to beat the Thunder in the future, because the Thunder did not divide between young players and veterans. Every player the Thunder has is expected to be even better, they also have a large number of draft picks that the Timberwolves don’t have, and they’re much further from the financial crisis.

Avoiding that kind of fiscal crisis is the whole point of the Towns deal. The Timberwolves’ idea is to get rid of Towns’ long-term super-max contract and maximize their long-term flexibility with Randall’s shorter contract. This is not only the flexibility the Timberwolves need to upgrade their roster in the future, but also the flexibility they need to retain the rest of the core roster.

If you only look at the Timberwolves’ security contract next season (and the team options that are good for them), the total salary for the 12 players on their roster is $150.1 million. Not bad, right? Well, but that doesn't include Randall and Reed who have the option of a player, and Alexander Walker who is a completely free agent. The second rich line next season is expected to be US$207.8 million. Therefore, if the Timberwolves want to renew these three players and avoid reaching the second rich line, their available funds will be less than $58 million. If Randall chooses to execute his $30.9 million player option, there will be only about $27 million left.

Timberwolves are not necessarily bound by the second rich line. They can also surpass it. For the moment, we only discuss the Timberwolves renewed their players through the Bird clause. The Timberwolves have not been subject to the hard salary cap yet, but they have surpassed the second rich line this season. A team can cross the line twice in five years without penalty. If you do this for the third time, a first-round pick for the team — their 2032 pick for the Timberwolves — will automatically drop to the 30th pick. The original intention of this system is to assume that the team is unwilling to take this risk, and in fact, the Timberwolves are likely not willing to do so. If the Timberwolves surpass the second rich line next season, they may not be able to do so in the next few years. The results of the Western Conference Finals show that the Timberwolves may be far from the point where they can risk their last chance to superline.

Will the new boss group led by Mark Lorre and Alex Rodriguez be willing? In 2024, ESPN reported that the Lore Rodriguez Group plans to completely avoid luxury taxes in the 2024-25 season, which is almost an impossible cheap operation. In their battle with former boss Glen Taylor for control of the team, they reportedly introduced some well-known investors: Michael Bloomberg, Eric Schmidt and Blue Owls Capital. We don't know if such investors are more focused on budget or more on the goal of the field to compete for the championship. In short, we have no idea how high their total salary can be achieved by putting aside basketball considerations.

Therefore, even if the Timberwolves want to maintain their original team, they are likely to be unable to do it because someone leaves. Maybe it was a young player like Reed or Alexander Walker leaving in the free agent market. Maybe they will trade veterans like Conley or Donte Divenzenzo. However, purely for financial reasons, the possibility of the core eight teams staying all next season is very low. If this lineup is not enough to beat the Thunder, then the weakened version of the lineup will not do it next year.

Only time can prove how big ambitions these Timberwolves players are. Some teams are content to wander in the second or third round every year, and hope that changes in the situation can help them go further. For example, if someone sprained his ankle on the other side, or who has a cold shooting feels like a shot, anything can happen as long as you can get to that point.

But everything Tim Connelly did when managing the team showed that he would not be content with the status quo. From Gobert’s deal with Towns to his bold choice of Dillingham on draft night, there has been no more radical general manager in basketball in recent years than Connelly. In a market like Minnesota, you have to be aggressive. Edwards is still a long way from trying out the free agent market, but that point in time always comes faster than the team realizes. The moment Edwards felt that he couldn’t see the real possibility of a title at the Timberwolves, it was when everything the team built around him began to collapse.

If the Timberwolves are not enough to compete with the Thunder at this time, some fierce measures must be taken to change this situation. The Timberwolves either need to invest more chips now and try to catch up with the Thunder, or they need to take a step back and win opportunities for future championships.

Given that the Timberwolves have very little remaining draft capital, the upgrade option to win immediately will be very limited. The Timberwolves couldn't get Giannis Antetokounmpo, they couldn't get a healthy and peak player. If the Timberwolves want to get a big-name star now, it must be accompanied by some related risks. In this regard, there is only one name that really makes sense. The Timberwolves were linked with Kevin Durant on the trade deadline. Durant was Edwards' childhood idol, and the two played for the American men's basketball team last summer. The Timberwolves are likely to find another opportunity to get Durant.

McDaniels may be completely out of the scope of the deal. The question is whether the Phoenix Suns will ask for Gobert in the trade. Gobert is the NBA's top defense lower limit booster, while the Suns' defense is a mess. Of course, the Timberwolves' defense will also become a mess after losing Gobert. Reed couldn’t continue to offer rim protection, and part of the reason the Knicks traded Randall was because they knew he wasn’t competent in the center role.

What if the Suns are willing to work together to make a deal built around Randall, Conley, Divinzenzo and others? This may make sense. It would be a high-risk gamble, betting that young players can fill the depth of the roster lost in the trade, but it would be a way to dramatically increase their offensive cap without sacrificing the defensive nature brought by Gobert.

Of course, any potential trade about Durant will significantly shorten the Timberwolves' championship window. Durant is 37 years old. At best, he will only have a few more years as an All-Star player at most. Is this really the window period that the Timberwolves want to bet? At the peak of the Thunder's strength? Or, would it make more sense to take another path? What if the Timberwolves bet on the young core player, trade Gobert and choose not to provide Randall with a long-term contract?

This is another risk, but the types of risks are different. The mobility this practice can create can be very beneficial. If young players perform well, the Timberwolves may even re-accumulate the team's assets in order to win a younger star again in the future. But this method won't work immediately. Although Gobert's offense in the playoffs was frustrating, without him, this team wouldn't be at the Western Conference Finals level. Losing Gobert, the Timberwolves could suddenly become a play-off team – a fate they avoided by just one win this season. It was a dangerous situation as Edwards matured. Will Edwards accept that the team's situation has gone back several years? What if the Timberwolves are still not competitive when Edwards' free agent is approaching a few years later? Is it really that valuable to avoid the Thunder as the San Antonio Spurs window approaches?

These are all tricky questions, but there is no easy answer for a Timberwolves who are far from the level of the Western Conference Finals team. Going to the top means beating a team like the Thunder, and if the series we just watched says anything, that's not feasible for the current Timberwolves. The Timberwolves will change: it may be a small cost-cutting strategy or a large-scale adjustment, but this Timberwolves will not appear in the NBA in full this season. The Timberwolves need to figure out what this actually means for the future.

Author: Sam Quinn

Translator: GWayNe