Don’t rush the process: Lessons learned from Jimmy Butler and the Wolves

With Jimmy Butler’s future in Minnesota up in the air, it’s time to question whether this was ever a risk worth taking for the Timberwolves.

It seems as if the shotgun marriage of Jimmy Butler and the Minnesota Timberwolves may soon be coming to an end.

(Yes, in this scenario, Tom Thibodeau was indeed the pregnant bride. Butler was the groom, Glen Taylor the priest, Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins the altar boys getting high in the rectory, Derrick Rose the over-the hill bridesmaid who still dresses like she’s 22, and Kyrie Irving the high-school sweetheart Jimmy runs off with the first chance he gets)

On one hand, you can’t totally fault Thibs’ thinking when he made the deal. The grass is always greener, and Jimmy Butler was a known quantity. He’d would walk into the Wolves locker room and immediately rub off on the young guys like some sort of instant pain-relief ointment. Lazy habits would disappear instantly. Re-apply twice daily or as needed.

It’s not like there hadn’t been precedent for this type of thing working. Another star who was synonymous with the Minnesota Timberwolves once changed addresses, went to a Boston team that was essentially a lump of clay, and shifted the culture like he was flipping a switch.

Kevin Garnett was also a once in a generation personality, not to mention a top twenty all-time player and former MVP with an unspeakable level of gravitas. He was also joining a 30-year-old Paul Pierce who was dying to win and a 32-year-old Ray Allen who had a legendary work ethic already instilled.

As basketball talents, Towns and Wiggins may someday be on par with Pierce and Allen. Despite their inconsistent careers thus far (and that’s putting it kindly for Wiggins), both young Wolves are able to do things on the court few of their peers can even dream of. This is especially true of Towns, who is up there with Anthony Davis as having revolutionary big-man potential, some of which was actualized when he made his first All-NBA Team last season. There’s a reason general managers named him the player they’d most like to build around in each of the last two league-wide surveys. With Butler in tow, it was tempting to dream that it would all come together.

Locker room composition isn’t like baking a cake though; it’s far more like making the perfect sauce….you taste, you adjust, and you repeat until you get it right. Find any Italian grandmother and ask her how much salt she adds to her tomatoes. She won’t have a precise answer because it’s different every time.

Should we be surprised that, unlike in Chicago, Thibs couldn’t quite get the ingredients to balance out here? Maybe there was nothing he could do. Butler — a player who came into the league with a chip on his shoulder after falling to 30th in the draft — was supposed to instill toughness and work ethic in two kids who’d been picked first overall following years spent as top prospects in their class. Butler also has a natural inclination to go 110 percent on every play because once upon a time, that was the only way he’d be able to see the court. Wigging and Towns never had such concerns.

In retrospect, perhaps it was a little arrogant to think that the KG-to-Boston scenario could repeat itself. It was also an unnecessary risk taken by Thibs, the latest example of a coach/GM dual-role not quite working out.

At the time of the trade, Karl-Anthony Towns was 21 years old, while Andrew Wiggins and Zach LaVine were 22. Kris Dunn, pegged as a bust after only one season playing point guard at the highest level, was 23, and Lauri Markkanen — taken with Minnesota’s pick — was 20 (Dennis Smith Jr. and Frank Ntilikina, the next two picks who each would have been interesting fits in different ways, were both 19).

Here, team building actually is more like baking than anything else: it’s never a good idea to take the cake out of the oven before it’s risen. When star-trades work, they do so because the situation allows it. Garnett to Boston was incredibly unique. Charles Barkley went to a Phoenix team that had won 53 games the season before. The Lakers were 30-16 when they acquired Pau Gasol, with a stable infrastructure already in place led by Kobe and Phil. Rasheed Wallace was the missing piece for the Detroit Pistons, not a panacea. Chris Webber was dealt to a Kings team that was able to grow organically as a unit without any hurry.

Things don’t always work out so well, of course. When the Knicks traded multiple young players and draft picks for Carmelo Anthony, it felt rushed. New York was 28-26 at the time and wasn’t a player away from contention, even less so after the roster was gutted to acquire Melo. Not to be outdone, Brooklyn gave up a haul to acquire Deron Williams despite being one of the worst teams in the league.

At first glance, neither scenario is comparable to the one Minnesota faced when they traded for Butler, who was joining as talented a young two-man core as existed in the league at the time. Although neither the Knicks or Nets had such pieces in place, like the Timberwolves, each team felt immediate pressure to go all in. This led to one comically bad transaction after another. For Brooklyn, it was acquiring Gerald Wallace for the pick that became Damian Lillard, giving Williams’ his next contract, and completing a Boston massacre trade which ultimately set the franchise back half a decade. For New York, it was the Bargnani heist, re-signing Melo with an inexplicable no-trade clause, and handing Joakim Noah a contract that still hangs around their necks like an anvil.

Similarly, with Butler, the Wolves are now in the middle of a “choose your own adventure” book where every decision leads to a river filled with crocodiles.

They’re already on the hook for two more years and $38 million worth of Jeff Teague, a player who might not even be the team’s best fit at point guard given the surrounding pieces. Now, it appears they have to decide between trading the former Bull for fifty cents on the dollar (if they’re lucky) or dealing away a 22-year-old Towns, something that seemed unfathomable not long ago. If somehow this smooths over, they’ll be faced with a similarly impossible choice next summer: hand a 30-year old with a knee surgery in the rear-view mirror a $188 million contract or let him walk for nothing. Andrew Wiggins’ max contract extension — a deal aging worse by the hour — hasn’t even kicked in yet.

Even though nothing is certain at the moment, things don’t look good. Vegas has the Wolves pegged at 45 wins, tied for eighth in the West. This was supposed to be the season it all came together. Instead, it seems to be on the brink of falling apart.

However this turns out, it appears we have a new slogan in the NBA, one that teams should remember before putting all their chips in the middle of the table before they need to:

Don’t Rush the Process.