Jimmy Butler is holding up a mirror to the Timberwolves

It’s a cliche to say that no person is an island, yet I think part of the reason it’s repeated so often is because of how hard it is to internalize. We become who we are through relationships, through knowing and being known by others, through caring and being cared for, but to really acknowledge this can be unsettling. Doing so causes us to realize our inherent and radical contingency, but at the same time, realizing the interconnectedness of all that is, the interdependence you share with every living thing on the planet can be a life-affirming revelation.

We learn about ourselves through others, who in our relationships often inadvertently hold up a mirror to our self, revealing things we would not know otherwise. And right now, the Minnesota Timberwolves are learning a lot about their organization and their young players with Jimmy Butler playing the role of the mirror that they are forced to look into. The Timberwolves’ recent practice, which featured Butler verbally berating both teammates and management, quickly became one of the more infamous practices in NBA history alongside Latrell Sprewell’s choking of P.J. Carlesimo and Bernard King’s threatening to shoot Wes Unseld.

Jimmy Butler is who he is. He is a fanatical man whose very cool off-court demeanor belies an intensity that is boiling just beneath the surface waiting to be unleashed the moment he walks onto a basketball court. Part of this is inherent, yet Butler was also shaped by spending the first few years of his NBA career playing under Tom Thibodeau on the Bulls. Thibodeau is also a fanatical man, a man unacquainted with the idea of long-term goals, focusing instead of the primacy of winning every possession, every night, and if he has to play his best players an obscene and unwise number of minutes in order to secure those victories, then damn it, he’s going to do just that.

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Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins are not like that. They are both great athletes with loads of talent that has been actualized to varying degrees throughout their young NBA careers, but neither one appears to have that same sort of maniacal focus that so readily defines Butler and Thibodeau. And that is where the conflict seems to arise. They are not men who seek out and desire challenges just to prove that they are capable of overcoming them. When Andrew Wiggins responded to Stephen Jackson’s comments, saying that he keeps the same energy everywhere he goes, it felt like Wiggins was inadvertently coming so close to realizing the problem with his playing style, but still managing to elude it.

Compounding everything is the fact that the Timberwolves are not a well-run organization. From their wasting of Kevin Garnett’s prime (apart from one magical season) to the drafting of Jonny Flynn and Ricky Rubio over Stephen Curry in the 2009 NBA Draft, it has not been a franchise characterized by foresight or good decision making. And what that highlights is that even if the Wolves had drafted Curry, it’s anyone’s guess if he would have become the Stephen Curry we know today in such an environment. Towns is a transcendent talent, already an All-NBA player at just 22. Wiggins entered the league with a ton of hype but has thus far been unable to translate that potential into concrete on-court success. There are still residents residing on Wiggins Island, but the population decreases with each ill-advised mid-range jumper he launches and each half-hearted defensive possession that he plays.

Some people just don’t work well together. Jimmy Butler does make this team better, and they would not have made the playoffs last season without him, but he is not the future of the franchise. Towns is, and for better or (more likely) for worse, they are stuck with Wiggins for five more seasons. Those two players are who need to be prioritized. They need to be brought along in an environment more conducive to their growth. It’s not difficult to imagine Wiggins developing more quickly, and becoming a much more potent player than he currently is, in a different system with a less demanding coach who does not accentuate the negative at the expense of realizing the gifts Wiggins remains capable of delivering if in the right situation.

And some people just need different things. It is patently unfair to assume that the same comforting words will mean the same thing and provide the same salve for two separate friends. Butler and Thibodeau deserve each other and I don’t really mean that as an insult. The problem is that they are stuck looking for teammates and players who match their own dispositions, men who are not merely serious and dedicated to becoming better players and winning basketball games, but men who are serious and dedicated to those things in the same exact manner that they are. Perhaps Towns and Wiggins are holding mirrors up to Butler and Thibodeau as well.

I do not believe that any of these four men are right or wrong, but I also do not believe that the relationship between these two factions can be reconciled at this late date, though it appears that Minnesota’s management is going to try to force a rapprochement regardless. The team needs to plan for the future, which is a time when Butler will be gone and a time that Thibodeau has never appeared to care much about, though it is a time when Karl-Anthony Towns will enter his prime and almost certainly become one of the best players in the NBA. The future may not be now, but the Wolves need to start acting like it’s as imminent as it is.