Mine are similar and I’ve meant to make a more meaningful post on it. I’m not as optimistic on the potential return on Gobert when all is said and done. I don’t believe many people acknowledge the realistic possibility that it could equate to a mess of pottage. I also don’t know that people realize how good the Wolves can be, even legitimate contenders. We had Gobert surrounded by Mitchell, Conley and Bogdanovic, then pretended Royce was a valuable defensive piece. The Wolves surround Gobert with KAT, Edwards, DLo and McDaniels. That’s a much more talented cast, any way you slice it. I know we’re prone to poopoo it and “lol it’s teh wolvs,” but if we had that kind of talent around Gobert, we would have circle jerked ourselves into expecting a title this year.
Over the past few years I’ve consistently harped on specific problems that we had that were addressable:
1. Quin’s overemphasis on filtering to Rudy that had the unfortunate side effect of conditioning guys to not play defense at all.
2. Mentality. There was a huge mental hurdle that compounded with every historical collapse.
3. Rebounding in the clutch. We never really played a true power forward unless you count Favors, and that’s when our defense was better, but he still didn’t close and it was always a problem that Rudy ended up guarding the shooter and nobody could rebound, so we’d get smoked on giving up offensive rebounds.
4. We’ve justified obvious misses of easy Gobert targets by pointing to his offensive inefficiencies. Being able to hit Gobert with a lob is something that made people believe Exum could survive in this league.
If we would have addressed any of the above by even 25%, we’d be in a totally different situation. But how do the Wolves differ on this?
1. The entire team hasn’t been conditioned to not play defense for the past number of years. You take guys giving an average effort and then add Gobert and you’ll get some pretty great results.
2. Minnesota doesn’t have the mental baggage of collapsing in big moments in historic fashion. There’s very little pressure here. They’ll likely be underdogs and hungry.
3. Instead of having Bogdanovic or Royce next to him in the front court to grab defensive boards, he’s got ****ing KAT. He averages more rebounds per minute than Royce and Bojan combined, to say nothing if Edwards and McDaniels’ better rebounding abilities than the rest of our cast. Yes, I get that this will redistribute a bit, but this is worlds better with no hyperbole.
4. Russell will look significantly better as a point guard with Gobert. He averages 8 assists per 36 minutes. And KAT gives some massive spacing on n the perimeter while combining Gobert’s massive gravity at the rim.
The picks we get from the Wolves may well all be in the 20s. The pick swap may be irrelevant. People are talking about the Wolves giving up way too much. This is actually a nice bold move from Minnesota and this deal can legitimately put them on the map. This is the reason you cash in on potential (i.e. picks) because the hypothetical value is always higher than the actual value. An example is Donovan’s rookie year. Nobody wanted to give up the pick because we kept thinking it was Doncic. I kept telling everyone the pick won’t be that good. But, hey, it could’ve been Doncic, like Almost Ainge! We needed to parlay that hypothetical value into real value. Instead, we got… Grayson Allen. Then the cap space issue. We “kept the powder dry” to not act too prematurely. So we waited. I know many have perhaps memory-holed this, but for a couple years we were thinking of guys like Kawhi and Klay being who we could dump our money on. As time went on, we eventually hit a wall where we were going to lose cap space and our return was... Mike Conley. Now you can certainly say it was a reasonable deal at the time and the best available, but there's absolutely nobody who, had you told them a year or two before hand, that all that "dry powder" was to land Conley, that they would have been excited. The "potential" of what something can be is almost always much higher than the reality of what it becomes.
On the flip side, there's a consistent appeal to Ainge rebuilding Boston by getting the return he did on Paul Piece and Kevin Garnett. Kevin Garnett was 37 years old with a lot of NBA miles on him. Paul Pierce was 36 years old. Boston didn't have a supporting cast. The fact that Ainge was able to parlay that into what he did is the exception and not the rule. Had Boston not flipped something later this past season, it's also a totally different narrative on what Ainge did while he was there. Donovan Mitchell is 25 years old. Rudy Gobert is 30 years old. Both of these guys are under contract for three more years and both have a player option for the fourth. Kevin Garnett had two years left on his deal. Paul Pierce had one year left on his. These situations aren't even remotely close, and the amount of value Ainge sent out for what he got back isn't even remotely close to the kind of value ratio we're getting now. We're doing all of this for perhaps a slim chance that we get back to maybe being as close as we are now, with perhaps a theoretically higher ceiling. All yet to be determined. We could do well and make it out better off, but I think a lot of people are discounting how realistic of a possibility it is that this offseason may end up being a gigantic **** up because Ainge is going all-in on what worked for him once, much the same way that DL wanted to go all-in on Udoka because he felt getting Rudy and Donovan gave him that forecasting greatness.
