There are two reasonable ways to evaluate the Minnesota Timberwolves as they enter the 2025 offseason, fresh off another Western Conference finals defeat.
This team has reached consecutive Western Conference finals.
The Western Conference finals suggested that they probably aren’t close enough to risk their last second-apron season quite yet.
As frustrating as Gobert’s offense was in the playoffs, this is not a Western Conference finals team without him.
These are tough questions, but there are no easy answers for a Timberwolves team that is much further from contention than its Western Conference finals berths suggest.
After suffering yet another loss in the Western Conference finals, the Minnesota Timberwolves can be analyzed in two fair ways as they begin the 2025 offseason.
This team has advanced to the Western Conference finals twice in a row. The Timberwolves accomplished that around 23-year-old Anthony Edwards, and the only other team to do so in the last ten years was the dynastic Golden State Warriors. Around him, there are many young people: Rob Dillingham, Jaylen Clark, and Terrence Shannon are all promising prospects between the ages of 20 and 24, and Jaden McDaniels, Naz Reid, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker are all rotation players who are 26 or younger. One of the Western Conference’s top and most reliable teams, they are expected to stay competitive for many years to come.
The 2025 team only returned to the Western Conference finals due to a weak bracket, and the 2024 team died the moment it traded Karl-Anthony Towns. The Timberwolves won their first two series against a Lakers team without a center and a Warriors team without Stephen Curry. However, the instant they attempted to compete with the elite, they were thrashed by a real contender in Oklahoma City. The team’s younger players are outnumbered by the older players, who seem to be on the decline. Mike Conley is 37 years old. Rudy Gobert is 32, almost unplayable offensively during the playoffs, and about to sign a three-year contract extension. Because of his player option, Julius Randle, 30, has the power to demand a long-term contract that the Knicks were unwilling to offer. There is a peak in this team.
Like most things, the truth is most likely somewhere in the middle. What’s so worrying in this situation is that, given who just defeated them in five games, it might not even matter. The Thunder put up the ante. Despite all the rhetoric about parity and seven consecutive champions, Oklahoma City isn’t going away.
As we already know, the Timberwolves are ill-prepared to defeat the Thunder in their current configuration. The Thunder don’t differentiate between youth and age, so they most likely won’t be able to defeat them in the future either. They are far from experiencing a financial crunch, have a wealth of draft picks that Minnesota does not, and everyone has figures to improve.
Which players should the Timberwolves target in the NBA Draft? Danny Wolf and Cedric Coward are two players who could be selected at No. 17.
Salerno Cameron.
The whole point of the Towns trade was to avoid that crunch. With Randle’s shorter contract, they hoped to maximize their long-term flexibility while avoiding his long-term supermax contract. They needed flexibility for more than just future advancements. Just to hold the rest of this core together, they needed flexibility.
If you take away the Timberwolves’ favorable team options and their guaranteed contracts for the upcoming season, they owe 12 players $150 million. That’s not bad, is it? Well, that excludes Alexander-Walker, an unrestricted free agent, and Randle and Reid, who have player options. For the upcoming season, the second apron is expected to cost $207–8 million. If Randle accepts his $30 million option, they will have less than $58 million left over to re-sign all three below the line, or about $27 million.
The second apron does not necessarily bind the Timberwolves. They might surpass it. . We are only discussing re-signing their own players with Bird Rights at this time. As of yet, they are not hard-capped. This season, however, the Timberwolves have already surpassed the second apron. There is no penalty if a team does this twice in a five-year span. The third time you do this, a frozen first-round pick—in this case, Minnesota’s 2032 selection—automatically falls to No. thirty in total. This system was created under the assumption that teams wouldn’t want to take that chance, and Minnesota probably won’t. It is likely that the Timberwolves will not be able to surpass the second apron for a number of years if they do so in the upcoming season. They are probably not close enough to risk their final second-apron season just yet, according to the Western Conference finals.
Will the new ownership group, which consists of Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez, be willing to do so even if they are? According to an ESPN report in 2024, the Lore-Rodriguez group intended to attempt to avoid the luxury tax completely for the 2024–25 season, which is an extremely cost-effective strategy. Several well-known investors, including Michael Bloomberg, Eric Schmidt, and Blue Owl Capital, were reportedly added as they battled with former owner Glen Taylor for control of the team. Comparing the on-court objective of attempting to compete for championships to the budget, we don’t know how focused investors like that will be. Basically, aside from basketball issues, we don’t even know how high their salary can go.
Consequently, even if Minnesota were to run it back, it would almost certainly do so with someone going. In free agency, that might be a younger player like Reid or Alexander-Walker. Instead, they might exchange an older player, such as DiVincenzo or Conley. But for purely financial reasons, it is unlikely that all eight of the core players will return for the upcoming season. This team won’t be a weaker version of itself next year if it wasn’t good enough to defeat the Thunder.
How ambitious these Timberwolves are will only become clear with time. Some teams are happy to remain in the second or third round each year in the hopes that something will happen to push them over the edge. Anything can happen if you get that far—a sprained ankle here, a cold shooting streak there.
However, nothing Tim Connelly has done as team manager indicates that he will be content to sit on his hands. There hasn’t been a more assertive general manager in basketball in recent years, including his draft-night raid on Dillingham and the Gobert and Towns deals. In a market like Minnesota, you need to be aggressive. Free agency is still a long way off for Edwards, but time always passes more quickly than a team may think. Everything this organization has built around him begins to fall apart the moment he believes he can’t realistically compete for titles in Minnesota.
Something drastic will need to be done to improve the team’s current performance if it isn’t good enough to compete with the Thunder. They’ll have to either take a step back to give themselves a chance to catch up to Oklahoma City later, or they’ll have to push even more chips in here and now.
The Timberwolves will have few options for win-now upgrades because of their limited amount of remaining draft capital. Don’t expect Giannis Antetokounmpo. They aren’t getting a prime, healthy individual. They will have to assume some risk if they wish to gain a well-known name right away. On that front, there’s really only one name that makes sense. Kevin Durant was connected to the Timberwolves at the last minute. As a child, Edwards looked up to Durant, and last summer, the two played together for Team USA. It’s likely that the Timberwolves will examine Durant once more.
McDaniels is most likely completely off the table. Whether Phoenix would demand Rudy Gobert in a deal is the question. Their defense is a complete mess, and he is the NBA’s best defensive floor-raiser. Without him, Minnesota would undoubtedly suffer as well. Reid doesn’t play rim-protection full-time, and the Knicks traded Randle in part because they knew he couldn’t play center. This might make sense if the Suns would work together to create a trade centered around, say, Randle, Conley, and DiVincenzo. Though it would be a risky gamble, it would be a way to significantly boost their offensive potential without compromising the defensive identity that Gobert gives them.
Naturally, any possible Durant trade significantly reduces Minnesota’s window. He is 37 years old. He can expect to be an All-Star for a few more years at most. At the height of Oklahoma City’s power, is this the window the Timberwolves want to bet on, or would it be wiser to take a step back and go the other way? What if the Timberwolves decided not to offer Randle a long-term contract, traded Gobert, and put all of their money into the young core?
This is a different kind of risk. The flexibility this strategy would provide might be very advantageous. In the future, they might even be able to replenish the funds sufficiently to try again for a younger star if the young players exhibit promise. However, this strategy would not be successful right away. This isn’t a Western Conference finals team without Gobert, despite how annoying his offense was during the playoffs. If he were to leave, the Timberwolves might end up in the playoffs, a scenario they narrowly avoided with just one win this season. As Edwards matures, that is a dangerous place to be. Would he agree to take a few years off? What if they aren’t competing when his free agency rolls around? Is it really worth missing Oklahoma City’s window when San Antonio’s is just around the corner?
Although these are difficult questions, there are no simple answers for a Timberwolves team that is far from contending despite its appearances in the Western Conference finals. If the series we just watched is any guide, Minnesota is currently unable to defeat teams like the Thunder in order to reach the mountaintop. Here, things are going to change. The entire team from this year is not returning, whether it is due to wholesale or small cost-cutting measures. The Timberwolves must determine exactly what that means going forward.
