shrink wrote:Klomp wrote:shrink wrote:Connelly couldn’t have known it at the time, but one negative outcome from drafting Dillingham made us a less appealing place for Tyus on the minimum. No guarantee we’d even get him with Mike Conley here, but he’d certainly get plenty of playing time, he’d get to be at home, and he’d have a better chance for a ring joining the Wolves. I bet if he had come for this season’s try for a ring, for the rest of his life, he’d never have to pay for his own drink in a Minnesota bar, ever again!
For me, I’d rather have 2031 MIN unprotected + 2030 MIN swap + Tyus on minimum > Dillingham.
Tyus on minimum, but without Bird rights...awfully short-sighted.
Again, this season when we bring back our top 7 players, is likely our best chance at a ring. Many other Western Conference contenders have financially had to gut their team removing key starters and most of their bench. It sounds like Dillingham is going to get a lot of minutes, and rookies in their first year, particularly tiny rookies in bad drafts, are highly unlikely to be positive players in Year One. You KNOW Tyus is a positive player, in fact he is top 100 in WS and VORP, particularly since he’s making three pointers now too (41.4%). It’s only short-sighted IF Dillingham becomes an important player, and IF it happens sometime in three years or so. Wolves fans are too comfortable wasting minutes on development, when there has never been a more important season to use minutes to Win Now.
Finally, we won’t be able to tell what is truly short-sighted until we see the outcome of losing the 2030 pick swap and the 2031 unprotected pick, right? Gambling on Dillingham now could be bad short term and long term.
I absolutely understand the fear. But I think it's important to remember that we don't know what the future holds. We can think doom and gloom because we're the Timberwolves after all, but I don't think this iteration is the end.
Take a step back in time five years. The Denver Nuggets made their first trip to the Western Conference Finals. But they had an older core of veterans in the starting lineup with 34-year old Paul Millsap, 29-year old Will Barton and 25-year old Gary Harris. While they fell short of the Western Conference Finals in the next year, they set themselves up for success by trading away Barton and Harris by bringing in Aaron Gordon, who was a year younger than Harris and whose age matched star Nikola Jokic. While it took another couple seasons to match and surpass the team success they had reached, Jokic was entering his reign as one of the greatest players in the NBA, winning three MVPs in four years. The team success plateaued for a while, but came back around eventually.
That's a lot like what I see here. Our team success might plateau over the next few seasons while we're in a bit of cap hell, but I expect Ant's individual game to continue to blossom. Some players might come and go. But what having 8 players who are 25 years old or younger does is it gives us options. It gives us lottery tickets, which we can either hold onto or make a trade with down the road.
I don't really see a complete bottoming out in Dillingham's future. I know he's small and I know he's not great on defense, but I think offensively he will be solid from the start. That gives the franchise a baseline. That baseline is as a bench scorer and offense-creator, which was also a massive need for this team in the offseason. I don't believe it is doom and gloom if Dillingham does not ever become a full-time starting PG, because he just has to come in and fill in one of two needs. Being that weapon off the bench fills that need. This then contributes to the team's overall success, which lessens the impact of the 2030 pick swap or the 2031 unprotected pick. This is why I am so excited about him! It's not because I see the next Kyrie Irving. It's because he has double the opportunity to fill a longterm hole within this franchise.
Technically, Ant was a "negative player" up until this season. Jaden McDaniels had a negative VORP last year, the worst on the entire roster. Sometimes, numbers don't tell the entire story, despite how much we want to discover a groundbreaking statistic that does. There is a reason that every "advanced" statistic has flaws.
