Flip Saunders found himself sitting at a high-stakes poker game this offseason. As time passed, the players in the seats around him changed, but the pot at the center of the table – the right to employ Kevin Love, arguably the best power forward in the NBA — never did.
The saga surrounding Love’s future with the Timberwolves had dragged on for years. But when free agency began on July 1, Saunders says he might have taken his chips off the table, gone home and prepared for Love beginning this season in Minneapolis.
“It was 50-50,” Saunders said this week before his Timberwolves beat the Nets at Barclays Center. “We had made up our minds … we knew what we wanted, and I was very comfortable coaching Kevin and [dealing with] everything else.
“A lot of times, it boils down to the players … it boils down to money. If you can pay somebody 20 or 30 million more sometimes, when it comes down to it they might flinch, but they might end up staying.”
When Saunders returned to the franchise last year as part-owner and president of basketball operations, he made it clear his priority was to keep Love and construct a playoff team around him. But the Wolves could never get healthy last season, and wound up limping home having missed the playoffs for a 10th straight season.
At the time, it looked like Love would wind up on the Golden State Warriors – a team in a premium market with another superstar in Stephen Curry and the kind of trade chip in Klay Thompson to give the Wolves the motivation to pull the trigger on moving the second-best player in their franchise’s history, behind only Kevin Garnett.
But Golden State simply wouldn’t move Thompson, which Saunders made clear was a deal-breaker. Saunders, who made himself head coach in addition to his other duties after Rick Adelman retired, says he was then content to let things play out and bring Love back for this season. If he decided to opt-out of his contract next summer, Saunders would see if Love really was willing to leave an extra year and over $20 million guaranteed on the table to play somewhere else.
“Let’s put it this way,” Saunders said. “If we weren’t going to get what we wanted, we probably wouldn’t have traded him.”
But that was before LeBron James left Miami and headed back to Cleveland – a shock-wave move that gave Saunders the asset-rich trade partner he craved.
The Cavaliers may have been incredibly unlucky four years ago to lose James, the world’s best player, but they haven’t stopped getting lucky since. They won the draft lottery three times in the previous four seasons, getting Kyrie Irving, Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins, and picking fourth two other times, which netted them Tristan Thompson and Dion Waiters.
With that wealth of young talent, the Cavaliers had no qualms moving Bennett and Wiggins – the top overall picks in the past two drafts – for Love. The move paired James with the best shooting big man in the league and gave Saunders the young, high-upside pieces he needed to risk trading a player of Love’s caliber. That matters all the more for a franchise still recovering from the aftermath of trading Garnett seven years ago.
“We were in a situation where if LeBron doesn’t go to Cleveland, do we trade him? Probably not,” Saunders said. “He’s probably still here. But the way it worked out, LeBron went there, and a lot of pieces started to fall into place for Cleveland and it became a very logical thing for them to try to make a push to try to win a championship to get a guy that, ultimately, is one of the two best power forwards in the league, and that became a reality for them.
“Then, for us, it became we wanted to try to maximize what we wanted to do. With Love leaving, I don’t want to say we were in a total rebuild … more of a retool situation. We wanted to get young, athletic talent that we thought had the potential where, in three years, that we could hit home runs and they could be a team that makes a run like the Oklahoma City Thunder and develop like that.”
In Wiggins, the Timberwolves have a potential generation-type talent to build with for the next decade. An incredibly gifted athlete, the 6-foot-8 forward can seemingly do it all on the court, and at age 19 already is a good defender – something that often takes young players years to learn.
When Garnett entered the league 20 years ago, it was Saunders (along with Kevin McHale) who chose to draft him out of high school and it was Saunders who spent most of his first 10 seasons in the NBA coaching him. That’s why Saunders constantly refers to Garnett when talking about his new teenage phenom.
“All the great players are freaks in some way,” Saunders said. “[Garnett] was a freak in that he was 6-foot-13, could play any position, and has unbelievable passion for the game. [Wiggins], he’s a freak because of his length, his athleticism, and again, the similarities is they’re both two-way type players.
“Do I wish [Wiggins] had some of KG’s dog in him, his competitiveness? Yeah. But that’s something that might come. But how I compare them is that they both talk about wanting to be great, they always talk about being the best they can be, they both aren’t afraid to work and their both two-way type players. That’s why they’re very similar.”
Those lingering questions about Wiggins’ competitive fire make some doubt whether he can be a franchise-altering superstar. But he looked every bit the part Wednesday against the Nets, finishing with 17 points and making Joe Johnson work for his 22 points (although, to be fair, he was given a few lessons by Johnson in the process). Saunders said Wiggins will learn to be that kind of player, and said even Garnett – as fiery a player as there is in the league – had to learn how to assert himself offensively.
“It comes in time,” Saunders said. “Every player has a hot button that motivates them to play at a certain level. … I don’t think it’s totally fair to … a guy is trying to play as a team player, but sometimes they’re saying he’s not aggressive enough offensively. He’s shown times where he’ll be like that. I think the more he understands things … [Garnett] was like that, though. Offensively, we had to force-feed him. He would pass the ball to Mark Madsen, and people would get frustrated. But as he would always say, ‘I make the right play,’ and most of the time you can’t argue because he made the right basketball play.”
Bennett, meanwhile, looks like he’s half the size he was a year ago, and has shown signs of progress after a lost rookie season with the Cavaliers. Thaddeus Young, picked up for a first-round pick in the Love trade from the 76ers, is just 26, making him both a player for the Timberwolves to help build around and a veteran mentor to Bennett and Wiggins.
Add Ricky Rubio, who recently signed a four-year, $56 million extension and still has untapped potential, young big man Gorgui Dieng and 2014 first-round pick Zach LaVine, and the Timberwolves have a fun, young group that will be one of the more interesting teams to watch in years to come.
“Play hard every night,” Saunders said of his goal. “We played hard this first week … we’re [starting out] on a monster road trip, so who knows what that’s gonna bring. But if we play hard over the course of 82 games, we’ll get our share of wins and things like that. Our thing is to play hard … we’re trying to establish a culture of how we want to play, a style both offensively and defensively.”
After a summer filled with standoffs and, eventually, a good deal for both sides, Saunders and the Timberwolves look well on their way.
Commish: It’s sunny in LA … and Cleveland … and OKC
At a “Commitment to Service” event in New York Thursday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave his thoughts on three teams reeling in the early days of this season: the struggling-to-gel Cavaliers, the struggling-to-stay-healthy Thunder and the simply struggling Lakers.
He tried to be optimistic about all of them.
On the Cavaliers: “People forget it’s a team sport. No matter how good your star is or multiple stars, you still have to learn to gel and play together, and that’s what we’re seeing. We’re still in the process of seeing teams come together across the league.”
On the Lakers: “Even the very best teams go through a rebuilding process. The Lakers, their fans are loyal, and they’re right there with them. We’ll see. It’s still early, but it’s great to see Kobe back at the level he is, and I’m curious to see. We’ll see how Jeremy Lin does with him. It’s early days to count anybody out.”
On the Thunder, and specifically on the notion of NBA bemoaning a postseason potentially without Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook: “I don’t look at it that way. Whatever teams make the postseason, they make the postseason. To me, it’s always incredibly disheartening to see those types of injuries for any players, and even for fans, even if you don’t play at a professional level, we all know what it’s like to go through injuries and the rehab and pain and anxiety around it, so for these guys I feel for them and for the team. But they’re a great organization. They’ll bounce back.”
Cloudy skies for Thunder
The Thunder really are in danger of missing the playoffs after their brutal start and the pile of injuries accumulating on the roster.
Oklahoma City is now 1-4, and likely will be 1-5 after facing Memphis at home Friday night. With only seven or eight healthy players — none of them named Kevin Durant or Russell Westbrook — fatigue is clearly setting in as games unfold.
The Thunder have 20 games over the next five weeks, which is the approximate timeline to get Durant and Westbrook back from a broken foot and broken hand, respectively.
Let’s do the math: If the Thunder can go 7-13 over those 20 games and be at 8-17 in mid-December, they would need to go 42-15 to finish with the 50 games they likely will need to make the playoffs. That’s obviously possible for a team of Oklahoma City’s talent level, but here’s the problem.
Given how shorthanded the Thunder are now, it’s hard to see them actually winning that many games. And every game they lose without Durant and Westbrook makes the deficit even more daunting.
Unlikely royalty in West
On the other side: The Kings are arguably the biggest surprise in the NBA, going 4-1 with the only loss coming to the undefeated Warriors and wins over the Clippers, Trail Blazers and Nuggets (twice).
Sacramento was derided for its decision to let Isaiah Thomas go in the offseason, but so far it’s worked out and DeMarcus Cousins is playing like a man determined to make his first All-Star Game.
The Jazz might only be 2-3, but they’ve had a murderer’s row of a schedule and have picked up wins over the Suns and Cavaliers – whom they beat with a Gordon Hayward buzzer-beater Wednesday night. With a winnable upcoming stretch against the Pistons, Pacers, Hawks, Knicks and Thunder, Utah gets a chance to prove it is a new team under new coach Quin Snyder.