Draft: Three Final Musings

Hitting on a couple of thoughts before Minnesota do their draft-night moving and shaking.

Credit: Minnesota Timberwolves Media

The year-long ticking timer is almost at an end. The seconds are slowly but surely wasting away and, once again, NBA Draft Day is barreling toward us. More unusually than that ever-present fact is that the Minnesota Timberwolves are nestled into a non-lottery slot. This is the reality we strived for, folks. Combine that middle-of-the-road pick 19, a triumvirate of second-rounders (40, 48 and 50), a revolving front office door, and some bold and underlined roster questions and you have the makings of a legitimately wild Thursday evening — even if it’s not the usual top-of-the-night fireworks.

Tim Connelly, the shiny (and expensive) new President of Basketball Operations for the Wolves, will have the unenviable task of exiting the draft-night war room with answers to all of the swirling questions and putting any outside ponderings to bed. However, until that moment, it feels like there is little else to do in Wolves World but let the draft contemplations out of their cage and into the open. Here are my final three, freed and wild.

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A Terry Snug Fit

For the entirety of their 2021-22 season, the Timberwolves kept hammering one thing into our collective consciousness: this isn’t the Old Wolves. There is no humdrum mentality that permeated from the franchise pillars in the Kevin Love era or the Andrew Wiggins era. This team is packed to the rafters with personality. This is the Anthony Edwards pizzazz, the Patrick Beverley scorpion sting, the Karl-Anthony Towns garishness.

Adding to the bubbling brashness of that culture certainly wouldn’t be atop the list of draft-night needs for Connelly and his front office chums, but adding more of it — assuming the right on-court fit as well — would solidify Minnesota’s new era even further.

Enter Dalen Terry.

The 6-foot-7 guard is more of a one-point-five or a combo two than a true point guard, but he oozes electricity in both game and nature. He’s the one telling any opponent in earshot that they’re too small and the one flexing on them after a bucket. He’s the dude hyping up his teammates unrelentingly after they make a play or goading the crowd into a raucous frenzy. He is energy and effort and flair and fervor. If there is a personality that will not only slide smoothly into Minnesota’s budding culture, but enhance it further, it’s him.

Terry has been steadily climbing up mock draft boards and In Sam Vecenie’s recent one for The Athletic, he was taken at pick 22 by the Memphis Grizzlies. Vecenie, who knows a thing or two about this stuff, speculated that he would now be surprised if Terry fell out of the first round. Earlier in the draft cycle, it seemed like the Arizona sophomore could have been snagged with pick 40, but now his selection would almost certainly require a small reach at 19 or a consolidation trade to jump back into the first round.

It can’t just be about the showtime aspect of his game, of course, he has to be able to play. Terry can play. And if the Wolves ultimately do pull the trigger on a D’Angelo Russell trade this summer, his low-maintenance, high-impact style feels like a cozy fit alongside Minnesota’s core pieces.

The 19-year-old’s counting stats — 8.0 points, 4.8 rebounds, 3.9 assists and 1.2 steals in 27.8 minutes per game — don’t leap off the page and grab you by the excitables, but he is the kind of player who doesn’t need a fat box score to have a colossal impact. He has spells of game-breaking playmaking out of pick-and-roll or off-the-catch, improved greatly in his sophomore season as a spot-shot shooter, and continued to flash the ability to put his 7-foot wingspan to use as a defender.

For a team, especially sans Russell, who are looking to lump usage onto the shoulders of Edwards and Towns, having a lanky 6-foot-7 low-usage firecracker who could spend long periods letting his stars cook but also consistently make second-side reads like this would be a legitimate weapon.

There are warts, of course, his slight frame hinders him on both ends and his handle probably isn’t good enough to get to the rim frequently against NBA defenders. In addition, putting time into a ball-handler who doesn’t have the wiggle to repeatedly create their own shot is always playing with fire.

However, there are red flags with all of the picks Minnesota would be lining up at 19, and with Terry’s elite periphery skills, theoretical future fit alongside Minnesota’s stars, and balls-to-the-wall energy, he would be as fun a selection as any.

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What About Drop Coverage … Again?

We know Karl-Anthony Towns can’t play drop coverage defense. Couldn’t before and can’t now. Forcing his square peg back into that round hole is the stuff of nightmares. Thankfully, Chris Finch finally pushed the big red button that every other head coach had frightfully avoided during their Timberwolves tenure, launching Towns out to the level of the screen and let him move those big ass feet on the perimeter. Thankfully again, it worked, and the Wolves enjoyed their best defensive season since Towns was drafted.

Still, overreliance on a rigid system can be a death knell in the NBA. The Wolves don’t have to move away from their two-on-the-ball pick-and-roll scheme — in fact, it would be wise to keep grinding that sword on the whetstone by finding players who can execute it — but they need to have other options. The Memphis Grizzlies were a playoff matchup that was conducive to their base scheme, but they still lost, and other teams can pick it apart even further. An optionless roster is a limp head in the guillotine.

So what about a drop coverage-proficient big in the draft? Squeezing a burly and swat-heavy five in the starting lineup next to Towns in their rookie year and expecting them to contribute heavily is a tall task, but a backup who can anchor a drop coverage bench or blended lineup and push Towns to the power forward position for small spurts seems feasible enough in theory. It seems so for the Wolves front office brass, too, with Clint Capela, Rudy Gobert, Myles Turner and Nerlens Noel all being linked from various sources over the last week.

Those names, perhaps excluding Noel, all seem like sizable fish to reel in, and even bigger rotation plans to mess with. Instead, perhaps they forego a blockbuster trade and focus in on filling one of their biggest needs on draft night. Hoopshype’s Michael Scotto floated that the Wolves were one of several teams making calls to Cleveland about the 14th pick, torpedoing names like Duke’s Mark Williams and Memphis’ Jalen Duran into the conversation.

There are, of course, differences between the two, but they share some foundation talents that surely have Minnesota’s eyes peeled: They’re huge, they’re vicious rim-protectors, and they are rebounding fiends. Williams is 7-foot-2, weighs 242 lbs, blocked 4.3 shots per game and hoovered up 11.3 boards a night for Duke and Duren stands at 6-foot-11 and weighs in at 250 lbs of chiseled stone, swatting 3.0 shots a night and pulling down 11.6 rebounds.

There would be kinks to iron out — can Towns function as a power forward without fouling out or being burned by big wings? can Anthony Edwards hunt his off-ball steals in a drop coverage scheme? can the Wolves provide enough point-of-attack defense to make a rookie rim-protector serviceable? — but if one of the pair tumble to 19 or the Wolves package a few assets to move up in the draft, don’t be surprised to see a fresh-faced behemoth enter the ranks on Thursday night.

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Home Run Hittin’

If Dalen Terry is swinging for the fences then Jaden Hardy is swinging for the damn moon. The Timberwolves are, for the first time in many a year, in a legitimate position to draft for playoff-style need and commit the cardinal sin of passing on best player available. However, we’ve seen that tactic chomp the rear end of plenty of teams in the past.

Jaden Hardy might be the one. The one who was far more sizzle than steak in his year with the G-League Elite squad. The one who still has as much potential bubbling deep under the surface as anybody Minnesota could realistically snag. The one to take a really big risk for. His small-shooting-guard position and iffy-at-best defensive output might ultimately seal his fate as a future Wolf, but if he is the one that screams the draft-time buzzwords and the Wolves believe it then you take him and make it work. If he is the one, you just do it.

For all of the putrid shot selection he exhibited in a G-League squad built purely to showcase talent and renounce team mentality, for all the struggles he had at the rim as a driver, for all the times where he demanded naught but a head-scratch, there were a mountain of flashes. Those flashes, in particular, come in the form of spectacular shot-creation — still the most valuable trait for a would-be NBA scorer.

Things like this just happened way too often to be ignored. And, unlike the early-season whiffing, they started to go in far more regularly toward the end of the season (perhaps as he adjusted to the 3-point line in the G-League). In his final eight games, Hardy shot 42 percent from deep on (29-of-69) on 8.6 launches per game, the majority of which were sky-high difficulty.

The 3rd-ranked player coming out of high school is shifty and skillful with the ball dancing on his fingertips and he has the pace, balance and awareness to feast as an off-ball movement scorer. Optimized (again, it feels like a long shot), Hardy is a legitimately deadly shooter in a plethora of ways with a whipcord handle and enough pick-and-roll and drive-and-dump passing to warrant on-ball reps — a sixth man supreme quickly and a legitimate star later on.

And, again, he does shit like this with such elegant ease that it sometimes feels criminal to imagine him being taken in the mid-20s.

Then again, he was terrible a lot. Like, terrible defense, terrible offense, terrible in-between stuff. Terrible. But the flashes … those glimmering little flashes of gold between all the shards of broken glass. It’s unlikely Tim Connelly is going to go digging for those gold flakes with his first big decision as the franchise’s lead man. But … the flashes. They call to me like the One Ring to Frodo Baggins.

Hardy is the ultimate go hard or go home pick. I’d love to see the weirdness.