Gersson Rosas nails step one
Throughout the weeklong, shall we say, celebration, of the Timberwolves introducing Gersson Rosas as the new President of Basketball Operations - a week the team spent flooding every airwave, tv screen, podcast video stream, you name it - with every synonym there is for the words “collaborative” and “inclusive”, Rosas himself repeated one key talking point more than any other:
“We’re going to build a world class organization here.”
Consider step one of the plan accomplished in force.
Rosas’ first three moves in reshaping (or perhaps more accurately, rescuing) the Wolves from the cataclysm that was one Thomas J Thibodeau’s tenure as boss have been everything the Wolves have lacked in front office process for basically their entire existence as a franchise: smart, decisive, inclusive, comprehensive, diverse and warranted.
In Gianluca Pascucci, Ryan Saunders and Sachin Gupta, Rosas has hired three qualified, deserving people to help him crew the ship. They’re diverse in ethnicity, but we’re hired for being ethnic. They’re diverse in background - Saunders has basically been bred for this, while Gupta started life as a quiet math geek. They have prior levels of personal connection to Gersson - in Gupta’s case, quite a bit - but were brought in for their qualifications.
Pascucci is a long-time NBA scout and executive who worked with Rosas in Houston many, many years ago. He is well known as a relentless scout with an eye for international prospects in particular, and most recently served as the Director of Global Scouting for the Brooklyn Nets.
One of his biggest credits there was the scouting of Rodions Kurucs, a little-known Latvian playing for Barcelona. Not only did Pascucci identify the talent of Kurucs, he did so despite Barca’s efforts to sabotage him. The team, sick of losing players to the NBA, intentionally didn’t play him. In three years, Kurucs played in 9 total games for just 43 minutes. For comparison, Luka Doncic played over 900 minutes for Real Madrid. But Pascucci figured it out anyway.
The Wolves have not only struggled to correctly evaluate young players (Foye, Telfair, Flynn, Johnson, Williams….you get the picture) but also has very limited resources to work with. They don’t have a top draft pick or significant cap space to make the easy, obvious moves with. If they’re going to fix this, they will need to find big time talent in places other teams don’t or can’t. Having a guy like Pascucci, who can see an NBA quality player in an international prospect being intentionally hidden by his team, is a considerable plus.
Yes, Ryan Saunders being retained has and will continue to generate a great deal of division, until if/when the Wolves succeed beyond dispute. But consider this:
Ryan has the unequivocal support of the entire roster. He has the support of Karl-Anthony Towns, the team’s best and most important player. He has the support of Derrick Rose, who was absolutely livid when “his man” Thibs was fired. And he has the support of everyone in between. That counts for a lot, on and off the court.
There’s evidence to suggest Ryan’s methods will work. He went 17-25 in impossible circumstances, through mass injury and a GM who essentially gave up by the trade deadline. Key players greatly improved their performances under him. For that brief, glorious stint when Luol Deng was healthy, the Wolves played like a 50 win team. Get healthy, RoCo.
Rosas did a real coaching search. He interviewed very serious candidates, including the highly respected David Vanterpool, Juwan Howard - now the head coach at Michigan, and Chris Finch, who won multiple GLeague championships under Rosas in Houston and then crafted custom offenses for Nikola Jokic and Anthony Davis. Rosas picked Saunders anyway. Even safely assuming Glen Taylor put a great deal of pressure on Rosas to stick with Ryan, it’s also safe to assume - based on the extent of the search and the process of the other hires - that Rosas would not have actually stuck with Saunders id he didn’t believe he was up to the task.
Ryan has all the right ideas. He wants to play faster. He wants to spread the floor and shoot threes. He wants to create a modern defense built on switches and rotations. Rosas hiring him full time would seem to indicate he thinks Ryan can successfully institute his ideas into a working playbook.
Make no mistake: Sachin Gupta is a home run hire every bit as much as Rosas himself is.
Gupta was a math geek as a kid who quietly but relentlessly worked his way to the NBA, then up the ladder, through a combination of serious analytics regression and insanely creative thinking. His last stop before entering the NBA was as a software engineer for ESPN where he invented the monster that has become the ESPN Trade Machine. He did it, he says, as a side project to combine his love of coding and sports with learning the fine details of the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement. He had no idea how much joy it would bring to fans (or how much aggravation it would bring to the media who would get bombarded by irrational fan trades)
Gupta then joined Daryl Morey and Rosas in Houston as the Rockets became the cutting edge of the analytics movement. He would then work for Sam Hinkie in Philadelphia as a major orchestrator of The Process.
But true to Rosas’ statement that the Wolves will not be Houston North, Gupta brings more than just data analysis. His combination of CBA manipulation and practical, eye-level scoutings checks Rosas’ boxes for a front office that combines analytics with traditional basketball practices.
Most importantly though, Gupta is known for pulling of miracle trades with limited assets that have transformed two different franchises. In Houston, he was the brainchild of the trade that sent Tracy McGrady’s expiring contract to New York and netted the Rockets Kevin Martin. Two years later, Martin would be the key asset sent to Oklahoma City for James Harden.
And in Philadelphia, Gupta was the mastermind of a salary dump trade with the Kings that ultimately got the 76ers a first overall pick. He worked out a deal that sent the 47th and 60th picks to Sacramento in exchange for taking on the salaries of Nik Stauskas, Jason Thompson and Carl Landry, as well as the right two swap picks in 2017 and a 2019 first. The 2017 pick became the 3rd overall pick after the swap, which was then traded with the 2019 pick for the first overall pick. Gupta landed the first overall pick in the draft for the 47th and 60th picks. He did the NBA equivalent of trading a paper clip for a house.
And true to form for the Wolves’ new, non-abrasive Thibs-less era, Gupta is ultimately described as a good dude.
““He’s very intelligent, very empathetic. He’s also inquisitive and focused. The level of humility that Sachin has is off the charts. If you talk to him, he acts like he’s never done anything.””
Several sources have described Rosas to me as a delegator. He is someone who values the collaborative aspect of running a team. He wants a staff of brilliant thinkers who will bring him brilliant ideas, and who have the knowledge and chops to dissect those ideas, refine them, execute them or know when to discard them. A group of smart individuals, who he can trust will both dream big and manage the minute details.
He wants to find talent in obscure places. He wants to play fast and strategic. He wants come up with deals that turn paper clips into houses. He wants to challenge the norms. And now he’s assembled a core staff that will do exactly that for him. Even if the sum of Rosas’ work here is simply gathering intelligent basketball minds and getting them to row in the same direction together, he’s already wildly succeeded, and put the Wolves in an odds-on position to achieve success.
