Unburdened
I call it the Thibs Tax.
Savvy NBA minds often refer to ‘opportunity cost’. The opportunities a team misses out on because they did something costly beforehand. Using all of you caps space now costs you the opportunity to to sign someone later. Spending all your draft picks costs you the opportunity to use them in a trade later. Failing to gather assets now costs you the ability to spend any later.
The Timberwolves have cost themselves a tremendous amount of opportunity over the years.
Every resource that isn’t collected is one less that can be used. Every resource used is one less available, and in a salary capped league, those resources are scare. The luxury tax and limited roster space are extremely restrictive on the process of team building. A single signing uses both, so teams need to be very selective in who they sign and who they keep. It’s not as simple as ‘is this player good?’ It’s also ‘how good is this player?’ and ‘can we get the same thing from someone else for less?’ and ‘will this player still be good two years from now?’ and ‘will other teams want this player if we need to make a trade?’ And and and….
For the Wolves, particularly under Tom Thibodeau, all of this can only be described as an abject failure. The team has consistently signed players who are too old, for too much money, for too many years. They have chewed through cap space and roster space and that has bore out severe opportunity costs. Drafting Kris Dunn instead of Jamal Murray or Buddy Hield. Jeff Teague at $19 million/year instead of Darren Collison for $10 million/year. Jamal Crawford instead of Reggie Bullock. Jordan Hill instead of Anthony Tolliver. Failing to get Markelle Fultz, Landry Shamet, or any draft picks for Jimmy Butler.
And, of course, the massive overpays to keep players with questionable value. Signing Gorgui Dieng (bless his heart) to $16 million/year when no one else was bidding. And handing a max contract to Andrew Wiggins.
All of this is Thibs Tax stuff. The Timberwolves under Thibs burned resources with a reckless abandon, and as is almost always the case when that happens, the consequences were crippling. The list of opportunities the Wolves lost in just a three year span because of the cost of the Thibs Tax is staggering.
When Rosas was hired, he inherited an impossible situation - a roster and cap sheet with no flexibility thanks to the contracts of Teague, Dieng and Wiggins, and almost no assets to begin correcting with that thanks to Thibs botching the Butler trade.
Rosas failed twice in the DLo chase before finally pulling it off, and both failures were a direct result of the Thibs Tax: first over the summer, when the dead contracts left him without enough cap space or flexibility to sign Russell outright, and then in the week leading up to the trade deadline, when Thibs’ failure to get and draft picks for Jimmy proved to be a seemingly-insurmountable hurdle. The Warriors wanted draft picks, and the Wolves had none to offer.
That makes what Rosas did on Thursday all the most impressive. He had one real asset to spend - Robert Covington - and he and his team essentially turned that one asset into seven new players, including DLo.
The technical path Rosas and Sachin Gupta used to pull off the roster revamp can be basically boiled down to the luxury tax. For anyone wondering why the Warriors did this now rather than wait until the summer - which is most everyone, including myself - the answer is they decided they had to get under the tax line this season to avoid the repeater tax next season. When they tried to play hardball, the Wolves simply dug in and dared them not to shed salary. It was a staring contest, and the Wolves won it. Given the measured way they handled the entire week, it’s probably safe to assume they always knew they’d win. It was a genius way to get a blockbuster basketball trade in their favor by leveraging non-basketball means.
But more importantly, Rosas revamped the roster by doing the one thing basically every previous Timberwolves front office has refused to do: simply deciding it needed to be done.
If there’s one thing that has crippled this franchise more than anything else in it history, it has been inertia. The continuous, repeated cycle of the team reaching a point of things obviously not working, but then failing to take any action on it.
Kevin Garnett is a first ballot Hall of Famer and one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history. He played for the Wolves for 12 seasons and made it out of the first round of the playoffs once. It was clear by KG’s 5th season that a team built around Garnett, Terrell Brandon and Wally Szczerbiak was not good enough. But it took 3 more years for Kevin McHale to do anything about it.
Likewise, nothing David Kahn put around Kevin Love got the team anywhere close to respectable (granted Kahn had a number of issues separate from just team building) By the time Rick Adelman got going on fixing the situation, it was too late…Love already wanted out.
And of course, Thibs completely and utterly failed to handle the Jimmy Butler situation. He not only failed to take action on what was clearly a toxic, non-workable situation, he in fact actively refused to. This lead to the infamous practice session and Jimmy/ESPN interview, and ultimately the shortsighted trade that fell well short of getting the Wolves what they needed.
When Rosas took over last May, he stressed the importance of process - of doing things the right way, in the right order, with the right people who had the right goal in mind. He made a valiant effort at signing D’Angelo over the summer that fell through due to no fault of his own. He then put the Wolves in assessment mode, tasking Ryan with instituting a modern playbook so he could evaluate how the core pieces of the roster performed under it.
That process certainly felt egregious many moments throughout this season. Bad losses to bad teams. Embarrassing headlines for untucked jerseys and blown leads. Two separate double-digit losing streaks.
But through it all, Rosas got exactly what he wanted. He waited for KAT to get healthy so he could see how the core played together. He quickly decided Teague wasn’t fitting in and moved him. This then gave him a chance to scrutinize KAT and Wiggins as a duo, as well as the Point Wiggins idea that was perhaps the last possibility the Wolves held out hope for a Wiggins transformation in. That, too, quickly proved to be non-viable.
So in just month ten of his tenure - a remarkably short time for your average NBA show runner, and an extraordinarily short time for a Timberwolves boss - Rosas called it. KAT + Wiggins was not the answer. Time to get D’Angelo.
Ten months. Ten. It took McHale almost six years to make that call on KG + Wally. It took David Kahn four years of blundering to finally be replaced my Adelman. Thibs took only six months to deal Jimmy, but let the situation turn the Wolves into a leaguewide embarrassment first and still had to be forced to deal with it in the end.
Rosas took ten months, in which he handled his business in the right way and gave every possibility a fair chance. And then he pulled off the impossible, taking a single asset and using it to make the team younger, better on the court, and better positioned for the future all at the same time.
For Wolves fans, that combination of decisiveness and brilliance is a foreign concept. A lot of us - myself included - are still trying to process and comprehend what Gers and Sachin pulled off. But I’ll tell you one thing: no one’s complaining.
