Quote:
Originally Posted by RealSNR
I'm not married to Teague by any means. I'm only worried about the money at this point. I can't help it as a Wolves fan, but I just got through 13 years of zero playoffs, and the best team I had to watch in that time was a Rick Adelman-coached group of Kevin Love, Andrei Kirilenko, and oft-injured Ricky Rubio. We just got through a grueling tanking process and actually came out ahead of the game. And now I worry that we're stocking up too soon. Butler, Irving, and KAT all have only two years left. Wiggins was more likely to accept staying here through an extension, and now if we can't keep one of them, are all of them going to bolt?
It'd pretty much end up being two years of competitive basketball in the Western Conference playoffs and then back to the sewer where we belong.
And I do worry that length would get to Butler or at least prevent what he's capable of doing defensively against guards.
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Alternatively, if Irving ends up taking this team a step forward from Wiggins, doesn't it increase the odds of retaining KAT and Butler tremendously?
Because THOSE are the guys you need to keep. If losing Wiggins increases the chance of keeping the other two by as much as 10%, then it's a good move.
Wiggins is the best player on a 30 win team, IMO. He's not a bad player by any means - in fact I'd say he's probably a pretty decent one. But as you've noted, he's one more season away from sliding more towards 'overpriced bust' than anything. He's gonna get a max deal by virtue of his draft position and if he can't become a more efficient scorer, the team that gives him that deal is going to be worse for it.
I think there's a little divestiture aversion here. If both Wiggins and Irving were FAs and the Wolves could sign either (with neither having any ties to Minn.), I think you'd take Irving without hesitation. He's simply a better player with more upside and he's not that much older.
Now Wiggins could find his outside stroke and prove me wrong....or at least less right (I don't see a scenario where he's clearly better than Irving), but that's a 50/50 proposition at best.
Just seems to me that the best path towards true relevance for the Wolves is via Irving, KAT and Butler.
And as for how it impacts Butler with forwards defending him - like I said, the league's moving away from traditional positions anyway. Butler is going to have to deal with forwards defending him against a lot teams simply because many teams no longer utilize a true #1 and have gravitated towards stretch 3s playing what used to be a 2 (with the former 2s sliding in as combo guards). Not everybody has the personnel to do it, but not everybody has a 3 that can hang with Butler anyway. Besides, with Wiggins not being a truly dynamic scorer, I think most teams that have a 3 that can harass Butler would have him on Butler anyway with their 2 on Wiggins.