The biggest story in the NBA is the broken relationship between Jimmy Butler and the Minnesota Timberwolves. While I don’t have enough information to truly know what is going on, from the outside it seems they are suffering from a failure of management. I see two clear problems:
- They gave Tom Thibodeau the foolish Coach & General Manager dual role. Setting aside whether these two workloads are too much for one person to accomplish effectively, they are somewhat at odds. Coaches should focus on making the most of a given season by winning each and every game possible. General managers should focus on maximizing the team in a longer time horizon. General managers can make smart decisions to prioritize the current season if it maximizes their long term overall. We have seen time and time again that combining these two roles ends in failure as franchises fail to manage their assets properly.
- Owner Glen Taylor has been interfering with decisions to be made by the basketball operations team. I don’t know much about Taylor and he is probably smarter than I am. But I doubt he knows more about basketball than Thibodeau. The Timberwolves recently offered Andrew Wiggins, their third-best player, an overpayment of a five-year $150 million contract. While most NBA analysts agree this was a poor decision (Wiggins has had a negative Value Over Replacement Player in each of his four NBA seasons) it was Taylor who pushed this contract after asking Wiggins to promise to get better. Now, despite Thibodeau refusing to trade Butler, Taylor is pushing to make a trade. I suspect Thibodeau understands there is not a trade to be made that makes basketball sense for the Timberwolves while Taylor is reacting emotionally to Butler’s negative attitude. This is understandable but ultimately unwise. And if I were a Timberwolves fan I would be furious because it was the overpayment to Wiggins that likely started this rift, given Butler has said the dispute is over finances.
The Timberwolves will likely trade Butler for a poor return. The only other possibility is to not trade him and he remains on the team, unhappy, adding further friction to the locker room. While Butler is now clearly a problem, their woes stem from a failure of management.