2010/11 Minnesota Timberwolves Payroll: $35.1 million 2010/11 NBA Salary Cap: $56.1 million Roughly: $21 million under cap Variables: Darko Milicic - Unrestricted Free Agent Damien Wilkins - Unrestricted Free Agent Oleksiy Pecherov - Unrestricted Free Agent Sasha Pavlovic - Unrestricted Free Agent Brian Cardinal - Unrestricted Free Agent Ryan Gomes - Non-guaranteed Team Option for $4.2 million -$1 million buyout Greg Stiesma - Non-guaranteed Team Option for $762K Nathan Jawai - Qualifying Offer for $1.0 million Ricky Rubio - Rights Retained, $2.8 million cap hold Draft Picks - 4th, 16th pick, 23rd pick, 45th pick, and 56th pick. The Good: Nobody has assembled a better Euroleague roster than David Kahn. Ricky Rubio just capped off a tremendous season where he helped lead FC Barcalona to the Euroleague title. Nikola Pekovic had a strong campaign for Panathinaikos. Henk Norel continued to show promise with DKV Joventut, and Darko Milicic flashed enough in his stay so that he should be able to find a deal despite a tightening European market. If only Minnesota was in Europe and not the NBA, they might have been able to make the Final Four. The Bad: Minnesota is one of the more dysfunctional franchises around. They went from the incompetence of Kevin McHale to the power hungry David Kahn. It has not taken long for Kahn to get rid of many of the players he inherited from McHale, but it is hard to see how any move that has been made will have any substantial long term meaning. The team had a stock pile of draft picks last summer, and yet only Jonny Flynn and Wayne Ellington played for the team last year. Flynn showed himself to be an NBA level point guard, but no better than a number of point guards taken after him and not good enough to justify alienating Ricky Rubio. Ellington was a streaky shooter, and his value to an NBA team is almost entirely based on his ability to shoot from the perimeter. If he does so the way he did in January and February, he can have a long career. If he shoots the way he did the rest of the season, he might not be long for the league. The organization appears to be aware of the fact that Kevin Love and Al Jefferson cannot play together. Only the completely apathetic Warriors were worse defensively than Minnesota. It is a difficult task to be more incompetent on that end than Toronto and New York, but the Wolves were able to do it. Clearly one of their big but not tall men has to go, though deciding to build around Love instead of Jefferson, as has been reported, would be foolish. Love is smaller, struggles with length, has conditioning issues, has struggled to adjust to the triangle offense Rambis wants to run, and just flat out is not as good as Jefferson. It will be interesting to see what kind of package Minnesota could get in return for Jefferson. Teams who are competitive, but not close, like Oklahoma City and Chicago could become much more interesting if they were to get a post scorer like Jefferson. Both teams have the worker bee big men who can protect the hoop and block shots, but neither have a reliable back-to-the-basket scorer. Big Al's recent DUI also muddies the trade waters. The Future: The Timberwolves appear to be on their way to being well under the salary cap heading into the summer. They are still showing interest in Darko Milicic but it's unlikely they would allow him to keep a $11.3 million cap hold. If they simply choose to decline options on Stiesma and Jawai while keeping Ryan Gomes, the team will be $11.7 million under the cap. The problem for Minnesota is that their climate and struggles make it nearly impossible for them to attract free agents without severely overpaying, making the draft even more important for them than for other teams. Minnesota should figure to be one of the major players on draft night. They have three first round picks, and one in the top five (4th, 16th, 23rd). Corey Brewer went from bust to respectable last season, but selecting Wes Johnson with the 4th pick would give them an instant upgrade at the 3 position and will probably be the best player available to them at 4 if they aren;t able to move up to get the guy they really covet (Evan Turner) at 2. It will be a revealing night for Timberwolves fans to see what Kahn thinks of his core and the franchise’s direction going forward. DeMarcus Cousins could be an option with the fourth pick. But the problem is he would further compound a logjam of similar bigmen (Love and Jefferson). --

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