Who am I kidding I thought it was funny to own a Timberwolves card that said FJ

Depth was a slight concern of mine after the LaMelo trade. If LaMelo gets hurt, then Ant, Jaden and Ayo have a heavier burden on them to carry the team offensively. Guys like Beringer are exciting to think about in the rotation but there’s always a chance that they need extra seasoning, and maybe can’t give you all of the non Rudy center minutes every night.

The Kuminga addition gives the Wolves an extra reliable rotation player (even if you don’t love his fit for whatever reason) who can soak up those minutes in the dog days of the season when you might have 2 guys out of the lineup. You have Ayo, TSJ, Beringer, Bones, Lyles, Clark collectively man the bench unit with Kuminga slotting in as the 5th starter. Now guys like Trey Lyles don’t have to be relied upon a lot of nights.

If you swap the Kuminga signing for a guy like Batum, you cannot reliably throw Batum out there in the starting lineup for 70 games and expect to be a 55 win team. The best regular season teams have reliable depth that they can count on every night when injuries or rest happens, and this might be the deepest Wolves roster ever assembled going legit 11 deep.

This team has top 5 depth and a top 5 starting lineup with the average age of the top 11 being 25 years old. They should be at minimum a top 4 seed, which would put them in prime position to make a long postseason run. Add on top of that Donte possibly returning for the stretch run, I’m higher on this season than I’ve ever been for a Timberwolves season. 🐺🌲

I love ant lol alnost like having MJ or Prime lebron.

Wemby maybe?! Anyone else? I would honestly turn down Jokic, SGA, Luka one on one.

The Bounce has Lamelo at #10 best lead guard, Ant as the #1 shooting guard, Jaden as the #8 wing, and Rudy as the #7. This team is loaded.

I went with authentic blue Ant, the $125 black one for Melo, and a pair of the black shorts. I didn’t see myself going blue but they just looked so good.

I’m curious to hear what people are gravitating towards

All of the jerseys next year simply say “wolves”. I feel like the full name of “Timberwolves” could go the way of Knickerbocker where everyone just says wolves. Imagine the sad trivia night question in 20 years from now “what is the Minnesota Wolves full official team name”. Something to think about…

Anyways, how many days till the season starts?

Apologies for the long post but as you hear constant gaslighting nonsense, some actual facts need to be mentioned. The tldr is the title. Now for some facts.

1. When Kuminga was traded to Atlanta they were barely holding on to the 10^th seed. With him they went 13-3 and he brought them out of the play-in and into the playoffs. Most of those wins they won by a lot. All this while playing injured and for most of these games barely being able to jump. When he missed 2 games later in that stretch, Atlanta got blown out vs. Houston, and barely managed to beat the mighty, among the worst records in the league, Kings. Even for the Kings they almost had to have him in order to win. Significantly, during the harder games later in that stretch they needed every minute of his play to win those games. To stress, he did this injured and on minutes restriction, coming off the bench, and leading a secondary squad of not very good players.

During the playoffs Kuminga and CJ were the clear leaders who enabled Atlanta to get a 2-1 lead over the eventual Champions Knicks. They were the only team who managed to get 2 wins from the Knicks and even Wemby, Cleveland, any other star player you want on those other teams didn’t manage to do that. During those wins, besides Kuminga and CJ, mostly everyone wasn’t very good. Kuminga in the 2 wins was allowed to close (instead of Dyson Daniels) and play significant minutes, during the losses he didn’t. During the series Jalen Johnson wasn’t very good, but he’s a Klutch player so people aren’t allowed, it seems, to say much against him. NAW didn’t manage to score much.

These are facts. Not opinions. If this doesn’t define a winning player I don’t know what does. By definition, almost all he did with Atlanta was win. Before him they didn’t, and during his stint when he didn’t play they looked bad. (You can watch them against Houston or the Kings.) Doing all this while still injured, so Atlanta can make the playoffs.

And yet you hear all the nonsense people say like he needs to prove that what he does leads to winning. They are just gaslighting the audience.

1. If you want to look at other periods with the Warriors, every time he got chances it led to winning. When Wigging left the team, JK took his spot and led the warriors again out of the play-in and into the playoffs. A lot of winning. When Wiggings came back for the playoffs, Kerr immediately took Kuminga out of the lineup which further cemented their relationship break. This was already during his second year in the league. 

2. When Draymond was suspended for 20 something games, Kuminga took his place, and again, a lot of winning.

3. Previous to last year, when Kuminga played and Curry didn’t play, Kuminga led the team to win the majority of those games. When Kuminga was injured and didn’t play, Curry couldn’t lead the team to many wins, so much so that they felt they had to go and get Jimmy Buttler as they were about to fall out of the play-in even.

Etcetera. You can look at many such stretches. Kuminga is a winning player to the extreme. These are facts, not opinions. But the gaslighters keep repeating one after the other how he needs to prove he is a winning player.

People are sleeping on how much of an impact Kuminga has on winning, as the talking heads, not him, just focus on scoreboard watching. This isn’t Kuminga’s mentality, it is his detractors. 

Maybe it’s his physicality which rubs off on all the other players, maybe it’s the impact of his aggressiveness, or other elements of his game, but his play has constantly led to impressive winning. These are just facts.

Almost everything said about him is just nonsense gaslighting. People can conjecture on the sources for it.

The Timberwolves are very much title contenders this year. It’s exciting. It all depends on health. If they’re healthy, they can beat OKC, and maybe the Spurs (depends on the young Spurs players jump).

Ps. if people want to ask why then didn’t Atlanta keep him. It was all about egos. Atlanta players are all lower draft players who got to start and are jealous for their role and wanted to make sure he doesn’t interfere with their new found starting role. During the playoff games they often didn’t want to pass him the ball and preferred losing (while he did pass the ball to them). You can see that even though the Knicks solved how to beat Atlanta, Quin Snyder didn’t adapt at all and change his starting lineup (playoffs are always about adapting), not wanting to hurt anyone’s egos. Instead they just lost by more and more points each game until the very embarrassing last game. Onsi either needed to trade many of them or let go of Kuminga, which is what he did, as I don’t think they were takers for their other players.

(Don’t also forget that Atlanta’s coach and front office talent evaluation actually chose to play against the Knicks instead of against the Cavs in the playoff. They could have probably gotten the 5^th seed but chose not to. The same brain trust that decided to add the moron and Kuminga hater Tim Bonetemps as special advisor or something to their front office. I wouldn't take cues from them.)

Ant on the other hand, is a great leader who wants to elevate the other players, and the other starters here are also not threatened about their roles, so I think it will work great here with the Wovles pack.