For most of last month, being a Timberwolves fan meant refreshing your browser and waiting for a grown man in Los Angeles to decide whether Minneapolis was worth his last two winters. We talked ourselves, out loud and in public, into the idea that a four-time MVP was going to pick the coldest market in the league for his farewell tour because the roster fit was kind of perfect.
Then LeBron signed with Philadelphia, and that was that.
So here’s what August looks like for Minnesota. No introductory press
conference. No jersey number announcement. Instead, the thing that actually moved the needle this week was a clip out of the practice facility: Anthony Edwards on one end, LaMelo Ball on the other, and Olivia Miles getting shots up on the court next door.
I know how that reads. July workout footage is the screensaver of the sports calendar. It fills the screen when nothing is actually running. Every team in the league posts the same video of the same guy draining the same catch-and-shoot threes over the same assistant coach’s outstretched hand, and it means precisely nothing in November.
Fine. All true. Now look at the clip again anyway.
Here is the entire history of this franchise, compressed: the talent gets grown here and cashes out somewhere warmer. The issue was never that nobody good played here. The wound is that the good ones treated Minnesota as a place you pass through on your way to becoming who you were going to be. The building emptied out every summer for as long as anyone around here can remember.
So when a guard the Wolves surrendered an unprotected 2033 first and three pick swaps to acquire spends the dead middle of his offseason getting shots up in Minneapolis, at a time of year when nobody is required to be anywhere, that does not land as filler to me. He could have spent July anywhere on the planet.
They didn’t have to talk him into the room. He was already in the room.
Strip the sentiment out and the basketball case stands on its own. For the past two seasons, every conversation about this team dead-ended at the same complaint: Anthony Edwards needed help. Not because the coaching failed him, but because the roster left him no choice. With Mike Conley aging into a smaller role, Minnesota never found a second guard who could reliably run the offense. The results was that the whole operation funneled through Ant. By January of last season he was getting double-teamed on nearly 20 percent of his possessions, one of the highest rates in the league, and he still put up 28.8 a night and dragged a 49-33 team into the Western Conference Semifinals before San Antonio ended it in six.
That’s the ceiling of one man doing two jobs. LaMelo is the second job walking through the door. A 25-year-old lead guard who bends a defense before Edwards ever touches the ball is the difference between Ant hunting and Ant getting hunted. The upside is a top-tier backcourt in the sport and a shot at the first Finals trip in franchise history. The downside is real too, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. LaMelo’s injury history is the whole reason this was a gamble, and the roster is still one legitimate forward short of making defensive sense. Nothing about a July gym changes the odds on it.
But it does tell you the bet is bought in.
And then there’s the third figure in the frame. Olivia Miles, on the next court over, doing the same thing everyone else in the building was doing. The picture, taken plainly, is a Minneapolis practice facility in July with high-level basketball players in it, on purpose, at a time of year when this building used to be where people had packed up their lockers.
Yes, this is just a video. It’s the offseason. The power forward hole is unsolved, and the games that count are still a hundred-plus days out. But I’ve watched this franchise for a long time, and I know the shape of its disappointments by heart. The shape of this one isn’t one of them. The talent didn’t leave. The talent didn’t have to be begged. The talent flew back early and turned the lights on itself.
We spent all summer waiting for a name to walk through the door.
Turns out the door was already open.
Turns out somebody was already inside.
