NBA Offseason Roundup: Part II

Kevin Love: Minnesota's Savior

For the first installment of this series, click HERE. 

In order to run a successful NBA team, it is crucial to not only consider the long-term effects of each transaction but also to adhere to a long-term vision during the offseason. Recently, I analyzed the offseason transactions of a variety of teams who are in the process of reconstructing their rosters. Today, I'd like to review how two teams were able to start their rebuilding processes by trading their superstar players. This is part two in a series of blog posts recapping the NBA offseason.

Minnesota Timberwolves and New Orleans Hornets On the Way Up

Occasionally, NBA franchises must part ways with their superstar player if that player is not capable of leading the team to a championship with his current supporting cast. The Minnesota Timberwolves and New Orleans Hornets each experienced this dilemma with their respective all-stars.

Kevin Garnett entered the league in 1995, and he guided the Timberwolves to eight playoff appearances in the next nine seasons. After making the Western Conference Finals in 2004, the T’wolves failed to make the playoffs in each of KG’s next three seasos. Clearly, the T’wolves were not getting any better, so they were left with a decision to make regarding their 30 year old star power forward.

In the 2005 NBA draft, the New Orleans Hornets selected Chris Paul with the 4^th pick. Two seasons later, Paul led the Hornets to 56 wins and a memorable second round 7-game series against the defending champion San Antonio Spurs. That was the Hornets best season with Paul on the roster. In the summer of 2011, everybody was talking about the possibility of him leaving once his contract expired after that season, so the Hornets had a big decision to make regarding their superstar.

It is very rare for a team to get equal value in return when trading a superstar because of the impact that one great player can have on a team’s overall level of success. However, the T’wolves and Hornets were able to reconstruct their rosters after dealing their star player by avoiding “The dreaded middle” that we talked about in Free Agent Blog Post I.

Minnesota Timberwolves

The Timberwolves lost enough in their first season without KG to get the third pick in the next year’s draft. That pick turned into Kevin Love, who many people thought lacked the athleticism to become a great power forward. Early on, the criticism was justified, as Love’s teams failed to win 25 games in each of his first three seasons. The constant losing caused the T’wolves to have four top-6 picks in the 2009-2011 drafts. Those picks turned out to be Ricky Rubio, Jonny Flynn, Wesley Johnson, and Derrick Williams. The T’wolves missed on two of those picks (Flynn and Johnson), which undoubtedly stalled their rebuilding process. However, Rubio’s excellence in his debut season may have made up for those bad picks, as he demonstrated a court vision that only a few point guards in the league possess. His play was a major part of the Wolves early season success (21-20) and the Wolves struggled mightily after Rubio went down with a torn ACL, as they went 5-20 without him.

Kevin Love has emerged as one of the league’s top power forwards and he and Rubio form one of the best young guard/forward duos in the league. Unfortunately, Love is going to be out until around early December recovering from a broken wrist and Rubio could be out until mid January, as he recovers from his ACL injury. Bad injury luck aside, the Timberwolves are demonstrating how trading a franchise player and “bottoming out” can be a successful way to reconstruct a franchise.

New Orleans Hornets

The Hornets traded Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Clippers in the summer of 2011 for Eric Gordon, Al-Farouq Aminu and a future first round pick (Austin Rivers) in return for CP3. The main part of the trade was Gordon, who is a potential future all-star and the type of young player that all teams hope to receive when they have to trade their best player. Gordon picked a good season to get hurt because his absence from all but nine games last season caused the Hornets to wind up with the 4^thworst record in the league and thus, the 4^th best odds of winning the #1 overall pick in the draft. New Orleans went on to unexpectedly win the draft lottery, which guaranteed them the right to select Anthony Davis, who was clearly the top prospect of the 2012 draft class.

The Hornets exemplified the "bottoming out" strategy by trading their superstar, which all but ensured that they would receive a valuable draft pick. Of course, not all teams are lucky enough to land the #1 pick and not all #1 picks are as promising as Anthony Davis. Still, the Hornets gave themselves a chance at acquiring a franchise player by losing enough games to get a high pick in the draft.

The Hornets got more in return for their star player than the Wolves, but they were also extremely lucky to get the #1 pick in the year that Anthony Davis was set to enter the league. If Davis becomes the type of player that many expect him to become, the Hornets could be a perennial playoff team for many years. Their bright future is a result of their ability to  “bottom out” after trading their franchise player.

Conclusion

The nature of the NBA and the NBA’s draft system makes it so that it is better to be really bad than to be average. The Wolves and Hornets were both in a position where they were not contenders and if they wanted to radically change their roster, they would have to trade their superstars. Both teams lost a lot of games in the subsequent season(s) following their trades. The losing seasons allowed each team to improve up to this point and both teams should continue to improve over the next several seasons.