Let's Settle This: How should the Wolves win next year? (with poll!)

Harrison Barnes territory is 10-20 wins, and “play the youngsters and live with their crunch-time ups and downs” is the 20 wins area.

sounds like trading Kevin Love for Kevin Garnett, so I chose Option 2. I’d like the guys we currently have + John Wall or Evan Turner to win as many games as possible, perhaps with a medium-salaried veteran added to the mix. In an ideal world, we’d win 35 games next year, lose our pick, but add Rubio the following summer, and become a perennial playoff team, after that.

If I had to guess what WILL HAPPEN… wait, I’ll stop. That might be the next “LET’S SETTLE THIS” topic.

According to you, any way. I happen to agree, but I don’t think the Kahn and Rambis felt the same way this year, and there’s no guarantee they’ll change their goals next year—especially if the team starts out as organically crappy next year as they ended this year.

1. A team bottoms out, starts losing a lot of games
2. They get high lottery picks for a while, leading to a major influx of talent
3. Team shrinks payroll as cheap, young talent replaces expensive veterans
4. Team starts to improve and flirts with playoffs
5. Team no longer has pipeline of high draft picks providing influx of additional talent
6. Team makes a few free agent acquisitions to add talent. Payroll increases.
7. Team’s young talent matures and needs to be paid. Team’s payroll balloons.
8. Team no longer able to sign any impact free agents due to salary cap and luxury tax
9. Team now mediocre and locked into high payroll. Few avenues for improvement.

I realize teams avoid this scenario through very savvy trades or draft day steals. But both of those require a certain amount of incompetence by other teams as well as lots of luck.

Seems like a bad system. Even if your team does everything right, you very likely may be on a collision course with ‘perennial playoff tease/8th seed’ until the team ages and starts stinking again.

For the Wolves, the above list is compounded by the mind-blowingly bad decisions made in the past. A long sequence of blown drafts and bad trades have trapped the Wolves in the lottery phase.

Unless the team has a grand slam of a summer, there is going to be a certain amount of pressure to lose next year too. One more year of top 10 protection of our pick = one more year of a potentially major talent addition. Rubio not here yet anyway. Need to play Flynn and maybe Jefferson or Love a lot to boost/retain their trade value since they will likely be moved.

I think ideally they win around 30 games (this will seem great in our minds), keep their 1st rounder (hopefully around 7 or 8). Adding Rubio and the 1st rounder in a year, along with continued development of the rest of the team, could bump them into 40 win range within two years while still holding some valuable assets, and having several young players with big upside.

and we still have a decent shot at winning the lottery next year with the 6-7 slot in the lottery…how often does the worst team actually get the first pick? i’m just sayin is all. this way the fans don’t feel soooo disenfranchised that they start turning the channel to watch the thunder….or the gophers…or the lynx…or Barca!