Wolves trade Wiggy

As a now non-fan and mere observer of the Timberwolves, I find no excitement in the team's major trade today of Andrew Wiggins to Golden State for D'Angelo Russell. 

Russell has been hyped up as the latest Wolves savior,  but we all know he won't be.

Still, Gersson Rosas deserves a great deal of credit for getting that Wiggins contract off the books. I have never been a Wiggins basher. Some people make trashing Wiggins part of their daily routine. But no argument can be made that he was worth that max deal, or ever would be.

Rosas also traded Dieng today and a couple days ago traded off a bunch of guys in a 3 or 4 team mega deal. Mostly this was all just moving around either garbage players or bad contracts like Dieng's.

None of this will work out in the long run, of course. Russell will either flop, be a malcontent, or simply not move the needle like many are desperately hoping he will. Wiggins will probably blossom in Golden State. Players the Wolves traded away will do better than the ones they received. That 1st round pick they got the other day will be used on a bust. 

But still, with these moves the Wolves have basically entirely flushed out all of the crap from the Thibs era. In less than a year and a half after Jimmy Butler tore this franchise apart as Thibs watched, the roster has had a near 100% makeover. The only players left here who even played for Thibs are Towns and Okogie. That's it. 

The Thibs era is fully the past. Now they are into the era of appeasing Towns so he won't want out. They went down this road once before when they went out of their way to make Kevin Love happy so he would stay. That of course turned into a disaster too.

Towns needs to step up and do his part. His reputation has taken a brutal.hit this year. He missed a whole lot more games with a knee injury than anyone seemed to think he should have. The team literally has not won a game since he came back. The whispers of his discontent have begun (we will see if Russell's arrival quiets that). And he has become pouty and seemingly delusional, thinking he was snubbed for an all star game he had no business being picked for.

If all these wheelings and dealings don't bring this team back into relevance, Towns may be the next big name shipped out.