Timberwolves owner confirms every bit of awkwardness in the Jimmy Butler drama
While discussing the Jimmy Butler trade demand fiasco that’s unfolding in the Twin Cities, Kevin Garnett told a national television audience watching the NBA’s opening-night festivities that Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor “doesn’t know s— about basketball,” so naturally the good people of Minneapolis awoke to Taylor talking basketball in the Star Tribune on Wednesday morning.
And sure enough, on the morning his franchise’s star veteran player is slated to start for a team that he does not want to play for, alongside teammates he holds in open contempt, there was the Wolves owner confirming all the organization’s missteps that led to Butler’s repeated requests to be traded.
Taylor confirmed what The Athletic’s Jon Krawczynski reported earlier this week — that he met with Butler, and the two came to an understanding, with the former pledging to continue working toward fulfilling the trade request and the latter vowing to actually try while he remains on the roster.
“I think [Butler has] made it very clear that he would not re-sign with us at the end of the year,” Taylor told the Star Tribune, which he also owns, “and therefore it is in our interest to get a trade so that we can get a player or two to replace him that helps our team.”
The Timberwolves officially have zero leverage
That’s one heck of a way to submarine whatever semblance of leverage you might have had in said trade talks, because, while everyone assumed this to be true already, we now know that Butler suiting up against the San Antonio Spurs on Wednesday night is not a step toward any kind of reconciliation, but the extremely awkward case of a player just biding his time before being sold off for spare parts.
If you’re the Miami Heat or Houston Rockets or any of Butler’s other reported suitors, is there any chance you’ll sweeten an offer now that the owner has confirmed publicly that he has promised to trade an All-Star who has no interest in re-signing with the team for something — maybe anything that will salvage this situation? You sort of assumed that was the case anyway, but now you really know.
Why is Jimmy Butler still on the Wolves?
So, what is Butler still doing on the Wolves? The trade offers aren’t getting any better. How does a businessman who turned himself into a billionaire allow an employee to hold his company hostage — to continue working with impressionable coworkers whose confidence he willingly tried to destroy before detailing precisely how and why he did it in a pre-arranged nationally televised interview?
When asked this question or something akin to it — how Butler, Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins can coexist on a basketball court when Butler has publicly denounced them both — Taylor told the Star Tribune, “When I ask them, they all have said they can play together in the games. I don’t know why they wouldn’t be telling me their true feelings.” Sometimes what players say and what they do can be incongruent, and that was readily apparent to anybody who watched the Wolves try to play together again, including Towns, who called the preseason finale an “unacceptable” embarrassment.
As KG’s former teammate turned fellow analyst Paul Pierce told Dime, “It just doesn’t seem like it’s gonna be a culture to where it’s built for winning, because on one end you’ve got a star who doesn’t want to be there, but’s gonna play anyway. Guys know that he can be gone any day now. It just doesn’t seem like a culture built for winning right now as long as they have Jimmy Butler on the roster.”
Changes coming in Minnesota even if Butler were to stay
And because every episode of this Butler drama never fails to deliver, Taylor offered some additional news to the Star Tribune: Even if the Wolves and Butler could come to a long-term solution to this mess, “We would have to make some changes on our team in order to keep Jimmy,” because Towns and Wiggins are making so much money, and the owner apparently isn’t interested in paying them all.
This is almost enough to make you sympathize with Butler demanding to be traded from a playoff team because, you know, he’s all about winning. I’m not quite sure I’ve ever heard an owner essentially tell his team’s fans: We tried everything we can to keep this promising core together to no avail, but even if we had succeeded, I wasn’t really willing to pay to keep them all together anyway.
Nobody agrees on when Butler requested a trade
Taylor also confirmed to the Star Tribune that, as far as he knew, Butler’s trade request came a week before training camp, when the rest of us learned the extent of his dissatisfaction in sourced reports:
“Back about three weeks ago, when [Butler’s request] came out in the news, Thibodeau called me and said that he had a meeting with Butler out on the West Coast, and Butler had told him at that time he wanted to be traded. That was the first I had heard anything about it.”
This is not how Butler’s camp tells it. Butler reportedly believes he made clear to Wolves coach and president of basketball operations Tom Thibodeau after last season that he had no intention of playing for Minnesota again. Thibodeau denied this, but Taylor left the door open for interpretation:
“Initially, when Butler told [Thibodeau] he wanted to leave, you know Tom did everything he could to try to keep Jimmy here and I understand that. They have a close relationship.
“Thibs brought him here so that he would stay here. But eventually I think that in listening to Jimmy, Thibs and I are lined up on this. We need to be looking at a trade.”
Tom Thibodeau’s job is safe
While another owner might wonder why he was first hearing from his president of basketball operations about a star player’s trade request after it became a national story, why his coach thinks it’s a good idea to keep a player who doesn’t want to be part of the team and is in fact undermining its chemistry, and how those two thought processes could conflict with what’s best for the franchise, Taylor is not willing to entertain the idea that it could be time to move on from Thibodeau.
“No, no,” he told the Star Tribiune, “the only thing now is that we are starting to play games and I am asking him to concentrate on coaching. GM Scott Layden will help to see if any trades are available.”
OK, cool. So, let’s drag this into the season, then. To recap: Taylor told the man whom he hired to run his basketball operations to concentrate on coaching a player who no longer wants to be on the team while the organization continues discussions about a trade that could make or break the franchise.
Maybe Garnett was right.
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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
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