The Timberwolves made a bold statement to the NBA last week with their trade for three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert.
Minnesota paid a steep price to acquire the 30-year-old Frenchman from the Jazz, essentially giving up five first-round picks, three players and a pick swap to Utah.
The Timberwolves will team Gobert with a talented core of Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Edwards and D’Angelo Russell, and if his introductory news conference is any indication, Gobert isn’t running from high expectations.
“The goal is to win a championship,” Gobert said Wednesday, per The Associated Press. “I came here for that. I didn’t come here just to be a good team. I came here to try to take this team to the finals and accomplish that.”
Gobert’s confidence likely is music to the ears of Timberwolves fans, who haven’t seen the team advance past the first round of the playoffs since 2004. That said, Minnesota showed promise last season, reaching the playoffs as the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference with a 46–36 record in their first year under head coach Chris Finch. That mark represented a two-fold increase in wins from 2020-21, when the team went 23–49 in an abbreviated 72-game schedule.
Gobert seems to appreciate the fleeting opportunity to compete for a championship after arriving from Utah, which is suddenly in rebuilding mode barely a year after earning the No. 1 seed in the West at 52-20 in 2020-21.
“The window for winning is not always big,” Gobert said, per the AP. “For us in Utah, that’s kind of what happened. I think the organization felt like that. We had maybe passed that window that we had over the last few years. I think [the Jazz are] still going to be a very competitive team. It just felt like with all the assets that they could get for me, it was better for them to go that way.”
Gobert, a three-time All-Star, averaged 15.6 points, a league-high 14.7 rebounds and 2.1 blocked shots per game last season. Over the course of his nine-year NBA career, he has averaged 12.4 points, 11.7 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per game
