Our NBA insiders are debating the biggest topics in the league. With trade season fast approaching, which team should look to hit the reset button?
Chris Mannix: All right, Howard, Thanksgiving is in the rear view, the Dec. 15 (unofficial) start of trade season is a couple of weeks away, and Christmas will be here before you know it. With a few exceptions (Indiana, Sacramento), teams are starting to get a pretty good idea of who they are and who they aren’t, specifically contenders. So survey the landscape for me—which team do you think needs to hit the reset button?
Howard Beck: Well, clearly it’s time to blow up the Brooklyn Nets! Oh wait, I already did that one. (Yes, I stand by every word, even if they have played slightly better of late.) There are easily a half dozen teams that are disturbingly underachieving. But if I’m picking one team to use the reset button from my old Atari 2600, it’s the Timberwolves, who spent all of their draft capital to get Rudy Gobert and yet are no better today than they were at the same point last season. I know, it’s super early for Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns as a duo, but the chemistry in Minnesota is just glaringly awful. And it’s not just about the difficulty of pairing the two bigs (though, let's be clear, all the concerns raised over the summer seem well founded). The Towns–Anthony Edwards dynamic has been suspect ever since Edwards began to blossom. (And then there’s D’Angelo Russell, a tough fit just about everywhere, other than a brief joyride in Brooklyn.) I’m sure the Wolves want to give this group as long as possible to figure it out, but I’m not convinced they’ll ever get there. Edwards is the future. Gobert has to stay to anchor the defense (and to justify the massive investment of all those picks). Which means it’s time to do two things: See what you can get for Russell now, and start gauging the market for Towns. They can’t actually trade KAT until next July, because of the supermax extension he signed last summer, but it’s time to start laying the groundwork.
Mannix: Oh, come on, Beck! The Timberwolves? A quarter of the way through the season? I’ll admit it has been positively painful to watch a Gobert-led defense sit one bad game away from ranking in the bottom third of the NBA in defensive rating (fun fact: Gobert has three more blocks this season than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander). Anthony Edwards’s—let’s call it lethargy—has been immortalized on social media. But I went into this season believing this team would need time, and I don’t think 22 games is enough of it. And (gulp) move Towns? Before we move on to the team that I think needs the launch codes, you’re really telling me it’s time to move Towns?
Beck: The 20-game mark is typically—though not always and not infallibly—the milepost for teams to determine what’s working and what isn’t. I just don’t know how much of this is fixable with time and more games. And to be honest, it isn’t the 22 games the Wolves have played this season that serves as the key barometer—it’s the 500-plus games they’ve played since Towns arrived in 2015. He’s a wonderful offensive talent, but he still doesn’t defend at a respectable level and he hasn’t led the Wolves anywhere. Unless you consider two one-and-out playoff appearances to be a success. It’s time to try something different. When the time comes next summer, they can get a ransom for Towns and rebuild around Edwards-Gobert. It’s not even a teardown, just a course adjustment. If not them, then who?
Mannix: Uh, have you seen the Bulls? The bottom-third offense, middle-of-the-pack defense, sub-.500 record Bulls? I’ve got some sympathy for Chicago’s plight. They were rolling before Lonzo Ball’s injury last season. But they have been reeling ever since. This was the potential downside to some of the big swings Artūras Karnišovas made when he took over as vice president of basketball ops; the Bulls got better with Ball, Nikola Vučević and DeMar DeRozan, but they had the look of a team with a ceiling. And with Ball out—and who knows when he’s going to be back from this bizarre knee injury—they may have hit it. If there’s any team that needs a pair of scissors taken to the roster it’s the Bulls, isn’t it?
Beck: I actually had four teams on my “blow it up” list, and—bingo!—we’ve now named three of the four. Yes, the Bulls are a strong candidate here, for all the reasons you mentioned. I was never a big fan of the win-now moves they made, but I understood the rationale. The Bulls badly wanted to be relevant again, and the Vučević-DeRozan gambit worked in that regard. Last season was fun! You can never discount the value of reenergizing your fan base. But this was always going to be a short-term fix, with steep, long-term costs—i.e., the picks and players they sent to Orlando, including Wendell Carter Jr., in the Vooch trade. Speaking of which: The Magic own the Bulls’ 2023 first-round pick, though it’s top-four protected. So deciding whether to hit the reset button now is actually a bit risky. If the Bulls are bad enough, and the lottery balls break their way, they could end up with a top-four pick in a very strong draft. But if the balls don’t bounce their way, that pick could easily end up in the five to 10 range and become another gift to Orlando. Is this really the right time for the Bulls to pull the plug?
Mannix: Champagne will be uncorked in Orlando if the Bulls blow it up, but I don’t see much of a choice. If you’re a red-eyed optimist, Chicago treads water for a few months, Ball comes back and the Bulls revert back to the really good team (22–13) they were before Ball was sidelined. In that optimistic world Patrick Williams breaks through and gives Chicago another reliable rotation player. But that feels too pie-in-the-sky for me. And think about it, how many teams out there would love to mine the Bulls’ roster? Would the Lakers, who have been making eyes at DeRozan for years now, not jump at the chance of adding him? Maybe Chicago could add one or both of the Lakers’ available first-round picks. Zach LaVine has value. Vučević, with the right team, does, too. And the sooner you pull the plug, the better your chances of positioning yourself for a Victor Wembanyama/Scoot Henderson franchise-changing talent. Because doesn’t this team, at best, have a first-round-and-out feel to it?
Beck: I’m with you on that last part: The Bulls have zero chance of escaping the first round, if they even make the playoffs. They’re not beating the Celtics or Bucks, they’re not better than the Cavs and I really don’t see them winning a series against a healthy Sixers or Raptors team, either. (Please don’t ask me to handicap a theoretical Bulls-Nets series. It will break my brain.) I’m also with you on the theoretical payoff of a teardown: Selling off some combination of LaVine, DeRozan and/or Vooch would set the Bulls up nicely in the future. But man, the downside. Are the Bulls really going to beat out the Rockets, Pistons and Magic for a bottom-three record? Even if they do, they’d have a 48 percent chance of their pick falling outside the top four, which means losing it to Orlando. And of course, the odds of surrendering the pick only get higher if they finish with the fourth-worst record or lower. I just don’t think that’s a responsible option for the Bulls right now. Miami, on the other hand …
Mannix: Right—try convincing the Heat to nuke the roster. Sell Pat Riley on the virtue of offloading Jimmy Butler and Kyle Lowry for picks. Ain’t happening. Miami fundamentally doesn’t see the virtue in tanking, and even if they did dump a few high-priced vets they would still be too talented, still play too hard and still be too well-coached to sink deep enough in the standings to make it worth it. They are a peculiar case, though. A 53-win team just cracking double-digit wins in December? The No. 1 seed last season battling for a play-in spot? Injuries, obviously, have beaten them up early, but do you really see a team that has peaked?
Beck: Listen, I love what the Heat have done in this mini era since acquiring Jimmy. They’re tough as hell, they share the ball, they do all the little things to win games. The problem is, they have to do all of that at the highest possible level, every night, because they just don’t have the firepower of the top-tier teams. And there’s a hard limit on how many games—or how many playoff series—you can win if you don’t have an elite scorer or two. The Heat don’t. They can’t match Giannis [Antetokounmpo] or [Jayson] Tatum or [Joel] Embiid or [Kevin] Durant, or even Donovan Mitchell. And with the rise of the Cavs (and potentially the Raptors), I don’t see the Heat cracking the top four in the East again with this core. Butler is 33, with a lot of hard miles on him. Lowry is 36. The clock is ticking. That run to the Finals in 2020 was inspiring and memorable. But that was their peak. I just don’t see the Heat finding the elite scorer they need to make another run before these guys are done.
Mannix: I’m sure about one thing: The Heat absolutely, positively do not agree with you.
