New Timberwolves general manager Gersson Rosas just took his first big swing. Minnesota has been linked to D’Angelo Russell since hiring Rosas this summer, with those rumors exploding in the last week, but meeting Golden State’s price for the 23-year-old All-Star was always going to be hard, if not impossible. So Rosas settled for being part of a complex four-team, 12-player deal that sent Robert Covington to Houston and Clint Capela to Atlanta and brought Malik Beasley, Juancho Hernangomez, and Jarred Vanderbilt from Denver to Minnesota.
There are a lot of moving pieces here. This was a huge gamble for the Wolves, but it may not get them much closer to actually acquiring Russell, who has become something of a white whale. Covington was also one of their only players whom other teams wanted, as well as Karl-Anthony Towns’s best friend on the team. Minnesota’s franchise player didn’t seem happy when he posted an image of a concerned-looking Drake on his Instagram stories after the deal broke Tuesday night.
But Towns could end up changing his mind once the dust settles. This deal checks two important boxes for Minnesota: It acquired talented young players in Beasley (23), Hernangomez (24), and Vanderbilt (20), who are closer in age to Towns (24) than Covington (29), while also adding depth to a roster sparse on talent.
The Wolves had to do something before the deadline. Any optimism from their fast start had long since faded. They are 15-34 this season and haven’t won a game with Towns on the floor since November.
Most casual NBA fans have never heard of Beasley or Hernangomez, both of whom were drafted by the Nuggets in the first round in 2016. The Wolves are betting that has more to do with their situation in Denver than their talent.
One of the cardinal rules for NBA executives when looking for sleepers is to evaluate players based only on what they have been given the opportunity to do on the floor. Neither Beasley nor Hernangomez has ever averaged more than 24 minutes per game in Denver. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything about their long-term potential. Both have done well within their limited roles.
The easiest way to see that is to look at their per-36-minute numbers:
Career per 36: Hernangomez and Beasley
Beasley has always been an explosive scorer. At 6-foot-4 and 200 pounds, he’s a prototypical 3-and-D shooting guard with the ability to put up points in a hurry. While he has been relegated to a catch-and-shoot player in Denver, he has shown the ability to handle the ball and finish at the rim as well. Catch him on the right night and he looks like a future star. He exploded for a career-high 35 points in a win against the Rockets last season:
Hernangomez is a more subtle contributor. At 6-foot-9 and 214 pounds, he’s a combo forward with the ability to defend multiple positions and space the floor. But he’s a ball mover who is best when making the extra pass and picking and choosing his spots on offense as opposed to looking for his own shot.
Rival executives have long wondered what Beasley and Hernangomez could do in bigger roles. It was just never going to happen in Denver, where they were being squeezed for playing time on both sides. Their paths to starting were blocked by Gary Harris, Will Barton, and Paul Millsap, while the emergence of Michael Porter Jr. meant they were no longer needed on the second unit either. Both players have been in and out of the rotation, making it hard to establish any kind of rhythm.
That won’t be an issue in Minnesota, where the two could immediately be inserted into the starting lineup. With Covington gone, there is no one preventing Beasley and Hernangomez from playing 30–35 minutes a night on their new squad. Opportunity is the lifeblood for any young player in the NBA, and both players just received a much-needed infusion.
Beasley and Hernangomez will both be restricted free agents in the offseason, which is why Denver had to move on from them, even in the midst of a playoff push. There was no point in handing out long-term contracts to players struggling to see the floor. So the Nuggets flipped them for a grab bag of expiring contracts and Houston’s 2020 first-round pick.
The best-case scenario for Rosas is that Beasley and Hernangomez follow in the footsteps of Eric Bledsoe and Tobias Harris. It’s hard to remember after everything that has happened in their careers, but the two were in a similar situation when they came into the league. Bledsoe spent his first three seasons as the Clippers’ understudy to Chris Paul, never averaging more than 23 minutes per game, before being acquired by Phoenix. Harris spent his first one and a half seasons in Milwaukee, averaging 11 minutes per game, before being traded to Orlando.
Both Bledsoe and Harris were acquired by new front offices, similar to the one Rosas has assembled in Minnesota, looking to make a splash. Identifying underutilized young talent around the NBA is the easiest way to boost a team. While it didn’t end up working out for either Phoenix and Orlando long-term, acquiring Bledsoe and Harris were two of the best moves they ever made.
Rosas didn’t have the luxury of starting over and beginning his own version of The Process. Wolves fans are desperate for success after making only one playoff appearance in the last 15 years, and they have a franchise player in Towns entering the prime of his career. The big-market vultures are already starting to circle around him, even though he just entered the first year of a five-year max contract.
Getting Russell would be a splashy coup to usher in a new era in Minnesota, but Rosas likely doesn’t have the pieces to entice Golden State. The previous regime stripped the franchise for parts in a desperate attempt to win now and left the next regime a roster without much talent outside of Towns and no salary cap flexibility.
Rosas will likely slowly build up Minnesota’s talent base to the point that he can eventually make a bigger splash down the road. The Wolves’ situation resembled the one he left in Houston, where the Rockets rebuilt around James Harden on the fly without ever bottoming out, buying low and selling high at the right times.
Rosas bought low on Beasley and Hernangomez. If he’s right, he just gave his new franchise a powerful push in the right direction. If he’s wrong, it’ll be his first step out the door. That’s the life of an NBA general manager.
