Tim Connelly is a deflector by nature. He likes to aw-shucks his way through explaining how he executes his toil as the leader of a front office. He brushes aside drafting Nikola Jokić in Denver as dumb luck and will often shrug his shoulders when talking about a trade, saying he just hopes it works for both teams.
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He has played a prominent role in assembling the championship roster in Denver and helping to turn the Minnesota Timberwolves into a contender that made it to the Western Conference finals this season. It was more of the same from him after the NBA Draft this week, when he engineered an aggressive move into the top 10 to grab Kentucky guard Rob Dillingham and then Illinois wing Terrence Shannon Jr. with the 27th pick to address a major need on the Wolves roster.
After Connelly tried to duck credit on Wednesday night, his friend and Timberwolves senior vice president of basketball operations Matt Lloyd did the talking for him.
“The guy was a complete monster the last two days putting us in a position to add to the team with limited resources,” Lloyd said on Thursday after Round 2.
Lloyd joked (presumably) that Connelly slept for a total of 16 minutes over the previous few days while he combed the rest of the league looking for opportunities to add talent. The Timberwolves see their championship window as now, but their payroll is about to skyrocket, limiting their avenues for improving the team.
With few resources to use to pick up a selection, Connelly tapped into his vast array of contacts around the league to generate options where, initially, there appeared to be none.
“Over the course of meetings and discussions and debates and video and stats, Rob Dillingham was someone we wanted to go get, and so Tim, he just went and got him. It was savage,” Lloyd said. “It was just an incredible two-day performance and it has put us in a position to get better.”
The Timberwolves entered this week needing help with shot creation and knew they were not going to have the money in free agency to go get it. So Connelly circled the wagons with a close-knit staff that includes Lloyd, Sachin Gupta, Jon Wallace, Dell Demps, head coach Chris Finch and a robust group of analytics staff and sports performance staff, scouts and salary cap experts to come up with a plan.
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In the days leading up to the draft, Connelly sat with Finch to watch video of Dillingham. They saw an explosive bucket-getter who throws lob passes as well as anyone on their current team, a key skill to open up more offense with Rudy Gobert.
“He was as excited as we were,” Connelly said of Finch.
One of Connelly’s biggest strengths is his network of contacts throughout the league. He is a social butterfly, an expert relationship builder who helps him have straightforward conversations with team officials at a time of the calendar when smokescreens and subterfuge run rampant.
“His personality is he doesn’t come up here and be someone different than who he is in real life,” Lloyd said. “His ability to gather information and know who was doing what, and when, where, why and how, that’s why we got in the position we got in the position we got in (Wednesday) and made the deal we did because of the information he gathered.”
When the San Antonio Spurs emerged as a trade partner at No. 8, Connelly met with owner Glen Taylor to discuss the financial ramifications. Adding the eighth overall pick to a team that was already going to sail past the luxury tax threshold means millions more in outlay. Taylor quickly signed off on the deal and, according to team sources in the room, encouraged the Wolves to keep looking for more ways to add talent as the night went on.
“The ownership group was here last night and the resources that kind of provided us, they kind of OK’d everything we did,” Lloyd said.
After adding two promising young offensive players on the first day of the draft, the Wolves changed course for Day 2. They started the day with the 37th overall pick but traded it to Detroit along with Wendell Moore Jr. for the 53rd pick. The Wolves used the 37th selection as a sweetener to get off of Moore’s $2.5 million contract for next season, a number that would have effectively cost much more because they will be in the luxury tax.
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There was simply no sign that Moore was poised to crack into the Wolves rotation anytime soon, especially given the additions of Dillingham and Shannon on Wednesday. Moore was the 26th overall pick two years ago out of Duke. He was viewed at the time as a versatile guard/wing who they hoped would develop into the kind of player who could initiate the offense, knock down open shots and guard multiple positions. But Finch rarely used him in games. Moore appeared in just 25 this season, never playing much more than eight minutes.
With no room for Moore, who will be entering his third season, in the rotation, there was no sense in keeping him around. The Wolves then traded from No. 53 to No. 57 and then out of the second round entirely and did not take a player at all on Thursday. The terms of the second and third trades have not yet been disclosed, but the moves undoubtedly helped the team’s financial picture as big raises for Anthony Edwards, Karl-Anthony Towns and Jaden McDaniels are set to kick in.
If the Wolves bring back Kyle Anderson and Monte Morris in free agency, something Connelly said on Wednesday was a goal, the payroll will be approaching the $189.5 million second apron of the luxury tax system. That carries with it severe restrictions on several roster-building methods, including sign-and-trades, aggregating salaries in deals, and potentially, freezing draft picks down the road.
Teams across the league are concerned about the new rules, and Lloyd believes that Connelly’s approach of prioritizing making more draft picks over signing players in free agency could serve as a blueprint for teams to navigate this new economic reality.
“I would opine that Tim kind of laid the foundation for teams that are in our position going forward with the aprons and tax exposure and the cap exposure,” Lloyd said. “We had to address needs on the roster with limited resources, so we just utilized the draft as opposed to utilizing free agency or trades.”
(Photo of Tim Connelly / Alex Kormann via Getty Images)
