The 1st Round: Towns as the now-inevitable #1 pick.
Andy G: First off, Happy Draft Week. Whatever this says about us, and the team that we cheer for, this is usually the highlight of our NBA season and a time clearly marked off on our calendars. This is an especially big one, what with the Wolves picking first overall for the first time ever. (Eds note: But this year’s will join the last two top picks on the Wolves roster, who came over in the K-Love trade. Thanks, LeBron!) Also, the Wolves are picking high in the 2nd Round. There’s some question as to whether they’ll keep both picks, or use them on players that will immediately join the NBA, but the fact is they have them and that means more to discuss.
I’ve written some things about the Wolves top pick; specifically, whether they should use it on Karl Anthony-Towns from Kentucky, or Jahlil Okafor from Duke. For a while, it seemed like Flip was going to take Okafor, a player he was (reportedly) enamored with all season — possibly to the extent that the possibility of drafting Okafor helped motivate the season’s big tanking decisions, like holding Ricky Rubio out of games for much longer than he had to.
But late in the college season, the general scouting consensus (Draft Express and the NBA scouts who talk to Chad Ford) shifted from Okafor to Towns as the draft’s best prospect. The best stats projection models also prefer Towns to Okafor. Now it is widely believed that Flip’s mind has changed as well. There was a period of time when it was rumored that the Wolves personnel staff preferred Towns, but Flip still preferred Okafor. This was disconcerting to read, not because of the conclusion itself (I’m on record as loving Okafor’s potential, and even slightly preferring him to Towns based on what I watched) but because of what it suggested about the team’s structure and process.
Punch-Drunk Wolves 