Timberwolves boss Tim Connelly has a history of wheeling and dealing on draft night

The Timberwolves enter this year’s NBA draft with the No. 27 and No. 37 picks, so they’ll have a pick on Wednesday and Thursday now that the league has opted for a two-day affair.

But if recent history is any indication, President of Basketball Operations Tim Connelly isn’t going to be content sitting on his hands and waiting to make those picks.

Connelly has run two drafts in his tenure with the Wolves and each time he has made some draft-night moves that affected the Wolves’ position. In 2022, Connelly traded the No. 19 pick to move down for two picks — No. 22 and No. 26 to draft Walker Kessler (then traded to Utah) and Wendell Moore Jr. Then last season, he traded some future draft capital to move into the early second round to select Leonard Miller.

This week’s draft is trending toward being even more unpredictable than previous years, with no large names looming at the top and no predetermined pecking order outside of maybe a few picks. That could mean Connelly could wheel and deal if someone he has targeted begins to fall down the draft board; or if it doesn’t break his way, he can trade back or for future picks.

Marcus Fuller’s mock NBA draft

The Wolves owe the Jazz their 2025 first-round pick as part of the Rudy Gobert trade. They also will give them their picks in 2027 and 2029 along with a 2026 pick swap.

They are also headed for the “second apron” of the collective bargaining agreement with a payroll that will put them into the luxury tax, and well into it, for the first time since the 2019-20 season. That makes finding young talent on team-friendly deals that can contribute now or next season more paramount with the window of contention open.

The Wolves signed 36-year-old point guard Mike Conley for the next two seasons, but at some point they will have to pivot to figure out who their point guard of the future will be to play alongside Anthony Edwards for years to come. This draft represents possibly their best chance to find a young talent who can become that. Several of the mock drafts have the Wolves picking some sort of point guard, such as Isaiah Collier out of USC, Tyler Kolek from Marquette or KJ Simpson from Colorado.

Those players could be off the board or even available when the Wolves pick in the second round; that’s how unpredictable this draft might end up becoming.

At No. 37, Connelly could end up taking more of a developmental flier the way he ended last season with both Miller and guard Jaylen Clark, who spent most of the season rehabilitating a ruptured Achilles tendon.

The Wolves will have limited options in free agency this season thanks to the second-apron threshold. They will likely only be able to re-sign their own free agents — such as Kyle Anderson, Monte Morris or Jordan McLaughlin — and minimum-type players, since the second apron restricts teams’ ability to use mid-level exceptions, which the Wolves have used in the recent past to acquire players such as Anderson, Troy Brown Jr. and Shake Milton.

The Wolves do have their top seven players under contract this season, so playing time for younger players remains at a premium, but the day will come eventually when Connelly’s picks this year and years past will have to start producing.