With Timberwolves, sideshows haven’t become the main attraction

When Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez agreed to purchase the Timberwolves and Lynx from Glen Taylor — who also owns the Star Tribune — way back in 2021, one of the major story lines was whether these outsiders were intent on whisking the franchise away to some other more lucrative market.

Here we are in 2024, with the transfer of majority ownership chugging along and perhaps lurching to the finish line by the end of this month, with Lore and Rodriguez recently securing new financing to stabilize the deal.

The year before they bought the team (2019-20), the Wolves were dead last in average NBA attendance and they had made the playoffs just once since 2004. Now they are selling out Target Center as a matter of routine and the Wolves are cruising toward a high seed in what will be their third straight playoff appearance.

Lore and A-Rod bought the team for $1.5 billion, and it’s now valued at $2.5 billion. Count me among those who would like to acquire something and have it increase in value by 10 figures before I was done paying for it.

The protracted nature of the ownership transfer might have been a bigger deal if not for all the winning this year. Last week’s odd news that executive Sachin Gupta allegedly had his hard drive stolen by a disgruntled employee also could have dominated headlines for days during a lesser time for the Wolves.

Instead: The sideshows have remained on the side for once, as Patrick Reusse and I talked about on Monday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

The on-court product is too compelling to worry about much of anything else. Karl-Anthony Towns is injured again? That’s unfortunate, and his absence has been felt, but the Wolves are an impressive 6-3 without KAT while learning to play with different lineups.

The Wolves have looming salary cap decisions to make this offseason with new NBA rules combined with salaries for Towns and Anthony Edwards scheduled to take big leaps? Sure, but that’s a problem for another time. And besides, President Tim Connelly — roasted in his first year and celebrated in his second — should be able to solve it.

Minnesota almost certainly will have home-court advantage for the first round of the playoffs. It could be two or even three rounds depending on how the final 11 games and the playoffs go.

After a nice win over Golden State on Sunday put the Wolves within a half-game of Oklahoma City and a game of Denver, the biggest question remains this: Who would Minnesota prefer to play in the first round?

A loaded Western Conference providing a bevy of worth challengers is the biggest current concern for Wolves fans. For a franchise that used to bemoan curses, beg for the luck of ping-pong balls and struggle to find three competent players to put on the floor at the same time — let alone an entire rotation of excellence — these are different times.

Even with distractions all around, entertaining basketball continues to be the focus of almost all the attention.

Here are four more things to know today:

*With the Gophers men’s basketball season over following a second-round NIT loss, key roster questions loom. Marcus Fuller lays them out here, while I provide this caution: This does not yet seem like a team ready to compete for a secure NCAA tourney spot, even if everyone comes back. Ben Johnson needs to strike gold in the transfer portal again, have at least one freshman show he’s ready to make an early impact AND retain Dawson Garcia and Cam Christie for me to feel that way.

*It’s hard to find an NFL mock draft that doesn’t involve a trade up from the Vikings. Here’s the latest from Pro Football Focus, which has Minnesota moving up to No. 5 to take J.J. McCarthy.

*Shohei Ohtani is slated to talk to the media today, and my sincere hope for the sake of our page views is that he announces he is buying a bunch of prime property in Duluth.

*Reusse and I talked a little bit about college hockey, but there will be a lot more on Tuesday’s show with the Star Tribune’s Randy Johnson. He’ll detail his thoughts on the Gophers and the entire 16-team men’s bracket. We’ll have some Gophers football talk as well.