LaMelo Ball is going to be a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Naz Reid is not. Welcome to the latest whiplash from Tim Connelly’s annual summer jubilee.
When the weather warms and the balls stop bouncing from another NBA season, the Wolves president of basketball operations starts finger painting future roster shake-ups in tandem with exhaustive telephone calls to his brethren around the league, concocting blockbusters that feel like fever dreams.
And yet Connelly never seems to break a sweat.
“The thing about risk, it is all self-induced pressure. Like, if you don’t win, what’s the risk? I’d rather get fired than sit here being in job-survival mode,” he said five weeks ago, right after the Wolves were stomped in three of their four losses to San Antonio in the second round of the playoffs. Right then and there he announced, “If we mess up, we will mess up loudly. We are going to try and be as aggressive as possible.”
On Tuesday Connelly dumped Julius Randle and his $33-million contract for little more than salary-cap flexibility, punting the player who led the team in assists and was second in scoring last season. For almost 48 hours, people figured that Naz Reid was finally going to get his chance to start in Randle’s stead at power forward after logging seven years of patience and production.
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But on Thursday, for the second time in three years (including then-9 year Wolves veteran Karl-Anthony Towns in 2024), Connelly shocked the fan base and most of the NBA by trading Minnesota’s longest-tenured player. Naz is a folk hero here. Hundreds of people have Naz Reid tattoos. Beach towels bearing his name that were a giveaway promotion two years ago now sell for triple-digit dollar amounts on eBay.
In addition to parting with Naz, Connelly took out approximately the 6th, 7th and 8th mortgages on the Wolves draft capital since he took over as POBO five years ago. Gone is Minnesota’s first-round pick in 2033, which was the soonest one still available for them to trade under league rules, which stipulate you can’t lose your top pick two years in a row. But you can agree to give a team the choice to swap draft positions with you, and the Wolves have granted the Charlotte Hornets the right to swap positions with them in the 2028, 2029 and 2030 drafts. As a final sweetener, the Hornets get the Wolves second-round picks in 2029, 2032 and 2033.
In return, the Wolves get back the best player in the deal, point guard LaMelo Ball, and a backup wing player on an expiring contract this coming season, Josh Green.
Ball’s pros and cons are both gilded in neon. At age 25 (he is 17 days younger than Anthony Edwards), he is already one of the best pure point guards in the NBA, with a career assist percentage that is currently fourth best among active players, behind only Trae Young, Luka Doncic and Russell Westbrook.
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As the names ahead of him indicate, assist percentage rises in sync with ball dominant, high usage performance. For this trade to succeed, Ball will have to integrate his playmaking and thus improve his efficiency by more overtly enabling teammates significantly more talented than the rosters in Charlotte his first six seasons.
In that sense, his play for the Hornets in the 2025-26 campaign was very encouraging. His usage declined from an NBA-high of 35.9 in 2024-25 to 32 this past season, even as he was setting career highs in assists and assist-to-turnover ratio. Put simply, he thrived running an offense that surrounded him with more talent.
In 2024-25, Charlotte finished 29th among the 30 NBA teams in offensive rating (points scored per 100 possessions) with a rating of 106.7. But even at that low level, with LaMelo on the court the Hornets scored 112.7 points per 100 possessions, compared with 101.5 points when he was out. This past season, the team flourished with Ball at the helm, scoring 118.4 points per 100 possessions, 5th best in the NBA. After the All-Star break, they poured in 121.8 points per 100 possessions, second only to San Antonio. And while sharpshooting teammates like rookie Kon Knueppel provided a welcome boost, Ball was the unquestioned floor general. For the season, the Hornets scored 123.2 points per 100 possessions when he played and 110.6 when he didn’t.
Connelly parted with Naz and mortgaged the draft because getting a young, capable point guard that would enable Ant to play off the ball more often was identified as the team’s top offseason priority.
Nobody explains why this is so better than John Schuhmann, the maestro of analytics over at nba.com. He points out that among the 308 players who attempted at least 75 catch-and-shoot three-pointers last season, nobody was more accurate than Ant, who at 69-for-139 was flame-throwing at 49.6% accuracy. Compare that to the 35.3% that Ant shot on 363 pull-up three-pointers.
That added 14.6% on catch-and-shoot treys over pull-up treys was the third-highest positive differential among those 308 shooters. But whereas those other two players could concentrate on off-ball movement to maximize their efficiency, Ant was saddled with point-guard responsibilities. In fact, if we look at the other four players among the top five in positive catch-and-shoot efficiency, those C&S attempts dominated their shot mix from long range: 59% (Daniss Jenkins), 47% (Paolo Banchero), 66% (Quentin Grimes) and 71% (Immanuel Quickley). By contrast, just 28% of Ant’s total three-point tries were catch-and-shoot attempts.
Will Ball now on board to run the offense more frequently, Ant can make himself available for more off-ball, catch-and-shoot chances. And when Ant faces the barrage of double-teams and aggressive gap-help defense that has increasingly beset him throughout his NBA career, he has an ace playmaker to help pierce the seams of that strategy.
Meanwhile, sharing the court with Ant will likewise dramatically improve Ball’s offensive efficiency, if he is savvy and disciplined enough to exploit it. One of the more glaring flaws in Ball’s game is terrible shot selection – he will capriciously launch a trey early in the shot clock or otherwise ignore teammates and call his own number. This is probably a habit left over from when the Hornets were terrible. But last season, he led the NBA in three-point attempts with 740. Yes, he made 272, for a credible 36.8%. But it bears noting that Knueppel had one more make in 98 fewer attempts (42.5% overall), or that even saddled with point-guard duties, Ant still managed to make 39.9% of his threes last season.
Bottom line, Ant is not a flashy specialist like Knueppel; he’s the heartbeat of the franchise and the player to whom Ball must defer when Ant has the advantage.
A lot of these perceived weaknesses might simply be explained by Ball’s experience in Charlotte. Connelly famously made the Gobert trade to hasten Ant’s postseason immersion and thus fast-forward his growth in the crucible of big games played for big stakes. Ant has participated in 52 playoff games. Ball has participated in none.
Aside from elevating Ant, a reason to be excited about Ball’s arrival is the way he and Rudy Gobert can improve each other’s game. Another knock on Ball has been his defense. At 6-feet, 7-inches, he has great height on the perimeter and should be able to execute on-ball coverage better than his numbers indicate. Although his defensive shortcomings were more than compensated for by his offensive acumen in Charlotte, the Hornets always allowed fewer points per possession when he sat compared with when he played.
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Enter Gobert, whose defensive presence enables his teammates to tighten coverage, knowing they have a superb rim protector behind them. Ball has never been able to count on someone with that much presence and dedication at that end of the court. And on the flip side, Ball is the best lob initiator and pick-and-roll partner Gobert has played with, at least since his arrival in Minnesota. It is a well-known fact that if Rudy can get rolling early on offensive, his entire game – and, by extension, his team’s play – becomes more capable and alert.
A final red flag on the Ball trade is the question of his durability. He has played over 70 games just twice in his six-year career, and there were prolonged absences in many of the other four, with game totals running from 51 games his rookie season down to 36, 22 and 47 in years three, four and five.
So, yes, there is risk involved. But that is why you can get a player of Ball’s caliber for a sixth-man and a boatload of fair-to-middling draft capital.
Questions remain. With first Randle and now Naz departed, do the Wolves search for a bargain power forward or move Jaden McDaniels into that role? Is Joan Beringer ready to become a part of the regular rotation as a backup center?
Most significantly, is Ant ready to become “the best two-way guard in the NBA,” the way Connelly and coach Chris Finch always overrate him, or will he continue to show flashes of that stellar defense and much more frequent occasions where he becomes indifferent both on-ball and in rotations.
Connelly has put all his chips on the Anthony Edwards timeline. The draft cupboard will offer scant assistance in the years ahead, but that’s because Connelly has stockpiled a cadre of athletic wing players. Overall there are eleven players 26 years old or younger on the roster: Ant, Ball, McDaniels, Ayo Dosunmu, TJ Shannon, Josh Green from Charlotte, Jaylen Clark, Beringer, Bones Hyland, Julien Phillips and incoming rookie Isaiah Evans.
These are the “future” assets as well as the current ones. It follows the template set by Oklahoma City, San Antonio and New York, albeit with fewer reinforcements down the road and without a proven record of competing hard and collectively on both sides of the ball. That’s the character side of the equation and that’s what helped to doom the 2025-26 Timberwolves, sending Connelly out on another finger painting fever dream.
And if the character side of things doesn’t improve, the Ball trade will be a loud mistake.
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