When it comes to the Timberwolves and Karl-Anthony Towns this offseason, believe nothing you hear

A national report from earlier this month says "some executives around the league" are of the belief the Timberwolves will trade Karl-Anthony Towns in the next few weeks.

Wow. Talk about firm sourcing.

There have been more recent opinions offered by others closer to the Timberwolves' operation that the plan appears to be to run it back again in 2023-24, to find out if a now presumably healthy Towns could mesh more effectively with Rudy Gobert.

My opinion on the subject would be this:

If all those national reporters in cozy relationships with agents and team executives didn't have a whiff that Wolves basketball boss Tim Connelly was going to make the confounding, enormous trade for Gobert last July, we'll only be getting guesses until something actually happens with KAT, or when it doesn't.

You can trade four players and five first-rounders (including the one you drafted two weeks earlier) and all those NBA snoops and gossipmongers hadn't heard a whisper …

I must insist that makes Connelly all-world in keeping things inside a need-to-know circle.

To clarify: All-world in keeping information tight, all-world in crafting most of the team that just won an NBA title for the Denver Nuggets, but certainly not in the horrendous predicament in which he's placed himself and the T-Wolves (T stands for Trouble in River City) with the asinine Gobert trade.

Asinine because Walker Kessler, the 7-foot rookie, basically would have provided the same things as Connelly wanted from Gobert, at $35 million less in salary and with nine years gained in youth.

Towns has played eight seasons in Minnesota. He missed only five games total in his first four seasons. Injuries became an issue for a couple of years, and then he played 74 games in 2021-22 for his best overall season. KAT was the third-team center behind Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid on the official all-NBA teams. That qualified him to sign a four-year, $224 million "supermax" extension one year ago. That monster deal kicks in after the upcoming season.

A month later came the Gobert trade. And then came a calf strain that was more severe than originally advertised. He missed 52 games, came back late and had two or three clunkers in a postseason resulting in two wins in seven games.

Those clunkers were not based on lack of effort. Mostly, it was due to five of those games being against Denver, with the huge and amazing Jokic and a far better overall team (as was proven in the Nuggets' 16-4 run through the playoffs).

We have been asked by some to accept the theory the Timberwolves played the Nuggets tougher in the playoffs than any of the four teams, which is ridiculous because no team actually threatened their title run.

The impression of Wolves' fandom as an entity toward Towns entering this offseason was probably at its lowest point in eight years, and then he enhanced that let's-rip-KAT vibe in a recent appearance on a podcast hosted by Patrick Beverley.

KAT's first mistake was being involved in any public dialogue with the major screwball that is Pat Bev.

These player-interviews-player podcasts are all outrageous kiss-ups, and apparently Beverley took the prize, declaring Towns to be the best center in the NBA only a couple of days after Jokic completed his astounding work in the postseason.

And somewhere in there, KAT said this:

"I feel like when my time's up and I retire ... I feel like there's going to be people who are going to say that I changed the game. And I'm going to be very appreciative of that."

He also said: "When this is all over, there's going to be kids coming up saying they're going to be able to play a different way because I played in the NBA and did it a different way."

Center on the perimeter. Exceptional three-point shooter.

Presumably that's what KAT sees as making him unique.

That part didn't make the cut on most tweets and headlines. Just the "changed the game," which is absurd when standing alone.

And when KAT is spouting this, we should remember, he's not talking to the world of longtime season-ticket holders at Target Center. He's talking to the Instagram world, the world of his companion Jordyn Woods, a one-time Kardashian friend, where excess is what attracts the needed attention for celebrity.

Throw in that mentality with anything involving Pat Bev, the zaniest of NBA publicity hounds, and something stupid was bound to happen.

As for what I see happening this summer, Connelly will trade Towns — and that's definitely a guess.