RandBall: The Timberwolves have problems, but at least they aren’t Jimmy Butler problems

The 2017-18 Timberwolves could have been remembered more fondly.

They were, after all, the team that broke a postseason drought that stretched back to 2004 and brought relevance back to a franchise that had spent a decade-plus in various stages of rebuilding.

But they were also a relatively joyless and grinding bunch, slogging their way to 47 wins before being dispatched as the No. 8 seed by a clearly superior Rockets team.

The mercurial heartbeat of that team, Jimmy Butler, never truly meshed with up-and-comers Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins. Butler looked at the talent and effort around him, then looked at who was getting paid, and took a blowtorch during the offseason to any sort of long-term plan coach/personnel boss Tom Thibodeau might have had.

Whispers that he was unhappy turned into full-blown confirmation as camp and eventually the season opened. Butler wanted to be traded, and he was not subtle about it — most famously challenging teammates in a scrimmage during a heightened period of tension and uncertainty.

As the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Timberwolves editor at the time, I estimate that Butler took months (perhaps years) off my life, as I talked about on Tuesday’s Daily Delivery podcast.

I still remember the wave of relief I had as I hopped off a treadmill to field a call confirming that Butler was finally being traded.

All of this is a windup toward two separate but — at least to some of us — converging story lines.

On Monday, the Wolves defeated the Hawks 100-92 but struggled to put away a depleted team. Head coach Chris Finch was not shy in blasting his team even in victory, saying many things afterward, including: “That was a totally unacceptable second half of basketball. If we’re trying to be a team and go where we’re trying to go, that’s not good enough.”

This season, with the Wolves sitting at 25-21, has had the feel at times of both the disappointing 2022-23 year and that 2017-18 Butler year. The joy has been hard to find, and even when the wins have come they have been harder than necessary.

But if the Wolves organization and fans can take solace in comparative reality, it is this: At least Butler’s antics are far in the past — and are now Miami’s problem.

On the same day the Wolves were bumbling through a victory, the Heat were suspending a disgruntled Butler for the third time — this time because he walked out of practice.

Jimmy wants a trade, and he’s willing to keep lobbing grenades until he gets his way. That much hasn’t changed.

What has changed: He’s 35 now, not 29 as he was when he pulled this with the Wolves. The market for a mercurial star in his prime is different than it is for one in decline.

The Heat might not neatly reset if and when they trade Butler. It took the Wolves a couple of years and coaches to regroup, but they probably never would have been in position to draft Anthony Edwards if not for the route Butler chose.

One got the sense that Finch was particularly unhappy with Edwards’ focus on Monday, choosing an expletive related to cow dung to describe that second half and the tone set by the team’s best players.

Finch has seen his share of that during his tenure with the Wolves. But he has never experienced it at the level Butler delivered and continues to deliver it.