The LaMelo Bet Is Either Minnesota's Smartest Move or Its Most Dangerous One

Everyone spent July celebrating Anthony Edwards. The narrative wrote itself — franchise cornerstone, the guy who was here all along, the answer the front office finally built around. And Edwards deserves that. Twenty-six points a night on nearly 48% shooting is the foundation you build toward, not around. But the celebration skipped past the actual question Tim Connelly is trying to answer, and it's a harder one than the Edwards hagiography suggests.

Here's what drove this entire offseason: Minnesota won 11 of 24 close games last season. Forty-six percent. A team that won 59% of its games overall fell apart the moment the margin tightened, and that 13-point gap between their overall record and their clutch record wasn't a fluke or a bad week — it was a pattern, and I laid out in July why it was structural rather than motivational. The roster was designed to dominate the middle of games and had no reliable mechanism for winning the end of them. When the offense had to execute in half-court possessions with the game on the line, it devolved into isolation ball. McDaniels' final 10 games made that visible in the numbers: his shot attempts climbed to 14.7 per game while his field goal percentage cratered to 44.2%. More shots, worse results, no one to take the ball out of his hands at the right moment.

That is the specific problem LaMelo Ball is supposed to solve. Connelly didn't acquire him as a second star or a complementary piece — the public framing was explicit about this. Ball is a decision-maker in exactly the situations where Minnesota's offense last season became a series of individual guesses. His ability to create for others in the half-court, to slow a possession down and find the right shot rather than force one, is the theoretical antidote to what those final 10 games exposed. The logic is clean. Whether it translates is the entire question.

What makes this a genuine gamble rather than a safe upgrade is what Minnesota surrendered to get there. Naz Reid was averaging 13.4 points and 6.2 rebounds off the bench — reliable, versatile interior production that now has no replacement behind Rudy Gobert. The center depth chart, which Reid effectively anchored, is now a single aging player with no insurance. Mike Conley's departure strips the backcourt of its veteran steadiness. And DiVincenzo, who gave the team 11.9 points and 3.7 assists per game as a wing connector, is currently unavailable with an unspecified injury, which means the wing rotation heading into camp is thinner than it looks on paper and leans heavily on Bones Hyland and Jaden McDaniels carrying minutes neither was built to carry alone.

My read is that Connelly diagnosed the problem correctly and may have prescribed the right medicine at the wrong dose. The close-game collapse was real and structural, and Ball's playmaking addresses it directly. But the cost — Reid's interior depth, Conley's steadiness, DiVincenzo's availability in question — creates a different kind of fragility. Last year Minnesota was brittle in close games. This year they might be brittle everywhere else instead. The 2026-27 season will tell us whether Connelly fixed the leak or just moved it.