Before facing Tim Connelly’s Timberwolves in the playoffs for the second consecutive year, Nikola Jokic acknowledged the general manager who selected him.
The perception of Connelly’s 2022 blockbuster trade has changed dramatically since last year, when Minnesota was the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference facing top-seeded Denver in the first round, according to the Nuggets center.
This season, the Nuggets and Timberwolves were separated by just one regular-season win.
“I think they’re built really well,” Jokic said when asked about Minnesota’s first-round sweep of the Phoenix Suns. “Hopefully we are not going to get swept. I think Tim Connelly, when he made that trade, everybody was laughing at him and what he was doing. But he made a great team. And I think he deserves great credit for doing that.”
Connelly was Denver’s general manager from 2013 until May 2022, when he was hired as Minnesota’s president of basketball operations. The trade in question occurred two months later: The Timberwolves sent five players and five draft picks to the Utah Jazz in exchange for center Rudy Gobert, a three-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year.
The deal was widely criticized as an overpayment, and Gobert’s fit next to longtime Timberwolves big man Karl-Anthony Towns was scrutinized. However, Connelly continued to add complementary pieces to the roster. Before the 2023 trade deadline, he made another deal with the Jazz, acquiring current starting point guard Mike Conley and bench wing Nickeil Alexander-Walker. Last week, the NBA announced Conley as the winner of the 2023-24 award for Teammate of the Year.
Gobert is anticipated to win his fourth DPOY trophy in the coming days, at which point the second-round series against Denver will be well underway.
“I think they’re a really dangerous team,” Jokic said. “They can have an answer for everything. Playing small, playing big, they can do it all. So they’re a really dangerous team.”
