The Rudy Gobert trade is on the verge of being an all-time NBA disaster

The conversation around Rudy Gobert is only getting louder.

The Lakers triumphed over Timberwolves to begin the 2023 NBA play-in tournament on Tuesday night, with what should have been Dennis Schröder’s dagger corner three against the Minnesota, capping a brilliant second half. The Wolves would eventually lose in overtime, handing in an unmemorable bummer performance, sending them to a life or death one game playoff Friday, and what could transform a merely bad season into one of the all-time worst, franchise-derailing NBA seasons.

That’s because last summer, the newly minted Wolves ownership cabal which I assume is composed solely of Alex Rodriguez and CRUNCH made one of the boldest, and already dumbest trades ever, when they sent all their draft equity and much of their depth to Utah in exchange for 30-year-old, 7’1, Saint-Quentin France native Rudy Gobert-Bourgarel. As an exclusive for SB Nation, I’ve obtained behind the scene footage from those 2022 negotiations:

Let’s start with the uncharitable take. Rudy Gobert is a borscht belt riff come to life:

“You’re offering me an antiquated center who is a — let’s say, untalented offensive player — who also demands touches, can’t stay on the floor in the playoffs, AND is wildly overpaid? What am I missing?”

“He’s also a gaping a-hole and no one likes him.” (rimshot)

For years, Gobert left “The Eye Test Guys” dumbfounded. How is this lumbering condor throwing messy, awkward hook shots in the general direction of the rim, whose Utah teams invented increasingly painful and embarrassing ways to die on the proverbial playoff toilet, a perennial (last pick) All-Star and All-NBA mainstay? How is he a max player? He’s wet vac rebounder, an impenetrable regular season fortress and gaudy stat magnet around the rim, who quickly becomes a Maginot Line when targeted on the perimeter in seven games series every Spring. Gobert almost seemed created in a lab to exacerbate the “Analytics” vs. “Game” debates, beloved by nerds (because he’s had some of the best advanced stat seasons in NBA history, including this one) and hated by nearly everyone else, including his teammates.

Consider this postmortem of this season and the Gobert trade from a Jazz beat writer that sounds more like a testimonial from a person who escaped from prison or beat a terminal disease than a reporter whose team had parted with either their most or second most important player less than a year ago. Who can forget when Gobert might have been patient zero for Covid in the NBA, and quite possibly the United States, as he gleefully blew it from mic to mic in a press conference, and eventually, directly into Donovan Mitchell’s face?

This Tim McMahon classic from that period proved the rift between the unstoppable regular season Jazz battery went far beyond Gobert’s response to the pandemic. The piece characterizes Rudy as the most polarizing NBA teammate since Dwight Howard- although polarizing is probably a bad word choice because it suggests there is more than one pole. He’s a needy, chirpy jerk whose general gripe seems to be the NBA’s refusal to revert to the philosophy and style of play popular when George Mikan dominated the league.

Another moody, annoying French guy once said that hell is other people, but had he been born a century later he may of added, “but especially Rudy Gobert”. Once again, reported exclusively by me for Sports Blog Nation, here is recently obtained footage from what was hoped to be a relationship repairing dinner at Salt Lake City’s best restaurant (a Melting Pot on South Main Street) Mitchell and Gobert had prior to a game in the middle of last year’s catastrophic first round loss to the Dallas Mavericks, who won several games in the series without Luka Doncic:

Of course, none of it worked and the Jazz blew it up- pretty brilliantly I loathe admitting- stealing two monster hauls for their flawed stars, receiving a treasure trove of diamonds in the rough, valuable trade assets, and basically every draft pick not owned by the Thunder or Pelicans for the remainder of the 2020s. The trade was roundly panned in the moment for Minnesota by nearly every expert and talking head, criticizing the fit and the all-in gall of it, and while the most rose-tinted analysts hoped that at the very least the Wolves had secured a hyper-efficient, regular season machine that could lock up a middle of the pack playoff seed in an unsettled West for the foreseeable future, they were very wrong.

As far as we knew, Rudy’s dick-ish nature laid mostly dormant throughout this season, until game 82 when it emerged at the worst possible moment in a weakly thrown chest shot poorly aimed at Kyle Anderson. Much has been made of the fact that Gobert was retaliating because Anderson called him “Bitch”, but again, some exclusive reporting here, a source has related to me that’s merely been his nickname amongst teammates since coming to Minnesota. As per usual, as Gobert got all the headlines, the real death blow was thrown a bit earlier when Jaden McDaniels fractured his hand punching a wall in frustration.

Now let’s attempt to consider the bright side. In their brawl with the Lakers, particularly in the final six and a half minutes of regulation, we got a glimpse of exactly why the Minnesota brass felt they had to do something to change the chemistry of their team. Karl-Anthony Towns is many things, but he’s pretty clearly not “Him”. He’s one of the most gifted offensive front court players of his generation, but throughout his career, he’s generally approached “the moment” like Howard Hughes did germs. Anthony Edwards suffers from what is perhaps an abundance of the “Him” gene, but it appears to be very much a work in progress. Could the answer to all of these problems have been a modicum of patience? If the Wolves had simply kept Walker Kessler, and a platoon of good and experienced role players, and every draft pick until the Ocasio-Cortez administration, as they just keep noodling at the margins with that developing nucleus, would they be in much better shape? Sure, but let’s live in the now and speak to Rudy’s specific plight.

KAT has never been a great rim protector or rebounder. But he’s been a passable perimeter defender, and along with Jaden McDaniels, you can almost see the shape of the long, rangy defensive nightmare unit the Wolves were attempting to establish. This is because Rudy Gobert, we can at long last acknowledge in this piece, is a fucking monster on defense. As Zach Lowe has put it, he’s not a rim protector, he’s an entire paint protector. He makes every facet of offense uncomfortable inside for his opponent, which could theoretically erase any problems KAT experiences on the perimeter, including his penchant for amassing fouls in high pressure situations. Gobert is a double-double machine, and perhaps the idea was that penciled in reliability on both ends from a professional adult would help take some of the both statistical and mental pressure off the Wolves young and young-ish stars.

The problem for Rudy and Minnesota’s front office is we didn’t get much opportunity to see it. KAT only played 29 games this season, and Edwards still struggles with consistency, as he did against the Lakers in a nine-point, 43-minute performance. It put a lot on Gobert’s shoulders all season, whose numbers may have suffered as a result. If he had played Tuesday’s game could’ve shown the value he added to the team in the form of a playoff berth. But Rudy was suspended. Some made the conspiratorial but believable argument the Wolves did so less in the name of rules and decorum, than to avoid taking heat for potentially losing the game with their prize acquisition getting hunted by the Lakers, and because they arguably had a better chance of winning with him sitting. The thinking went, without Gobert clogging the middle, it opens up spacing and opportunity, and it almost bore out. As a result, if the Wolves can’t even manage earning a (sneakily interesting) first round matchup with the Denver Nuggets, fairly or unfairly, Gobert will be the face of this failure, which he may never be able to recover from, in Minnesota at least, and quite possibly in the NBA.

It’s all leading up to what is the biggest game of Rudy Gobert’s career. If he put his signature on the Wolves advancing, the Slo-Mo punch can become a footnote. If they can be at least fun and competitive against a Nuggets squad with its own issues, this season may even be viewed by an optimist as snake bitten, injury plagued, and something to build on.

But if Minnesota collapses Friday night, pretty much regardless of how Gobert plays, he’ll be the architect of a miserable season and a player who single handedly ruined the once bright immediate future of a team. He will be remembered as one of the all-time on court disappointments and locker room cancers. And the deal that brought him to the Wolves will go down as the worst trade in NBA history.