The Minnesota Timberwolves and the Cold Turn of the Basketball Fates

The Minnesota Timberwolves remain one of the NBA's up-and-comers, but their season of promise will end in wraps and painkillers.

Ricky Rubio's torn ACL will derail his entire offseason, ruling him out for participation in the Olympic medal efforts of his homeland. Nikola Pekovic is set to have surgery to remove the bone spurs in his ankle, and per Kent Youngblood of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, is looking forward to a day when injury isn't constantly on his mind.

Luke Ridnour will make an eventual return before season's end, but has already seen damage done by his departure. And Kevin Love will remain blanketed in bubble wrap, removed from all contact drills and practices until the symptoms of his concussion subside—even if that rules him out for the remainder of the season.

All of the Wolves' individual brilliance, all of their unexpected competence and all of their scrappy defense—everything that Minnesota worked hard to cultivate and build—was derailed by the basketball gods themselves.

It's as if the Wolves' undeniably charismatic campaign was detonated to send a message; basketball success of any kind is predicated on talent and chemistry, but a team's foundation is only allowed to succeed through good fortune alone.

Every leap that a player takes has the potential to end his season and, by extension, send his team into a tailspin. Futures in the NBA are that simple and that delicate. 

Though the entire league is laced with fascinating strategy and awe-inspiring talent, the mightiest ballplayers and most endearing on-court heroes submit at bended knee to the power of chance.

It crowns champions and humbles greats. Although skill and cohesion still determine the lion's share of NBA outcomes, the single and powerful swoop of a bad fall or a bad bounce has the chance to change basketball history—for better or worse.

The Wolves aren't a tragic tale by any stretch, as they only sit somewhere between the cursed late-2000s Portland Trail Blazers and the ever-healthy Oklahoma City Thunder; they haven't seen careers altered by their ailments, yet it's still unfortunate that their first taste of hope has been so marred through injuries and obstacles of all kinds.

Love's concussion isn't likely to create any long-term problems. Even the surgery and rehabilitation of Rubio and Pekovic could, and should, go off without a hitch.

But there's nothing to prevent the same bad luck from striking these Wolves (or any team) down the line, just as there's nothing to prevent a team's contention from going down in a huddle before the impending postseason even begins.

Hope can and will again be cut down so cruelly, because as many a philosopher has said before me: basketball is life. Coaches and players fight as they can for control, but there will always be an inevitable bit of chance that rules over them, and all else.

The playoff viability, the title chances, the slightest opening before a window closes—it's all predicated on good health and good breaks. The timing of a particular opportunity is much more specific than we often think.

Although every promising team that comes together is said to be a contender for "the next decade," they're truthfully only competitive so long as the breaks continue to go their way. They're all just a streak of bad luck away from their own implosion, as is the still-promising core of these Timberwolves.

Minnesota seems to have much ahead of them, but this season served as a reminder of the fact that nothing is a sure thing, and surely that nothing can be taken for granted. 

Winter doesn't discern or wait; even the young and promising are victim to the same power that eventually brings down the old and hobbled. They have better odds and more of a fighting chance, but there are forces of randomness in this universe that—try as we might to understand or predict them through dubbing a player as "injury prone," or some such nonsense—have a way of humbling us all.

Here's hoping that these Wolves are never so humbled again. There's no reason to diagnose any systemic reason for worry in Minnesota, but that has so often been the case in the first act of more depressing tales.

Providence is merely taken away as swiftly as it's found. While the lessons learned here have less to do with the Wolves than the nature of basketball life cycles in a more general sense, we can certainly bring everything full circle in our appreciation and expectations of a Minnesota core already in place. Particularly in regard to the light of a season lost.